cmdrriker

too bad Captain Obvious was at the joysticks/helm...

well their spat hath escalated quickly?

Friends don't let friends use comic sans, papyrus or it's imitators IMHO.

Fear and naivete are powerful motivators, catalyzing these early innovations. More often the realities of budget, politics, and competing priorities hampers the same creative energies.

Just don't pick Houston, things aren't so great there at the moment.

Preview.app which owes its heritage to NextStep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview

I'm so blonde that I thought it was a Quantum drive... like a Quantum hard drive... man

If there wasn't a more compelling reason for higher taxes on those who can pay more should... It just goes to show that there's always someone dumb with more money than they know what to do with that's willing to dump it into making more people dumb.

Mimeograph aka spirit duplicator used a stencil that you could write on or type on and then use alcohol to then dissolve the raised part of the stencil and transfer it onto the paper. It worked well for simple stuff but kinda poorly for halftones and could prob only provide 300 copies before you'd need a new stencil.

Xerographic from Greek "dry writing" differs in that you use a fine powder (toner) that can be electrostatically charged and then drawn to paper using a light-sensitive drum.

The genius of the AM machine is that it could be used to print on practically any medium including metal, dogtags were printed in this way. Also, data could be saved in either punchcard format or later electronically. The last big use was for imprinting credit cards.

All that was needed to make a Selectric into a terminal was essentially a box to take the electrical signals of hitting the keys (that triggered the correct letter on the ball to strike the ribbon) and amplify/send them to an interface into a device that could take TTY. Early word-processors and cold-type machines used this since those Selectrics were ubiquitous and dang durable.

A&M (later A&M Intl to sound more sophisticated) made some interesting equipment from its various divisions. Their Multigraph division long made duplicators for secretaries etc. They also introduced an office copier that sorta functioned like what Xerox came up with but minus the Xerographic process (sorta like a hybrid spirit duplicator on steroids). Like this one in this vintage ad: https://www.ebay.com/itm/274448810068. A&M's Varityper division produced some really innovative cold-type products and they were probably 3rd among the big names of the day CompuGraphic, Linotype (LinoTronic) with their Comp/Edit series of electro-mechanical typesetting gear. There was also AM Jacquard division which sold a word processing/editing setup that was seen to complement their typesetting division. I never saw one of those in person, primarily I was trained on the Varityper CompEdit and later digital version. Desktop publishing ended its existence as management didn't know how to integrate those systems into desktop publishing. Typesetting used to be an independent task, one would enter the text into a composition system where it could be edited and manipulated for page, letter, word, and character spacing depending upon the medium of output. DP combined all those functions and allowed you to WYSIWYG it before even printing it out. Linotype survived a little while longer with their system the Linotronic because they knew that essentially if they made a "printer" aka the imagesetter that outputs the films necessary for plate making they could eke out an existence (they're now owned by their longtime rival Monotype!).

I can still see in my head how to compose a line in the CompEdit, perhaps it was like a pseudo comp language in that you could specify line length, drop-cap, leading, tracking, kerning, etc all via commands. I guess the equivalent of WordPerfect's codes but with maximum strength.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_Jacquard_Systems https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273361... https://www.facebook.com/Varityper/ http://pdf.textfiles.com/jscott/1980-varityper-brochure.pdf

interesting, how does this compare to something like pg_auto_failover in a two or three-node PostgreSQL setup?

IMHO, he's the David Attenborough of Computer History.

Just remove the DRM chip that’s located on the starter cartridge, mine was on with a small Phillips screw. I then used the Brither DRM chip on my Linkyo toner cartridge and it works a treat. Problem solved AFICT.

Intel lost this battle years ago when leadership decided to badge engineer the shit out of their product portfolio and do stock buy-backs. In a capital intensive enterprise, Jack Welch school of management will only give the company maybe 10 years before those opportunity costs blow signifgant holes in your boat. Look at TSMC, they take government money, invested that in people and material. They’ve got a work plan in place to meet their customers needs which in turn is driving market direction. GF was left for dead and look at what they’re doing. They’re eating Intel’s lunch now while they’re flailing with mediocre graphic cards and no clear strategy where they’re going with future x86 designs. The universe is moving towards RISC and they’re essentially locked in a prison of their own making.

There’s also blue colored as well. Blue Monster brand.

You're correct, just about all "new" cassette decks contain Tanashin-originated components. Even reputable brands like Panasonic (National), TEAC, Son, Aldi & AllyExpress all use the same crappy mech.

Techmoan has been shown that nearly every "new" tape-playing device these days all contain the same lousy mech, some not even capable of stereo playback!

VWestlife covered the "world's first Bluetooth capable portable cassette player" which is a few years old now but also uses a lousy mech (mono!).

Cassette audio today seems to be more about the experience and social aspects of making, trading, and playing tapes ( Ala Guardians of the Galaxy style )rather than getting the best quality audio.

https://youtu.be/nezGOVOpHtc

https://youtu.be/WVylfRhIA7o

Does it matter what tool you use to write documentation? Confluence gets a lot of sh*t because its in the grown-up camp of tools but I know people who've got problems even with nano.

It's incumbent upon all users or members of the team to use the common tool along with agreed upon standards. Otherwise even if you wrote documentation in your own hemoglobin, no one would touch it either.

Some manager prob chose _________ as the tool for ticketing, documentation, etc not because it was good at ______, or _______ but because it fulfilled their action plan to have something, anything in place so that if the universe goes supernova, well some stuff was written down.

In my journey it seems that nobody is willing to criticize Edward Teach for the lousy treasure map he left, but rather we make fun of those who're still looking for his stuff.

Unless some government(s) steps in and dumps a ton of money into SST development and production nothing is going to happen.

The Concord showed this by shouldering the burden of research, development, prototyping, and then production. Turns out SS's don't have the load factor & associated economics to make it a viable mode. That revelation was before environmental and political challenges made those economics worse.

Unless unobtanium can me mined, tooled, and manufactured cheaply into airframe parts and power such as scram-jet or super cruising turbofans can push a plane at Mach 2 with 200+ seats behind the pilot, methinks its just a pretty artist's conception on a Pop Mechanics or Science magazine cover.

Boy, did Nokia elope after this with M$ft phone which was supposed to right Nokia's collective "ship". Elop joined the hallowed hall of fame of abysmal CEO's who ran their firms into the ground. Remember Lumia, Windows Phone 7,8 & 10 blehh.

Was it Balmer that hired Elop?

Ignoring the primary issue Uncle Sam has with this logistics solution, be reminded why laws and or regulations exist for things... there's always someone (right or wrong) that will circumvent the rules with shall we say... creative solutions.

My first real interest in computing came from my Uncle showing me his DX7. It made such cool synths as well what I thought at the time was a decent piano sound especially in the early 80s. A Huge bulky instrument it also had a midi interface too which was new (yikes) at the time.

I think Supercard is still going, its sorta like a souped up version of Hypercard

I have this book! I loved Hypercard and spend many hours making silly and functional programs with it.

I wish that somehow it was continued and not sent out to the pasture at Claris.