netdoll

Texinfo ultimately gets the @ convention from Brian Reid's Scribe[1], as developed at Carnegie Mellon during the late 70s and commercialized by Unilogic[2,3] in the 80s. Coincidentally, there was a close derivative of Scribe called Mint[4], also developed at Carnegie Mellon in the early 80s for the PERQ (an early personal workstation competing in the category of things like the Sun-1 or Lisp Machines).

[1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/cmu/scribe/Scribe_Introductory_Use... [2] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/unilogic/Scribe_Document_Productio... [3] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/unilogic/Scribe_Pocket_Reference.p... [4] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cmu/spice/Users_Manual_for_Mint...

Is this Chromium Ubiquity port publicized anywhere? I would love to try working with something like it again.

Was this an independent hobbyist reimplementation? Gobe did something similar in order to port their productivity suite (sorely missed) from BeOS over to Windows and Linux.

I believe the implication of OP's comment is that Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were originally released under non-commercial source available licenses before being relicensed to a FOSS license (GPLv2) a few years later, and the same could very well end up happening for Rogue Legacy as well.

The classic book references for programming shmup bullet patterns (in Japanese) are シューティングゲームアルゴリズムマニアックス and シューティングゲーム プログラミング, but in general, a lot of this stuff is folk knowledge and isn't communicated well outside of trial and error until you get something passable. I would suggest looking up web tutorials and game source code and learning from that (also will mention the Development sub forum on shmups.system11.org being quite useful).

If I had to wager a guess, probably something like labwc would end up in that role for a distro of DSL's scope and philosophy. However, I think we're still a while away from that, and for the targeted machines, X is still completely fine and will remain so for a long while.

I wonder if there will be any substantial increase in pedojacketing among cultural elites towards those they see as undesirables now that the bill is passed, or whether the second order effects of the bill will lead to a backlash against the existing proliferation of it from the young, globally connected, and tech savvy populations still remaining in Britain after the depredations of the last decade.

For ARM32, RISC OS is probably the closest to the value proposition offered by Menuet, albeit with a decent amount of high level code and a lot more support from developers for applications, languages, and games.

Xanadu comes close to this "ferengi Internet" mindset with some of the tactics it chooses for monetization of content, albeit from an entirely different angle (enabling remix culture more or less indiscriminately while preserving the sanctity of the existing copyright system and enabling royalties to flow to authors proportional to how their works are used and reused).

It's not mentioned in the article, but the author uses AppImages for GUI applications wherever and whenever he can. He's very well aware of this aspect of the classic Mac OS and seeks to emulate it as closely as possible.

I believe most of the things OP mentioned have to do with the shell and not the terminal. At the very least, most of the things thus mentioned can be configured in zsh (I don't know how, as I haven't looked into it really)

This is where the classic Mac OS really shines: one fullscreen application which is totally dedicated to the task at hand. It's why I still favor it for many "creative" endeavors and why Apple was able to survive so relatively long with it despite the OS being a flaming garbage pile of technical debt and hacks underneath the glossy exterior.

The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple.

The way I read it, they were attributing the intercombination of these elements under the desktop metaphor to Apple. Smalltalk existed, the Star existed, PERQ existed, the Lisp Machine GUIs existed and JERQ/Blit existed, but all of these were so substantially different from each other let alone what Apple did that they functionally exerted little influence on the way GUIs developed after the Macintosh launched save for a few odd branches here and there (Oberon anyone?)

ROX is one of those things which is great except for the ecosystem it tied itself to. I would love to see a Wayland rewrite one day, or something using the same concepts. Or really anything that isn't r/unixporn tile rice #9001

Conversely, I find anything above 1920x1080 very displeasing precisely because it removes my ability to practically use bitmapped fonts. Subpixel antialiasing is very distracting and Retina (IMHO) is a solution in search of a problem when it comes to making user interfaces that are actually aesthetic and easy on the eyes. I'm autistic and have diagnosed vision problems tho, so that probably feeds into it for better or worse.

However, I’m curious about how the complexity of big systems can be tamed. A system that is hard to reason about even with the source code being accessible is more expensive to maintain and to modify.

By removing the misfeatures that make layers of abstraction seem necessary. Linux has already gone thru this several times with things like the transition from HAL to udev, or the potential simplifications falling out of well written copy on write file systems (gefs is one I particularly have my eye on here). The main things which dishearten me in this regard are, respectively, the complexity of GPUs (and thus their supporting infrastructure in software), and what is needed to support the OS-within-an-OS that is the modern web browser.

Mozilla and Opera existed at the time, as well as a bountiful amount of IE shells which essentially acted as the Chromium derivative equivalents. Outside of Chrome (technically) shipping the same binaries across all the platforms it supports, and using scope creep in a more subtle way compared to 90s-era IE, I don't see how the situation is materially different between now and then.

That's right, I definitely had the ordeal of freeing Solaris in mind when I was writing the comment. Honestly something of a minor miracle it even happened. (also I'm pretty sure all the closed stuff got purged out of illumos?, not even using Sun compilers now, it's all gcc/binutils)

Even presuming the will existed in Microsoft, there's enough licensed code that open sourcing it as is would probably be a non starter. Probably a more viable approach would be open sourcing individual components as the rights are cleared and eventually replacing the third party components which aren't able to be renegotiated with freely available or internally built replacements. That being said, they -might- be able to free something like WRK with only a little prodding on legal's part, and that would be interesting in itself bc NT has a quite elegant internal architecture and not too many people get to see it overall.

Licensing issues would probably prevent this from happening, I can't comment on third party code from other sources, but rather famously, Microsoft got in trouble for disk compression code in the 6.x releases and had to substitute it later on. Personally, I would like to see one of the very late PC-DOS releases freed (7.1 or so), but considering IBM's indifferent to belligerent attitude on freeing their historical software, I don't see this happening any time soon.

Also relatedly to the idea of doing source releases, it may be worth looking into doing officially blessed public -binary- releases of old Microsoft software. I'd imagine it would be at least somewhat easier to get past legal and would enable the masses of unwashed zoomers to experience gems like QuickBasic, early Windows and DOS versions, everything released for CP/M, and some products that MS acquired and subsequently buried and took the hatchet to, like Altamira Composer. Actually, on that note, a source release for Altamira Composer or MS Image Composer would also be really nice if it was in fact practicable.

If you're not able to do large projects easily due to licensing conflicts, I would focus on small, -mostly- self contained ones in the meantime. A couple of nice, high sentimental value suggestions here (IMO) would be MASM, the Windows XP version of Paint, MS Comic Chat (to the extent that it doesn't pull in IE stuff that MS would rather keep internal), and maybe some of the stuff off the first entertainment pack (not in licensing hell like Tetris) or builtin games for Windows? I could see Reversi being a big hit. Also freeing the subset of the Core Fonts for the Web you're able to, at least Comic Sans MS.

In addition, the imposition of RTO strictures on employees who are neurodivergent (which makes up a relatively high percentage of the valley and other tech hubs for reasons I don't need to explain here) can also be considered a kind of immoral behavior since it is (intentionally or not) optimized to cause acute distress to those who fit into those neurotypes. I have intentionally avoided the tech sector for this reason and a couple of others (mostly to do with physical disabilities and inability to get medicated for things like ADHD)

I can personally attest to this, until I moved out to the city, I was significantly kneecapped in terms of what speeds I could have and it had an impact given how many services just implicitly assume you have high bandwidth and more or less lock you out if you don't. And I was one of the "lucky" ones in the sense that I was on a well known national cable provider, heaven forbid you were on telecom DSL or (for the really poor sods out there) V.92 or ISDN.

5 gigabit symmetric right now, if you're American.

Honestly, while I have a running boycott of consoles on moral grounds (Steam Deck notwithstanding), I feel like the Switch and PS4 are the best systems in quite a while, both for the variety of independent/AA games in all genres on them, and the retro arcade game ports M2 and Hamster are churning out at a steady and ever increasing pace.

Lots of interesting odds and ends, I've only perused it casually but I do wonder about the Cedar demo Eric Bier did a few years back, if the runtime system for that is included...

Also if anyone is interested in Medley Interlisp-D, do be aware that the project has been resurrected and is under active development on GitHub for contemporary operating systems using a permissive license.

The last time a major vendor seriously contemplated something like this, Sony made a 45 second ad completely humiliating them, destroying any and all goodwill that vendor had built up over the 6th and 7th generations, and won the early years of the 8th generation more or less for free. Never underestimate to what extent people value things like being able to play games offline and not having to deal with obtrusive checks tied to a centralized service.

2.11BSD still gets maintenance fixes when problems are found and of course you can trace a chain of descent for it all the way back to the first versions of Unix which were installed at Berkeley.

The biggest problem with it was simply that it primarily ended up in the hands of Western consumers and dev houses during the height of the FMV craze, the PC Engine CD did much better comparatively speaking because most of the things on it were actual games and it had (within Japan) wide support from nearly all major software development houses.