Viewing profile — ch_123

Hot take: I feel like a lot of the original value of language standards was to unite multiple proprietary implementations of compilers/runtimes/etc. from different vendors, each of…

I used to open up mods (I seem to recall them being in "PBO" files) and tweaked around the script code to change things and make my own weapons and such. Also a formative experienc…

> AS/400 in RPG Aside from a few utilities, relatively little of OS/400 was written in RPG. Originally, most of it was written in two different dialects of PL/I. Some Modula-2 was …

I agree with the overall point of the article, but I feel compelled to be _that guy_ and point out that most of IBM's systems programming involved various dialects of PL/I, not For…

And to the GP's point - the Pi Pico can be programmed in Micro Python.

Do you have a reference for this? Looking around, I see it being beaten by other ARM SBCs, and even low end Intel devices. Many years ago, I measured performance per watt of the or…

I loved Opera until they got rid of their in-house browser engine and became a Chromium fork, losing a lot of the functionality and UX I liked about the older versions. Ever since …

I use Google daily, and yet I can't remember the last time I used their search box - all of my searching has been done through the browser URL bar for a long, long time. I wonder i…

The "lightweight" nature of OpenBSD is a matter of perspective - if you are happy with OpenBSD's feature set, then it's a plus. On the other hand, FreeBSD has a lot of additional f…

I had a big problem with BSODs caused by Nvidia drivers. Of course, you could argue that this was Nvidia's fault, not Vista's, but this was somewhat academic. I moved back to XP (a…

They were developed by completely different teams. As an aside - as someone who used ME back in the day, I feel like I honestly had more problems with Vista. ME was a downgrade fro…

For me, search integrated into the start menu was a major quality of life improvement. Particularly the ability to hit the Windows key and type the name of an application. Strictly…

The early 3270 keyboards (and the other IBM keyboards from the mid 70s up to the early 80s) are some of the most pleasant keyboards I've typed on in terms of key weighting and tact…

It's the | symbol. On later generations of IBM terminal keyboard, you'll see | on the shift-1 position, and a separate key with the broken-bar (¦) symbol. For example, on this keyb…

Nitpick: The terminology used by IBM on the 3270 family (including the 3277 whose keyboard you shared) was "Tab" and "Back tab", not "Next field" and "Previous field".

Your memory is correct, and it's interesting to note that on the IBM terminal keyboards, the Enter key was marked "Enter", and the return/new line key was marked "↵". On the classi…

I find this story odd because IBM was consistent with their keyboard nomenclature across multiple products, and the 3270 series mainframe terminals used the Tab key, located in the…

VMS provided some functionality to convert floating point faults into traps: https://docs.vmssoftware.com/vsi-openvms-rtl-library-lib-man...

Sad to hear this, one of my first mechanical keyboards was a Filco TKL. At one point in time, it was my go-to "safe recommendation" for a keyboard. Since that point in time, the Ma…

> But I wonder how it seems to people who understand how it works? As someone who mostly understands what's going on - It does not seem like wizardry to me, but I am very impressed…

> The only potential bad news—and that heavily depends on your perspective—is that the new chips’ built-in NPU falls far short of the 40 TOPS that Microsoft requires for PCs to ear…

Quite likely - the buckling spring switches in Model M are quite stiff as far as keyboards go. Brown switches are a good choice if you want a light switch with some amount of tacti…

In addition to the three physical keyboard layouts in this post, there's a fourth one which has an extra key on both the right and the left side of the keyboard. An example is the …

The Thinkpad also likely cost far more than $600 when new. Even a several-year-old flagship laptop is going to be superior in some respects than a brand new laptop designed and pro…