Viewing profile — jrdres

Chinese apparently was originally always written vertically top-to-bottom. (And then columns would be right-to-left.) Modern Chinese just rotates everything except the characters t…

Believe it or not, there once was an 8-bit computer with native Arabic. It was a version of the Z-80 MSX series by Al Alamiah called Sakhr. It seems it could switch between English…

A forgotten point is that modern pixel fonts all assume pixels have a 1:1 ratio: height the same as width, so an 8x8 character box is perfectly square. That's NOT true for many of …

Interesting. In the 70's & 80's, 8-bit microcomputers had a the same problem as old teletypes: you couldn't type in some ASCII characters even when the computer could display them.…

Huh. Works on Android phone. Doesn't work on desktop, Adblock or no Adblock.

I'm confused. Should I be seeing something on this site? From the comments, there are apparently supposed to be amazing photos. But I see text, I see black backgrounds, but no phot…

The CBS field-sequential color system did have one application after the 1950's: it was the system used for color transmissions from the Apollo moon landings. https://en.wikipedia.…

It runs, but it would be very slow on actual hardware. I tried on a cycle-accurate emulator of a TRS-80 Model I with Omikron CP/M mapper. Most Z-80 machines of the time were 4MHz, …

Thanks for the 8088 version on Github. Any chance you still have the 8080 CP/M version?

Wildberger has always been this way. Way back in 2007, Marc Chu-Carroll's "Good Math Bad Math" highlighted Wildberger: "This isn’t the typical wankish crackpottery, but rather a de…

Now seems to be the trend to bring TCP to retro machines from first principles. 8088 PC's already have M Brutman's "mTCP" driver. And DogCow (D. Finnigan) has been working on and o…

Oh, this is DDA, not Bresenham, for lines. An interesting point about Bresenham's algorithm is made by David Schmenk (dschmenk) on his "Bresen-Span" page: "Take note that the algor…

The nice thing about 70s-80s computer magazines (and even some books) on archive.org is the relative lack of copyright concern: they're just out there without sign-on and checkout …

Don Lancaster (outside of Apple) did that. In fact, he ignored the Mac and connected a LaserWriter directly to his Apple II, and programmed in straight PostScript. Used that langua…

I don't know enough music to tell if this is insightful, or just neat pattern-matching. A few months ago, mathematician John Baez had a series on the mathematics of various tempera…

One of the first CP/M C's was BDS-C. It's claim to fame was that it compiled the source in-memory, so it was at least that part was nice and fast. Certainly compared to Whitesmiths…

As other commenters have said, C didn't actually generate fast programs for 8-bit processors, or even 16-bit processors for a long time. C is a poor fit for most of them, so assemb…