Viewing profile — mschaef

Many of those pictures look like great reasons for lockout tagout.

> Even 256 meg of hard drive. That would have been impressively expensive in the 80s. I only have a couple reference points around this scale: My dad's company had a system set up …

> OK, but we spent a decade having to worry about this garbage, until the tooling finally caught up. This was less about tooling than it was about economics - there was 32-bit hard…

> And this is the problem, it was very painful just to walk through a 200 KB buffer. This required compiler/runtime tricks, different selector increments in real vs protected mode,…

That would make more sense. I was trying to imagine what sort of (custom?) hardware would accommodate that amount of memory back then. That was large storage even for mainframes th…

I should preface this by saying I'm taking about x86 segmentation in general. On the 8086 you're right, but the 8086 can't address 2MB of memory to begin with. On the 80286 in prot…

There is no such thing as a "2MB program".... all you have is a program composed of If you do need something approaching a 2MB block of memory, you don't need a contiguous range of…

> I had to use it to do image processing on a 256MB image buffer back in the 1980s in assembly language.... Give me a flat 32 bit memory address space any day (e.g. MC68000 around …

The 8086 was a stopgap measure to accommodate the fact the iAPX432 was in the middle of turning into the disaster it did. Given the engineering resources and timelines involved in …

This is a small one, but significant to me. I asked Claude to add support for multiple lights to my toy ray-tracer. It correctly added the support and then suggested adding colored…

From the sound of it, You may know this already, but there was a 1950's era plan to do something very similar to what you imply here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_W…

I think there are a couple questions you need to ask yourself - the first is why is it hard for you to be alone? You're the one person you're stuck living with for your entire life…

Agreed, re: DeMuro.... I'm long past tired of hearing how "The ____ is the ____!" I do like Tedward's videos, though. He seems a lot more honestly enthusiastic about it, and defini…

That's a $125 salad spinner... I get the appeal, but it's definitely a premium product.

I have half a dozen of them (including my father's from college) that I cherish, but do not use. I love the simplicity and elegance of the design. (Slide rules do a lot with operat…

> The disinterest programmers have in using 80 bit arithmetic. I don't know, other than to say there's often a tendency in this industry to overlook the better in the name of the s…

Does this have any similarities at all to the fact that the Pentium 4 used a 16-bit ALU?

Thank you. As always.

What do you mean by respect? Here's a layperson's perspective, at least. Up through the 486 (with its built in x87), the x87 was always a niche product. You had to know about it, n…

> I'm curious what the CX-83D87 and Weiteks look like. The Weitek's were memory mapped. (At least those built for x86 machines.). This essentially increased bandwidth by using the …

> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting. Emacs' notion of self docume…

Knowing what I know now, I'd have appreciated it much more than I did at the time. (Also, fixing the link rate on the C64 would've been nice too.)

> My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I…

He's been blogging continuously for close to twenty years - he was one of the original wave of Microsoft bloggers (along with Larry Osterman, Michael Kaplan, and several others I c…

That derives logically from the way Commodore implemented disks. If you bought a 1540 or 1541 (or any other Commodore drive) for a C-64 or VIC-20, it had an onboard 6502 to run the…