Viewing profile — pdw

Floppy reliability dropped of a cliff in the mid-90s. It came to a point where it wasn't unusual to see I/O errors even on completely new floppies. But with older drives and older …

I'm sad that the building instructions link doesn't work. I'd love to see them.

Nothing to do with the VM. The game was designed that way, navigation is part of the puzzle.

I think that's out of date. The banner at the top of the page says "you can request a free license for version 5.4 from us." According to archive.org that was added later than the …

In the early 90s Microsoft distributed the full Win32 API documentation as a WinHelp file. It felt very much as hyperlinked man-pages. Super fast too, even on machines of the time.…

"Shipping" wouldn't be a problem, they could just run it from a network drive. Their PCs were networked, they needed to test deathmatches after all ;) And the compilation speed dif…

Even then it was not universal. For example, that Apple I ad that got posted a few days ago mentioned that "the system is expandable to 65K". https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…

Even in computing the binary definition is only used with memory sizes. E.g. storage, network speeds, clock rates use the standard definition.

All of Microsoft's applications used to do that! The 16-bit versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc all were implemented using bytecode. That technology was only integrated in Mic…

Rosetta uses software emulation for x87 floating point. That's slow, but in practice that doesn't matter much. Mac software never had a reason to use x87 FP, every Intel Mac had at…

The signedness of `char` is implementation-defined, it is signed on x86 but unsigned on ARM. So assigning a plain char to a wider integer type is suspicious, did the programmer exp…

The Nintendo GameCube and Wii also had IBM CPUs.

I wouldn't assume ABCL runs on Android. It's not listed as a supported runtime on their website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)

A lot of game devs of that era sadly treated the Adlib/SoundBlaster OPL2 chip as nothing more than a very poor MIDI synth, but it was capable of much better. For example, listen to…

In those days malloc would use sbrk to allocate memory. And yes, mmap was designed to memory map files. Using it to allocate anonymous pages came later.

Are they in widespread use? They were deprecated in 1995.

I always wondered how secure AS/400 actually is. The original implementation might have checked tag bits in hardware (I don't know), but the current (PowerPC) implementation relies…

Debian woody (2002) shipped gnustep. I tried it back then, but as far as I remember, it was weird enough that anybody who didn't have NEXTSTEP experience would bounce right off. Th…

Security researchers rarely fix bugs. They don't see it as their job, and it requires a very different skill set than finding or exploiting them anyway.

From that article: > While similar, it is not the widely reported Asrock motherboard problem, as the motherboards we use are of a different make

The Windows 2000 launch is closer to the release of Altair 8800 than it is to today :/

Right, people forget that the xz-utils backdoor happened to a very traditional no-dependencies C project.

zlib comes with a basic ZIP implementation (libminizip).