Viewing profile — schlupa

The Mega ST keyboard is indeed the best keyboard of the whole Atari family. My TT keyboard has its rubber dome getting stiff with age. This said, the Mega ST keyboard has one big f…

The expansion slot of Mega-ST is just 2 rows of 32 pins that are 1:1 connected to the CPU pins. Any extension that was supposed to be solderedon the CPU could be put in the slot wi…

I bought a Mega ST2 because I studied CS and wanted to become a developper. I sold the Amiga 500 my father had bought me. The ST was cheaper for programming than the Amiga 500 as y…

The big advantage we had on Atari and Amiga was that the 68000 could address more than 640K without a sweat. PC's had this annoying limit up until the 90s and the complexity that i…

OP's grievances are spot on for the period 1985 to 1990. After that, PC's did indeed gain enough power (386 were mass and 486 just came out), also VGA started to become. This means…

normal 720 K floppies were very generous with the sectors on a track. It was easy to format a floppy with 10 sectors per track even without reducing the gap between sectors. On Ata…

You're probably meaning the Belgian designed DAI computer that was developed for TI initially but was then refused in favor of the TI-99/4. From a corporate point of view it made s…

One thing TI (Extended) Basic had for it that was almost unique among early home computers was its use of decimal floating point with 13 digits precision. It was so useful for math…

The fundamental issue with BASIC on the TI-99/4A, be it the regular BASIC or even the Extended BASIC, is that the program was stored in the video memory. This meant that you couldn…

You can also visit one in Germany at the Technik Museum Sinsheim[1]. It has the advantage that it can be compared to the soviet counterpart Tupolev Tu-144 that is also exposed. [1]…

Not many characters left in ASCII. Reuse of an existing operator almost required. Binary operators cannot be use as it would be grammatical ambiguous and would need resolution at t…

Indeed. Watch Sina's youtube video on Ringo Starr where she explains the very special style he had and what makes his drumming stand out.

6502 is nice to program in assembler. For a compiler it is an atrocious platform to support. The limited stack, the 8 bit limit, the zero page idiosyncrasies, the page crossing bug…

Yeah, I also always have the necessity to look what the compiler does with the code you through at it.

This was a real issue with the V2 rocket as related in Irving's book 'The Mare's Nest'.

You also have the best programming language in the world and a lot of people dispense only negativity about it.

There was Helios64 but unfortunately they went out of business. I have the predecessor system Helios4 and absolutely love it.

There's also sometimes the incentive to slow things down because if it is too fast, the client will perceive that he paid too much money for an operation that takes no time, i.e. i…

One funny anecdote about Zuse during the war was that he managed to save his Z4 because it was named as V4 in the paperwork. The wehrmacht officers thought it was one of these reta…

Yes, I know. I just wanted to keep it at the simplest form.

That's not how you do it. git checkout master git pull => fetch and merge the new things on master git checkout develop => go back to your work branch git rebase master => simple r…

Probably not. The free (as in speech) part of git is what made it usable for entities like google, Microsoft, github etc. If git had been released with the same license model of Bi…

Mmmmh, AGC was not that low level. It was a 16 bit computer, running at 1Mhz with 72 Kb of ROM and 4 Kb of RAM.

That's similar to what I do on our translation memory at the Commission. The issue we have is that we search for sentences, not words and the medium length of sentences in the data…

Yes, that one is especially nasty as &p->bar[0] is a constant expression completely solvable at compile time. It's equivalent to the offsetof() macro of stddef.h