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Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

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Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#101

Post by lomnakkus »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #42
collyw wrote: post #28

We didn't have "apps" in the 80's we had "programs".

I wonder what synonyms there are for 'computer program.' Does 'application' count? Are there any synonyms for 'pedantry' that you can think of?

> I wonder what synonyms there are for 'computer program.' Does 'application' count?

"Application" definitely counts, but for some inscrutable reason I associate that with GUI-only programs.

> Are there any synonyms for 'pedantry' that you can think of?

"dogmatism", "purism", "literalism"... but maybe I'm being too literal, puritanical, or dogmatic. :)

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#102

Post by vernie »

nsxwolf wrote: post #100
neilsimp1 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of this picture: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/600x315/e9/ff/28/e9ff28...

Why does Steve Jobs have braces?

[0]

[0] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xbox-360-kid

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#104

Post by boondaburrah »

JimDabell wrote: post #58
spatulon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the case for the Spectrum, but not for the Mac. They have always been referred to as "applications" on the Mac, and I know that was abbreviated as "apps" by the mid-90s. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that abbreviation was used by Mac users as far back as the 80s.

Atari's GEM/TOS also had applications, abbreviated as "app", in the mid-80s. I don't know where people got the idea that "app" is something recent, but I've started seeing people say it in a few places lately. It's not true at all, we definitely had apps in the 80s.

Why do all my programs end it .PRG then? :P (currently struggling to get data off of an old ST - good old RS232 strikes again)

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#105

Post by 1001101 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #87

I am reminded of the last track on Information Society's[1] 1992 album "Peace and Love, Inc.", which was a recording of a 300 baud modem encoding an ASCII text message[2]. Their debut album, "Information Society"[3], used the somewhat obscure "CD+G" format, which included graphics that could be displayed by compatible players. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_(band) [2] http://www.textfiles.com/h…

Aphex Twin did something similar on "2 Remixes by AFX." [1] There was an SSTV image [2] encoded into one of the tracks. It's basically some calibration header tones followed by FM. For a little while, I didn't know it was data and just thought it was Richard doing his thing :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvuFdqk8Yg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#106

Post by abainbridge »

pvg wrote: post #77
Joeboy wrote: post #46

You see those blocky colours in the youtube video? Those are the Spectrum's "attribute file", a small colour overlay that goes on top of the higher resolution 1-bit monochrome bitmap part of the machine's video ram. Gives you a "hi-res colour computer" while saving a ton of ram, but at the cost of creating horrible artifacts when differently coloured objects get too close together. The same principle is still used in…

So there was no separate text mode at all, it seems (which is what I assumed looking at the video). Did it make the text scrolling sluggish?

Yes, there's only one display mode. But if anything it was better for displaying text than graphics.

The rows of pixels were laid out in a wacky fashion to make text rendering fast. The display resolution was 256x192. Being monochrome, the bitmap part of the display therefore used 32 bytes per row of pixels. You might expect that the second row would start at start_of_screen_address + 32. BUT NO! It was at start_of_screen_address + 256 because you can increment an address register by 256 faster than you can increment by 32 (on a Z80). Hahaha.

The result was that drawing graphics was a bit fiddly, but drawing 8-pixel wide character glyphs was easy and fast.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#110

Post by thanatropism »

alasdair_ wrote: post #109
collyw wrote: post #28

We didn't have "apps" in the 80's we had "programs".

Lotus 1-2-3 was commonly described as the "killer app" for the IBM PC as early as 1987.

Yes, but "application" didn't mean "program", it meant "application". Lotus 1-2-3 was an application of PCs, it made PCs useful.
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