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Quotes from 1992

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Re: Quotes from 1992

#81

Post by Stratoscope »

amelius wrote: post #74
Stratoscope wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of the apple, get it?" He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that wa…

So what you are saying is that big computers and little computers were fundamentally the same?

Definitely the same, at the level Steve and I were talking about. The 6502 has instructions that manipulate registers and memory, logical and arithmetic operations, branches and calls, status flags, and so forth. Just like all the "mainframe" CPUs I'd been programming.

The word size is different, the special areas of memory are different, it has different opcodes, and so on. But any competent machine language programmer of the day - regardless of which CPUs they'd programmed on before - would have had no trouble understanding this:

http://www.obelisk.me.uk/6502/instructions.html

That's what Steve didn't understand at the time. Not being a programmer himself, he didn't know how familiar all this would look to any machine language programmer.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#82

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisSD wrote: post #66
pjc50 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention some of the most popular games of all time - Minesweeper, Solitaire, and the earlier Reversi. And a pinball game in Windows 95.

Windows 95 also had Hover! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21 A while back they made an online version: http://www.hover.ie/

[deleted]

Re: Quotes from 1992

#83

Post by 0898 »

This guy sounds pretty ungrateful.

He was able to read Robert X. Cringley's book "Accidental Empires" thanks to Archive.org's "virtual library card" service.

This is a service where Archive.org sources a physical copy of a book for you, scans it, and lends it out to you digitally, one person at a time.

Sounds like a useful service. But all this monumentally ungrateful guy can do is moan about how "aggressively user-hostile" is it because you have to double tap to open a book from the list.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#84

Post by dsr_ »

ForHackernews wrote: post #25
dagw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

has this person never checked out an ebook from their local library? To be fair I don't know anybody who has either. I know it's possible and I know my local library offers this, but I've never met anybody who's actually used this service.

I'm surprised. To me it seems like the only reasonable way to use eBooks.

The only reasonable way to use ebooks is to buy the non-DRMed epub, drop it on your web server in a password-protected directory, and read it from all the devices you want to read it from.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#85

Post by cr0sh »

amelius wrote: post #34
einr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX is not a mainframe OS. It was developed for minicomputers. As was VMS, by the way.

Minicomputers are just smaller and cheaper versions of their mainframe counterparts. It's only a small step in evolution, and not an important distinction in this context (imho).

From what I understand, the greatest difference between mainframes and minicomputers (and later, microcomputers), is that mainframes were batch-oriented machines, while minicomputers were interactive-oriented.

Mainframes (pretty much "IBM only" today - I don't know of any other actual mainframe computer manufacturer; to be honest, I am not even sure if IBM is still making mainframes? Ok - just looked, I guess they do) are still batch oriented; what "interactive piece" they have, is just a batch process with a "run forever" run time.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#86

Post by mcguire »

"A little-known partnership between IBM and Apple to try to make a new OS (Pink) that would finally beat DOS:

"IBM has 33,000 programmers on its payroll but is so far from leading the software business (and knows it) that it is betting the company on the work of 100 Apple programmers wearing T-shirts in Mountain View, California."

Quote from a co-worker who spent a lot of time at Taligent: "They don't realize mice can have more than one button."

(I worked for the IBM Taligent Project Office in Austin. We were an AIX (mostly) and OS/2 (to an extent) shop.)

(Advice: Don't work for IBM.)

Re: Quotes from 1992

#87

Post by dleslie »

jhbadger wrote: post #50

From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.

There was also ... the MSX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Msx

Re: Quotes from 1992

#88

Post by mcguire »

0898 wrote: post #83

This guy sounds pretty ungrateful. He was able to read Robert X. Cringley's book "Accidental Empires" thanks to Archive.org's "virtual library card" service. This is a service where Archive.org sources a physical copy of a book for you, scans it, and lends it out to you digitally, one person at a time. Sounds like a useful service. But all this monumentally ungrateful guy can do is moan about how "aggressively user-h…

Presumably, he would prefer the publishers' option of not having Archive.org online at all.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#89

Post by peterwwillis »

gitgud wrote: post #37

It takes new ideas a long time to catch on - time that is mainly devoted to evolving the idea into something useful. This fact alone dumps most of the responsibility for early technical innovation in the laps of amateurs, who can afford to take the time. Only those who aren't trying to make money can afford to advance a technology that doesn't pay. This is how I feel about hacker news. People who have the time to adv…

This also describes NASA (sadly) and university research teams

Re: Quotes from 1992

#90

Post by Stratoscope »

bdickason wrote: post #73
Stratoscope wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of the apple, get it?" He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that wa…

Great story - thanks for sharing :) In hindsight, do you think it was any different? (Microcomputer vs mainframe for the disassembled you were talking about building)

Thank you! I went into more detail in another comment in the thread, but going from one instruction set to another just felt like having more than one way to say the same thing. Every instruction was different, but the concepts and kinds of instructions were pretty much identical. Once you've seen an overflow flag and a carry flag and registers and bit shifts and memory load and store on one CPU, you'll certainly recognize them on another.

I guess Steve thought the CPUs really were different, like, say, the difference between a CPU and a GPU.

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