It is always hard to go back and understand what it was like before an event. Like the Velvet Revolution. But at the time I was working on an IBM 360, mostly doing Fortran for scientists running anemometer simulations. The center for this activity was the person in charge of the 360 who could dole out time on the computer.
The power dynamic was something I did not really notice, but in retrospect this was frustrating for the mathematicians/scientist trying to run simulations. They had to queue up and wait.
Then one day a mathematician brought in an Apple II running VisiCalc. His own personal computer. He ran his simulations on that.
It was like our small world trembled as the tectonic plates of technology shifted. The power shifted just in that one instant. It was cool - how we saw the world changed in one instant.
from BASIC:
CALL -151 (short for CALL 65385, but BASIC can't handle unsigned INT so that wouldn't work)
F666G
IIRC the disk controller had firmware that loaded the first 256 byte sector from disk into memory.
RAM wasn't even cleared so usually no (or limited) data loss.
I thought it was PR#6 (redirect output) to boot from the disk controller in slot 6. I wonder what redirecting input would do.
6 CTRL+P
Will instantly divert output to slot 6. (and boot the disk if there is hardware there)
Today we would call this bus mastering, yes?
I’d like to add that the hardware for the SoftCard was designed by Tim Paterson at SCP about the same time he was writing the future MS-DOS
Alternatively, you could put up to a 32MB RAM SIMM directly on the card.
Now that I think about it, my first Mac did the same thing with the Apple //e card.
They are ...weird... machines.
Both have a (different) extremely bespoke Y cable that are almost required, such that if you find a card separated from the cable, you probably shouldn't pay much for it.
The IIe card has a little lag in the video circuitry compared to the real thing (at least in a first gen LC host, apparently that problem goes away if you stick it in a faster machine with a 24-bit PDS slot).
Coaxing the Houdini II to boot things that are not fundamentally MSDOS is always a good way to throw away a couple hours, but it does a great job of convincing anything up to Win95 that it's a PC. Performance is absurdly better with dedicated RAM.
There are a couple other things in the family, the MacCharlie and AST Mac86/Mac286 products for bolting PC hardware onto various Macs, and the later OrangePC cards (they ended up with the IP from both Apple and ASTs offerings). The apex of "weird hosted computers you can stick in a Mac" are probably the MacIvory (LISP machine on a NuBus card) products, but those are "costly and rare," and are infamously balky even if you do get the hardware (...and I just don't enjoy Lisp).
Sun had a SunPC/SunPCi line in the same vein that will bolt a PC-on-a-card into various SPARC hosts.
Commodore had that first-party Sidecar product with a PC-XT in a box for Amigas, and there was ShapeShifter that would let you fake a Mac semi-native on a 68k Amiga. Likewise DayDream (recently updated into DarkMatter) to run a Mac environment on a 68k NeXT host, both of which "needed" Mac ROMs attached on a dongle for license reasons.
MAE is emulation, but it was an Apple-blessed way to run MacOS hosted on contemporary Unix workstations of the early 90s, which is sort of the opposite. I've managed to prod it onto a (real) PA-RISC/HPUX host, and (emulated, because my SS20 has been super balky as long as I've had it) SPARC/Solaris host just for sport - I'm pretty sure it was built out of decapitated A/UX parts and an emulator when A/UX4 didn't happen.
I'd like to round out my set with at least a IIe with a Premium Softcard IIe at some point, but I'm not willing to pay ebay prices for any of that stuff.
I have no idea where my 5-1/4 disks are. But I know where the 3-1/2 disks are for my Mac. They aren’t in the attic. They are in my childhood bedroom.
My old Apple //e though is lost forever.
I don’t have any real sentimental attachment to the hardware. If anything, i am going to eventually take the time to rin emulators on my Mac.
Since the 6100/60, I’ve only bought them three Macs - a G4 Mac Mini, an Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Mini and my current M2 MacBook Air. The rest have been cheap PCs. I don’t really use my personal computer for much of anything.
joe is definitely among the easiest CLI/TUI editors there are.
Imagine if you had something that small and powerful today.
I completely agree with the first part. But why do you think we don't have that today, if we choose to do so?
2. FOSS has dropped into Code Reuse Mode*, & getting out of that is going to require motivated individuals to build their own, entirely new versions. LibreOffice is Good Enough for most users, so why go to all the effort of starting from ground level when a fork & reskin will do?
one would hope that FOSS would lead to having cool, alternate approaches to particular use problems (as in the old days, when there were myriad word processors on the market — XyWrite, WordPerfect, WriteNow, Word, etc., etc.), but Good Enough means that attention can be put on more interesting problems. what we're left with is a mediocre mass of applications.
*which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.
I don't necessarily disagree that there are some issues in the ecosystem, but I don't think that's the problem. For starters, I don't think anyone is* forking LibreOffice and throwing on a layer of paint? And when I need a word processor, I personally prefer AbiWord, which is its own thing.
In particular,
> which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.
This feels backwards. Alternatives tend to present a similar interface without* sharing code. In fact, even just on Linux I'd argue we have a rather lot of (re)implementations of the same things: Consider that we are in a position where Debian is shipping GNU coreutils, Ubuntu replaced them with a rust version (uutils), and Alpine has been happily shipping busybox for years (AFAIK, as long as it's existed).
Network effects.
Manufacturing and development process: Although Microsoft developed the idea, the actual engineering and prototyping were done by Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products (SCP). Don Burtis of Burtronix redesigned the card, and California Computer Systems manufactured it for Microsoft
This could be useful to save on costs in computer labs... my grade school used multiplexer boxes to share a single 1541 across four C-64's.
OPEN 1,8,15,"N:NEWDISK,01":CLOSE 1
And much as one would hope that Raymond Chen's blogging is holding up any important Microsoft initiatives, I very much doubt that it's much of a distraction for a megacorporation.
It is very much an engineer's engineering blog, and written by someone deeply in the trenches.
As a Unix person for decades, for me it’s great to see his incredibly experienced and insightful view on software development in general and specifically OS development at Microsoft and to read about his experience with all these nice processor architectures no longer supported by NT.