Posted in History, Technology and Software, tagged 16bit, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, History, ST on May 16, 2008 | No Comments »
A while back I wrote my “Reminiscing” series of posts talking about the history of the machines I used growing up, as I remembered it. I came upon a few materials on reddit over a period of about a month that gave more authoritative histories of the Atari ST and Amiga. They’re really neat to look [...]
Posted in History, Information Technology, Technology and Software on March 10, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Hi guys. Just FYI, a little more than a week ago I wrote a comment on one of Paul Murphy’s blog postings, called “The worst PC myth of all”. Murphy is a blogger on ZDNet. He liked my comment a lot, and he and I agreed to have it as a guest post on his blog, called “Managing L’Unix”. I changed it a bit [...]
Posted in Analysis, History, Technology and Software on November 13, 2007 | 5 Comments »
The pop culture
This is my last post in this series. In the other parts I’ve written positively about my experience growing up in the computing culture that our society has created. Now, bringing this full circle, I will be looking at it with a critical eye, because I’ve come to realize that some things have been missing. If you compare what I’ve [...]
Posted in Art, History, Just For Fun on November 10, 2007 | No Comments »
Going Retro
Here are some modern “retro” videos I found that harken back to the 8- and 16-bit era. I just thought they were neat.
“Move Your Feet”, by Junior Senior
A friend introduced me to this music video a few years ago. It harkens back to the olden days of blocky but colorful 8-bit graphics. I’m sure [...]
Posted in History, Just For Fun, Technology and Software on November 5, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Atari ST
While in college I got an Atari Mega STe, around 1992. It had a 16-bit Motorola 68000 CPU, and was soft-switchable between 8 Mhz and 16 Mhz. I got it with 1 MB of RAM. I eventually upgraded it to 4 MB, and added an internal 40 MB hard drive. That was kind of the average size at the time.
Some [...]
Posted in History, Just For Fun, Programming on October 31, 2007 | 12 Comments »
Compute! Magazine
Back to reminiscing! I’m dedicating this part in the series to this magazine, because I think it was that good. Compute! was published from 1979 to 1994. Though it started out focusing exclusively on computers that used the MOS 6502 CPU, or some variant, like the Apple II, Atari 8-bits (400, 800, XL and [...]
Posted in Education, History, Programming, Technology and Software on October 19, 2007 | 8 Comments »
I saw that lispy wrote about this. I happened to spot the original speech by Richard Stallman on reddit. The title intrigued me: “My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Emacs”. I’ll go through some pieces of it, because there are some interesting stories in here.
My first experience with Lisp was when I read the Lisp [...]
Posted in History, Just For Fun, Programming, Technology and Software on October 5, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Apple ][
The most commonly found computers in public schools in the early to mid-1980s were the Apple ][ plus and //e. These were 8-bit computers, running MOS 6502 CPUs (or some variant), running at 1 Mhz. They typically had anywhere from 48 to 64 kilobytes of RAM. They were the models Apple made before the Lisa and Macintosh.
When they finally installed [...]
Posted in History, Just For Fun, Programming, Technology and Software on September 28, 2007 | 2 Comments »
This is a series of posts I’ve had on the back burner for a while. It was inspired by Alan Kay’s comments in an interview from a few years ago, where he said that we’ve seen a significant retrogression in the state of computer science as a result of a “pop culture” that developed in the [...]
Posted in History, Squeak, Technology and Software on August 14, 2007 | 4 Comments »
I learned this past weekend via. a posting on James Robertson’s blog that the Professional edition of Dolphin Smalltalk has been discontinued. The free version will continue to be available for free. According to Object Arts the costs outpaced the profits.
When I used to see discussions on blogs about Seaside, often the subject of Squeak would come up, since that [...]
