The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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“Here’a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.” 25th anniversary

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/24

Today 25 years ago: [WayBack] Dilbert Comic Strip on 1995-06-24 | Dilbert by Scott Adams

Wally approaches another employee and says, “Hold it right there, buddy.”

Wally continues, “That scruffy beard . . . those suspenders . . . that smug expression . . .”

Wally concludes, “You’re one of those condescending Unix computer users!”

The man responds, “Here’a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.”

It was a play on the tiny Here’s a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer fragment from [WayBack] single.h:

#if _FP_W_TYPE_SIZE < 32
#error "Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer."
#endif

Not much has changed for Dilbert, apart that by now, the transcripts have been put on-line, something I wanted to do some 15 years ago with OCR.

Seems somebody did it, and made it official too. Woot!

On the computing side, we still seem to be well in the 64-bit era, just like when I posted 20 years ago today: Here’s a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.

I wonder that really has changed in the past 5 years, and how long the “here’s a nickel” will stay relevant.

Via these tweets that helped me remind to post:

There is more gold in that thread. See below (:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fun, History | Leave a Comment »

Computing History – The UK Computer Museum – Cambridge

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/19

On my places to visit:

The Centre for Computing History is a computer museum based in Cambridge, UK. With a collection of vintage computers and game consoles, many of the exhibits are hands on and interactive.

[WayBack] Computing History – The UK Computer Museum – Cambridge.

When I bumped into it, this was their collection size, ranging from the 1960s until recent history:

Archive Statistics :

  • Computers = 993
  • Peripherals = 1446
  • Mobile Devices = 31
  • Game Consoles = 213
  • Video Games = 10259
  • Software Packages = 2605
  • Books = 2045
  • Manuals = 4106
  • Magazines = 9057

Looking at their archived brands (having [WayBack] MITS – Altair and [WayBack] Raspberry Pi in the collection) is such a joy.

Archiving the older parts is a tough job, as they stem from way before the web era, so information has been lost, parts are hard to source, a lot of hardware got thrown away or is hard to find at all, people have died. More on that at [WayBack] About – Computing History.

Without a physical visit, you can find what they have at [WayBack] Search Our Archive – Computing History.

The video below on their archive is impressive.

–jeroen

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Posted in 6502, 68k, Apple I, BBC Micro B, BBS, C64, Commodore, CP/M, dial-up modems, FidoNet, History, IBM SAA CUA, PowerPC, Tesseract, VIC-20, Z80 | Leave a Comment »

Chr equivalent for Unicode in Delphi 7 – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/17

From a long time ago: [WayBack] chr equivalent for Unicode in Delphi 7 – Stack Overflow answered by David Heffernan:

Q

I need to initialize a Widestring in Delphi 7 but I can’t use chrfunction which is ANSI

var
  ws : Widestring;
begin

 ws := chr($FFFF) + chr($FFFF) + chr($FFFF);

end;

What can I use, then ?

A

I’m not sure there’s a simply way to do what you wish. You can convert a Word into a WideChar with a simple cast:

WideChar($FFFF)

but you cannot concatenate WideChar. So this is a compiler error:

WideChar($FFFF) + WideChar($FFFF)

You could use a helper function to get the job done:

function InitialiseWideString(const chars: array of Word): WideString;
var
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(Result, Length(chars));
  for i := 0 to high(chars) do
    Result[i+1] := WideChar(chars[i]);
end;

Then you can call it like this:

ws := InitialiseWideString([$0054, $0069, $006D, $0065, $0020, $0074, $006F, 
  $0020, $0075, $0070, $0067, $0072, $0061, $0064, $0065]);

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 7, Development, History, Software Development | 3 Comments »

GitHub – dschmenk/apple2pi: Apple II client/server for Raspberry Pi

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/28

[WayBack] GitHub – dschmenk/apple2pi: Apple II client/server for Raspberry Pi: hybrid computer of a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple II (either ][, or ][+, or //e) so the Apple II can be a front-end to the Raspberry Pi which then can run an Apple IIGS emulator, talk to the Apple II storage hardware and much more.

It can run [WayBack] RASPPLE II: A2CLOUD, A2SERVER, Apple II Pi for Raspberry Pi

Lot’s of videos below, all by David Schmenk https://www.youtube.com/user/dschmenk/videos

Via:

–jeroen

 

 

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Development, Hardware Development, Hardware Interfacing, History, Power User, Raspberry Pi, USB | Leave a Comment »

Raspberry Pi 1B OpenSuSE Tumbleweed zypper upgrade problem · GitHub

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/25

It looks like OpenSuSE has stopped supporting Raspberry Pi 1, so the best likely is to recycle it into a Pi-Hole as basically it’s been dead since mid 2017: [WayBack] Raspberry Pi 1B OpenSuSE Tumbleweed zypper upgrade problem · GitHub.

Build status for armv6l support: [WayBack] Project openSUSE:Factory:ARM Status Monitor – openSUSE Build Service

–jeroen

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Debian, Development, Hardware Development, History, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, Raspbian, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed | Leave a Comment »

David Korn Tells All – Slashdot

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/21

Almost 20 years old, but still a very nice read [Archive.is] David Korn Tells All – Slashdot.

Another funny story involving David Korn during the not-so open source times of Microsoft late last century: [WayBack] Korn Shell Story

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, History, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

6502.org • Search: mos6502 G+ posts

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/15

With the demise of G+, I am glad that most of the [WayBack] mos6502 posts were archived at [WayBack] 6502.org • Search: mos6502 G+ posts

Via [WayBack] This week, OUP/M, a 6502 CP/M-ish operating system from 1983, in the process of recovery from Jian-Xiong Shao’s Masters Thesis into Github. And a reques… – mos6502 – Google+

[WayBack] mos6502 – Google+

6502 posts – new projects and interesting old projects from the archives

–jeroen

Posted in 6502, History | Leave a Comment »

Men’s Java is not JavaScript Annoyed Programmer/Developer T-Shirt

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/05/13

Though the shirt is not available on Amazon [WayBack] any more, still – after 25 years – so many recruiters still get it wrong.

Not just recruiters, so: [WayBack] Why is JavaScript called JavaScript, since it has nothing to do with Java? – Stack Overflow, thanks to CMS [WayBack]:

From an interview made to its creator Brendan Eich:

InfoWorld: As I understand it, JavaScript started out as Mocha, then became LiveScript and then became JavaScript when Netscape and Sun got together. But it actually has nothing to do with Java or not much to do with it, correct?

Eich: That’s right. It was all within six months from May till December (1995) that it was Mocha and then LiveScript. And then in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.

he continues on the relation of ECMAScript based languages:

JavaScript, was originally named Mocha, later it was renamed to LiveScript, and then to JavaScript.

The LiveScript to JavaScript name change came because Netscape and Sun did a license agreement.

The language was then submitted for standarization to the ECMA International Organization. By that time, Netscape didn’t allow the use of the “JavaScript” name, so the standarized language is named ECMAScript.

JavaScript isn’t actually an open name. Now it’s a trademark of Sun (now Oracle).

There still a lot of confusion, some people still think that JavaScript, JScript, and ECMAScript are three different languages.

ECMAScript is the “standards” name for the language.

JavaScript is technically a “dialect” of ECMAScript, the Mozilla Foundation can use “JavaScript” as the name of their implementations (currently present on the Rhino and SpiderMonkey engines).

In the early days, Microsoft decided also to do what Netscape was doing on their own browser, and they developed JScript, which is also an ECMAScript dialect, but was named in this way to avoid trademark issues.

–jeroen

via: [WayBack] Does it bug you when people say Java when they actually mean JavaScript? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y3XK69B – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

 

Posted in Development, History, Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

The Invention of C++ – Nice bit of net lore

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/30

This is a nice joke: [WayBack] The Invention of C++ – Nice bit of net lore.

But the actual interview linked from the article is quite nice: [WayBack: The Real Stroustrup Interview]

By the name, I found the actual (hopefully still online when this gets out of the blog post queue) version at [WayBack] Stroustrup: Interviews under [WayBack] stroustrup.com/ieee_interview.pdf

–jeroen

Via: [WayBack] The invention of C++ – Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) – Google+

Posted in C, C++, Development, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Result

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/10

Such a cool device: [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Result.

The whole project:

  1. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Intro
  2. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Display
  3. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Driving the display
  4. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Schematic
  5. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Software
  6. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Enclosure
  7. [WayBack] Sprites mods – Miniature Macintosh Plus – Result

Sources: [WayBack] GitHub – Spritetm/minimacplus: Source code, PCB artwork and firmware for a tiny Macintosh Plus

–jeroen

 

Posted in 68k, History | Leave a Comment »

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