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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“Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/27

The tweet [WaybackSave/Archive] Jakub Kočí on X: “”Everybody should have an obsession with Lisp-like language at least once in their life” @KevlinHenney I’m glad that I had one with Clojure.” mentioned a great talk:

[Wayback/Archive] The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • GOTO 2024 – YouTube

The quote brought instant memories to my early computing days that I had almost forgotten: the muMATH (the muMATH-80 version on Apple II) computer algebra system which was based on muLISP (the German muLISP page has more detailed information), a LISP dialect.

In retrospect, I was way too young to really grasp LISP which was way harder than just using the muMATH wrapper. But it was also my first encounter to reasoning systems, or what we now collectively would call AI systems as back in the 70s there was a strong LISP connection to artificial intelligence . Do not confuse muMath with MuMath-Code however, that is a different LLM beast: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – youweihao-tal/MuMath-Code

So hopefully I will have a chance to revisit LISP with a LISP-like language one day, maybe even using the discontinued muMATH-83 on MS-DOS (also named “Microsoft LISP“), maybe even the (also discontinued) Derive 6.1 for Windows which is also based on muLISP, or even Clojure itself.

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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, History, LISP, LLM, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Fix a “Automatic Repair couldn’t repair your PC” on an UEFI system: when Windows cannot be located

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).

Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).

One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.

Back to the error at hand:

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Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Eind 2024 was er een exclusieve tour in de Gerbrandytoren: het hoogste gebouw van Nederland – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/18

Indrukwekkende video van “Zendmast Lopik” (staat in IJsselstein en heet officieel Gerbrandytoren):

[Wayback/Archive] EXCLUSIVE TOUR GERBRANDYTOWER | TALLEST STRUCTURE NETHERLANDS – YouTube

Achtergrondinformatie: Gerbrandytoren – Wikipedia

--jeroen

Posted in History, SocialMedia, YouTube | Leave a Comment »

10 years ago, Toru Iwatani showed his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/12

I missed this back then, so here is a reminder: [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man : gaming

Of course these had a big red stamp on them marking them classified. The detailed game experience and sprite transformations in just a few pages really shows how great Toru Iwatani was.

Images were posted first on [Wayback/Archive] Toru Iwatani shows his original drafts for Pac-Man – Imgur:

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Posted in History, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Tom Waes tussen twee vuren in Noord-Ierland

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/26

If anyone knows how to watch this outside Belgium, please let me know: [Wayback/Archive] Tom Waes tussen twee vuren in Noord-Ierland.

I was there a few years before and a few months after this got broadcasted and I am curious to the footage: how does it compare (or differe) with my own experience and why.

For now, it looks like you cannot view it outside Belgium without confirming you are a Belgian citizen: [Wayback/Archive] Reizen Waes – 5 (4) Noord-Ierland | VRT MAX

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Posted in Awareness, History | Leave a Comment »

Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” • Buttondown

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/30

[Wayback/Archive] Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” • Buttondown (via [Wayback/Archive] Hillel on Twitter: “New newsletter! “Why do we call it boilerplate code” is a short history of the term, traced through the industrial revolution and rise of modern newspapers.”).

TL;DR: it is a combination of

  • boiler plate being a kind of sheet metal
  • in typesetting, the Linotype produced thin sheets of lead with letters

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Posted in Font, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some links on the Apple IIc Plus (Apple IIc + on the boot screen) likely the rarest from the Apple II series

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/16

A while ago I bumped into this video about likely the rarest model in the Apple II series: the Apple IIc Plus:

[Wayback/Archive] Apple IIc Plus – the rarest and fastest Apple II! – YouTube

Returning to one of my favorite subjects – the Apple II – I decide to finally repair a broken Apple IIc Plus gifted to me a little more than a year ago. This machine was the final true hardware revision to the Apple II line, coming in 1988, and the last standalone machine in the line released. It was also the fastest, with a 4Mhz CPU (vs. 1Mhz in most other Apple II’s, and 2.6Mhz in the IIGS). But it was a problematic machine for Apple, with a concept that had been watered down to the point of, well, pointlessness.

The market wanted it even less than it wanted the original IIc (which was my first computer – the one in the thumbnail is my original machine). Still, it is an interesting computer for its accelerated CPU, and its somewhat anachronistic nature at the time of its launch.

It has a cool demo of Flight Simulator II demo mode (which back in those days crashing the plane – demo modes luckily improved from there :) at both 1 Mhz and 4 Mhz. It indeed is not smooth, but a lot faster.

The problem back in those days with acceleration is it would not just improve render speed, but also increase clock time speed. It made most games almost impossible to play in accelerated mode.

If I ever get one, I need to replace the 110V power supply with a 240V/110V auto-switching one as per [Wayback/Archive] IIc + 240v Power:

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Posted in 6502, Apple, Apple ][, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Early Firefox history thread by @asadotzler on Thread Reader App (from before it was called Phoenix, heck from before Phoenix was created!)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/14

A few years back I bumped in this cool [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @asadotzler on Thread Reader App on early Firefox history (from before it was called Phoenix or Firebird, heck from before Phoenix was created!).

It is important to keep telling these bits of history as they are fundamental to understand the Web Browser landscape as it is now.

Great material that complements Wikipedia articles like these:

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Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird, Firefox, History, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Trip down memory lane: book on p-Code based UCSD Pascal

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/06

Last week I wrote on File scoped namespaces – C# 10.0 draft specifications | Microsoft Learn, promising to write more on p-Code and UCSD Pascal. That’s now (:

I started with [Wayback/Archive] “java byte code” “ucsd” “p-code” – Google Search as I was looking for really old material on this (Java 1.0 versions became available in the 1994-1995 time frame, and a lot of material back then either did not make it to the World Wide Web (which slowly gained popularity around that time, see History of the World Wide Web) or has vanished due to link rot.

The cool thing is that many “new” people are not even aware of p-Code, as the 2019 thread [Wayback/Archive] What do you think about something like Pascal bytecode? shows.

I learned a thing or two from it as well, for instance that there has been a “recent” book on UCSD Pascal:

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Posted in Apple Pascal, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, gist, GitHub, History, Internet, link rot, Pascal, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, Standard Pascal, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50 – Ars Technica

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/02

It first I thought “I didn’t know they had birthday on my birthday”, but then found out the article [Wayback/Archive] Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50 – Ars Technica got published on my birthday.

In fact Monty Python and the Holy Grail got released on 19730403 in London, and towards the end of April in the USA.

Dutch audio fragment of mid april about the anniversary: [Wayback] mp3 on [Wayback/Archive] Erik van Muiswinkel over 50 jaar Monty Python and the Holy Grail | NPO Radio 1 is great.

--jeroen

Posted in About, History, Personal | Leave a Comment »

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