Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at [WayBack] Revision 2017, where it ended up on 1st place.
Every now and then I complete more pieces of my early 1990s vector fonts era. This time I’ve found back the name of the company that provided some parts of the software that we used at Polyvroom to produce vector fonts (both PostScript and TrueType): “Galiad Computers Ltd.” from Israel. I don’t remember Eitan Mizrotsky though.
At the time of writing, http://galiad.co.il/ seems down, but the Web Archive has old copies of it. I totally forgot they did some more public Border Software as well.
Another party involved back then was Visualogik. They still exist, so I will get in touch with them one day.
Mecanorma, LetterPress and Letraset dry tansfer lettering (click to enlarge).
Mecanorma was a French company and leading manufacture of instant lettering. The rub down lettering was manufactured by a Dutch company called Polyvroom BV. Around 1985 the company called Trip Productions took over Mecanorma and Polyvroom. In the following years Trip Productions BV developed digital fonts and produced the rub down lettering from Lisse in The Netherlands.
The main product of Mecanorma was always the production of the rub down lettering. It was not easy to to scale down the company when the market of the rub down lettering did almost disappear because of the new technology in the world. Many of the production lines for the rub down lettering were closed down. The rub down lettering is a decal technology and to survive Trip Productions did try to focus on that technology for a long time with success.
In 2012 the decision was made that they had to turn the company around. A new company was formed called Trip Licenses BV and they focus on the license of the Fonts and Patents the company has. The production and sales of the rub down lettering is still active and licensed to ProCraft BV in The Netherlands. The digital fonts are licensed to House of Type (ITF Inc.) in the USA.
FollowAlong with Letraset, the French company Mecanorma was one of the major vendors of instant rub-down lettering. Along with licensing typefaces from other vendors, Mecanorma commissioned original typeface designs.
From 1989 until 1994, Mecanorma worked with another Dutch company Visualogik to create digital versions of their typefaces. These typefaces were released in Type 1 format, bearing a “MN” suffix. In addition, Monotype licensed and digitized some of Mecanorma’s typefaces. In 1995, Mecanorma stepped back from the professional graphics market and entered into other areas such as home decoration. During that time, their decorative materials, including their instant rub-down lettering, were manufactured by the now defunct Dutch company, Trip Productions BV.
In 2004, International TypeFounders (ITF) licensed the digital typefaces from Trip Productions BV and released them as the Mecanorma Collection. This helped to preserve one of the finest digital font libraries of display typefaces around, combining real arts and crafts into the tools of today.
In 2014, International TypeFounders entered into a permanent agreement with Trip Consultants BV, the legal successor of the French type foundry Mecanorma. As the exclusive worldwide digital rights owners of the collection, ITF have now republished the Mecanorma Collection in OpenType for the first time.
A pair of 20MB hard drive compilations contain a full MacOS 7.0.1 environment that runs in a browser, and contains an assortment of applications spanning from 1984 to 1991 has appeared on the Internet Archive, with the entire bundle able to be run inside Safari.
Conditions are very, very good right now for easy, top-quality, final ingestion of original commercial Apple II Software and if you know people sitting on a pile of it or even if you have a small handful of boxes, please get in touch with me to arrange the disks to be imaged. apple@textfiles.com.
For example, piles and piles of educational software has returned from potential oblivion, because it’s about the preservation, not the title. Wonderfully done works are being brought back to life and are playable on the Internet Archive.
In other words: if you have or know someone who has disks with original, uncracked software that cannot be copied easily, let the team at the WayBack machine know as they have the resources that can help preserve that software.
64-bit as target: server side, the 32-bit days have been over for a long time
one-based strings (boy, I’m glad they didn’t continue on the zero-based strings they did on mobile)
Dislike
No openSUSE support where SuSE was the primary partner during Kylix development and launch, just search SuSE kylix; heck the registration guide is still up at [WayBack] SDB:Kylix – openSUSE
LLVM compiler as it is way too slow for my development cycles
ARC based
Time will tell if it works better for me than the .NET Core for Linux I’ve been using until now.
The second article I found (Delphi for Linux is on the Way!) was actually the first one I wrote, so I’ve put the copy below. The second article will be in my blog tomorrow.
It’s about “Software and Security from Apple Friends and Enemies” an early exchange of ideas and possibilities for DRM in the Apple ][ and Apple III era.
Yesterday at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet, where everything is sold by the pound, I noticed the Apple logo on letterhead sticking out from a bin of books, so I started digging. What I found were the 1979-1980 files of Jack MacDonald, manager of system software for the Apple II and /// at the time
They tell the story of project “SSAFE” or “Software Security from Apples Friends and Enemies.” This was a proposal to bring disk copy protection in-house to sell as a service to outside developers. Inter-office memos, meeting notes and progress reports all give a good idea of what a project lifecycle was like. Different schemes and levels of protection are considered, as well as implementation primarily on the Apple II+ and the upcoming SARA (The Apple ///) and Lisa computers. [WayBack] Randy Wigginton is featured prominently throughout, along with mentions of Woz and many other familiar names.
The reddit thread is very nice reading as it explains how close we are now to this Level 1:
Level 1. Totally secure. Absolutely no method of stealing the software. 100% effective. Note that the ideal, level 1, is achievable only through disallowing any access of any kind to the software and the computer. Not very practical in our circumstances.
and this one from boingboing:
It’s so neatly packaged and well-documented it could be a Harvard Business Review case-study.
I recently found some old magazine issues of my early programming escapades. It reminded me of the really old days where – as a school kid – I tried to buy Nibble magazine at a regular base. It was expensive (I think it was around 8 Dutch Guilders (or NLG) – close to EUR 4 – which was a lot for me, though less expensive than diskettes that were like NLG 10 each).
Recently I learned that all issues (16k pages total!) have been scanned and OCR-ed and can be obtained on DVD for a modest price. Even better: all their software is available for free.
Geek pr0n on the C64:
The [
–jeroen
This appeared a few days back: [
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
