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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
Posted in Font, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »
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:
Posted in 6502, Apple, Apple ][, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »
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:
Posted in Database Development, Development, Firebird, Firefox, History, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »
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:
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 »
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 »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/25
A great rambling on “It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway” (I really want that printed on a T-Shirt):
[Wayback/Archive] No, You Are Not Getting a CVE for That.
Lot’s of references by [Wayback/Archive] Parsia to great posts by [Wayback/Archive] Raymond Chen mainly on security issues that are not: there is only a vulnerability when you get from the other side of the outside of the airtight hatchway to the inside, not when you are already inside.
And of course this great reference to H2G2 (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), a trilogy in five parts by Douglas Adams:
Arthur: But can’t you think of something?!
Ford: I did.
Arthur: You did!
Ford: Unfortunately, it rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway—
Arthur: oh.
Ford: —that’s just sealed behind us.
Via:
--jeroen
Posted in Blue team, Fun, History, Power User, Quotes, Red team, Security | Tagged: 19 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/11
A while ago someone asked on Twitter if people had mobile phones in the early 1990’s.
I bought my first GSM phone in 1995. Unlike my other mobile non-smart phones that were from Nokia, this one was from Motorola.
It was the international GSM version of the Motorola MicroTAC series (see picture below) which by then was way more affordable and smaller than the Nokia devices (see Nokia 2010 – Wikipedia and Nokia 2110 – Wikipedia).
This was in the age that world wide there were various competing mobile phone network standards.
Posted in About, Cellular telephony, GSM, History, Personal, Power User, Telephony | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/09
Nice historic perspective: [Wayback/Archive] From Turbo Pascal to Delphi to C# to TypeScript, an interview with PL legend Anders Hejlsberg – YouTube
Via [Wayback/Archive] Zack Urlocker on Twitter: “Great interview with @ahejlsberg on the evolution of programming languages, the rise of TypeScript and more. Anders is one of the best programmers I ever worked with. …”
--jeroen
Posted in .NET, Borland Pascal, C#, Delphi, Development, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MS-DOS, Pascal, Scripting, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, TypeScript, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/04
B&W logo
Colour logo
Looking at the Wayback Machine Archivals of the banner logo, I saw two things:
Posted in History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: NewProfilePic | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/01
Last year, #Appril][ got rebranded into #AprilApples, so I wish you a happy retro-month filled with April Apples!
[Wayback/Archive] Welcome to #AprilApples! Apple II Computer event celebrated in the month of April
Consider using the [Wayback/Archive] #AprilApples Style Guide with logon on the right, plus Garamond and/or Motter Tektura typeface when possible to really give tribute to the Apple ][ era.
Last year, a big surprise was that Apple Computer put a PDF version of the famous Apple Pascal Poster on the Internet Archive.
So today is a great day to give that more traction and link to it:
A year before, during April][, a remake of that poster got done on AppleFritter: 
[Wayback/Archive] Apple pascal poster, remade | Applefritter
Via [Wayback/Archive] Javmaster@bsky.social: “http://appril2.com/ ” – Mastodon
Fonts:
Assembly Lines – Chris Torrence
Internet Archive [Archive] AssemblyLinesPodcast91 directory listing:
Images (I used a solid CSS brown background so you can see the difference between the regular logo and the outlined logo):
--jeroen
Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ///, Apple Lisa, Apple ][, Classic Macintosh, History, Power User | Tagged: 91, Appril, AprilApples | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 