Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/09
mos6502 wrote a really nice post on G+ with this quote:
“This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.”
A must read if you ever used Microsoft BASIC on a 6502 machine.
Lots of link to various sources of the Microsoft BASIC (it was developed on a PDP-10 that could even run the outputed 6502 assembly!)
–jeroen
via: We’ve already had some posts on the BASIC programming language for the 6502,….
Posted in 6502, BASIC, Development, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/06
My response to the comments in Cut and Paste Files & Folders in Mac OS X got a bit took long. So here is it in an article:
Indeed. CUA. The days (:
I’ll write more about CUA in the future (there is some CUA site:wiert.me stuff from the past) as it defines a lot of modern UI and user experience.
In fact the history of Ctrl-C and Command-C goes back until before System 1 (the OS for the first Macintosh) which indeed had the Open Apple Key shortcuts, but didn’t introduce them.
The Command Key was introduced in the Apple III and became more popular in the Apple //e and //c (I own both) where AppleWorks was already using these shortcuts in 1986.
It is funny to notice that Apple keyboards lost their logo keys but Windows keyboards gained them.
Some Apple keyboard pr0n can be found on Wikipedia.
–jeroen
Posted in 6502, History, IBM SAA CUA, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/03/30
For anyone keeping up with Pascal history, these uploads are new:
–jeroen
via: Index of /pdf/pascalNews.
Posted in Apple Pascal, BitSavers.org, DEC Pascal, Delphi, Development, History, IBM Pascal, Pascal, Software Development, Standard Pascal, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/02/14
Marketing blast of the past via David Millington – Google+.
I got most of the Delphi versions from D2-D6 on PC Plus magazine cover CDs, an English magazine also published in Australia. I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t had access to those free copies of Delphi when I was a kid.
and this one:
It came with a promotional copy of Borland Delphi… and unlike other “promotional” software often distributed on the cover disks of popular computer publications at that time, this one had absolutely no restrictions and was fully functional.
From a really nice article by Simon Stuart.
Who thought that he was ever at the Basic side of things (:
And of course it ends with correct Delph-ee pronunciation to be right: the community at large has spoken.
Given this week went very different than I anticipated, here is a much shorter story than I hoped for. I’ll focus on the early days, you can read on the later and current days here on my blog.
For me, my Delphi life has been pretty straight forward. It started with the early days and Turbo Pascal leading to Delphi.
Posted in BBS, Castalia, Delphi, Development, FidoNet, History, Software Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/29
When people tell you that ASCII is not an Internet Standard but an RFC. They are wrong. They used to be right though. Until 2015-01-12, when IETF declared the RFC 20 to be an Internet Standard: status-change-rfc20-ascii-format-to-standard-00.
So after more than 45 years (like many good things, the ASCII RFC is from 1969), it is not just an American Standard but an Internet Standard (:
Thanks Lauren Weinstein for sharing and Kristian Köhntopp for pointing to the reclassification.
–jeroen
via: ASCII – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/29
Unit testing has been here for a long time, and so has Unit Testing in Delphi. Below a summary of historic links together with some notes on how the state of affairs changed over the years.
I’ll start with one of the first large Delphi Unit Testing articles was a paper by Charlie Calvert summarizing the state of the art on Delphi Unit Testing in 2004. It is present in the wayback machine as DUnit Talk and on his elvenware.com site.
Note that the elvenwere.com site is sometimes slow or hard to reach. Since his evangelist days at Borland/CodeGear, Charlie has moved through a few evangelist jobs at Falafel and Microsoft and finally went back to his old profession: being a great teacher – this time at Bellevue College – often using script based languages and cloud computing, with less focus on his web-presence.
Many of his IT books (during his writing period, he wrote both as Charles Calvert and Charlie Calvert) are still relevant though.
Posted in Agile, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Dependency Injection, Design Patterns, Development, Event, FreePascal, History, Inversion of Control / IoC, Pascal, Software Development | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/18
Interesting talks about Apple Macintosh (now Mac) LC475, 800K floppies, System 7.6/7.7, SCSI, AppleTalk, Serial, Ethernet, hardware upgrades, etc.
New computer time. Well not exactly “new”. I needed to read/write some old….
Posted in Apple, History, Mac, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/24
Cool:
Scot Stevenson Shared publicly
For the 6502, 65c02 and 65816 freaks out there: WDC, who still produce the chips, have made their Programming the 65816 Including the 6502, 65C02 and 65802 available for free again (see link below). It’s the standard reference for the new version of these CPUs. Yes, this will be on the test. Ping +Alan Cox HT to BDD on 6502.org
–jeroen
For the 6502, 65c02 and 65816 freaks out there: WDC, who still produce the….
Posted in 6502, 6502 Assembly, Assembly Language, Development, History | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/12/01
Via Best C# Article of October 2014 Nicolas Dorier – NBitcoin I learned that dthorpe (yes, that is indeed Danny Thorpe many people know him from the Delphi, C# and Google world) is active as Contributors to NicolasDorier/NBitcoin and on quite some Bitcoin related repositories.
When we met last summer, he was visiting the Bitcoin 2014 conference in Amsterdam. It is really good to see his activity, and I really hope his Opex.io venture (see his LinkedIn profile) will take off, as his ideas are sound.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Bitcoin, C#, Cryptocurrency, Delphi, Development, History, Power User, Software Development, Windows Azure | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/11/28
A while ago, Alan Cox started a nice thread about finding an USB way to read old (like 5.25 inch and 3 inch) floppies.
That resulted in a nice comment thread revealing this info:
Now hopefully some people also post some links to USB PCMCIA memory card readers (:
–jeroen
Posted in History, Power User | 1 Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 