An eternal Dilbert strip that is based on the tiny Here’s a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer fragment from single.h:
#if _FP_W_TYPE_SIZE < 32
#error "Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer."
#endif
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
20 years ago today: Here’s a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/06/24
Posted in *nix, ARM, Assembly Language, Delphi, Delphi 1, Development, Fun, Geeky, History, MS-DOS, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 8.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, x86 | 2 Comments »
2 More Old Micro Cornucopia issues on BitSavers from 1986 « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/06/18
Almost two years ago, I wrote “the only issues missing are #28, #30 and #31.”. As of mid May any more:
All of them are from the 5th anniversary year.
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in 6502 Assembly, Assembly Language, BitSavers.org, C, C++, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »
Now that XE8 is out, some Turbo Pascal history
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/14
A few people asked, so below is a picture of just a piece of my books closet.
From left to right:
- Object Professional 1.0 manuals volume 1-3
- BTree Filer 5.0 manual
- Turbo Professional manual (from 1985!)
- Borland Paradox Engine 3.0 manuals
- Crystal Reports Developers Edition
- Borland Open Architecture Handbook for Pascal
- Turbo Pascal 5.5 OOP Guide
- Turbo Pascal 5.5 Reference Guide
- Turbo Pascal 5.5 User’s Guide
- Turbo Pascal Quick Reference
- Programming with Turbo Vision
This is only the front-left portion of one shelve. Most shelves are two deep and about 4 times as wide as what you see here (:
I have floppies somewhere in my archive too. Need to dig them up some day.
–jeroen
via:
- Delphi XE8 is out with version 22.0.19027.8951; Spring4D is almost ready. « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
- Some Turbo Pascal books….
Share this:
Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE8, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | 6 Comments »
Oh Mein Gott…
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/09
Demo party time. Amazing. As it runs on an early 4.77 Mhz IBM 8088 PC with CGA video.
–jeroen
Share this:
Posted in History | Leave a Comment »
mos6502: “This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.”
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,….
Share this:
Posted in 6502, BASIC, Development, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Keyboards, logo keys CUA and a some more history…
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
Share this:
Posted in 6502, Hardware, History, IBM SAA CUA, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User | 1 Comment »
BitSavers.org just added 7 missing scans of PascalNews newsletters (1975…1983)
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/03/30
For anyone keeping up with Pascal history, these uploads are new:
- 03_Pascal_Newsletter_Feb75.pdf
- 04_Pascal_Newsletter_Jul76.pdf
- 13_Pascal_Newsletter_Dec78.pdf
- 20_Pascal_Newsletter_Dec80.pdf
- 21_Pascal_Newsletter_Apr81.pdf
- 23A_Pascal_Newsletter.pdf
- 25_Pascal_Newsletter_Apr83.pdf
–jeroen
via: Index of /pdf/pascalNews.
Share this:
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 »
Where My Delphi Life Began – via David Millington and Simon Stuart #DelphiWeek
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.
My own early Delphi life
For me, my Delphi life has been pretty straight forward. It started with the early days and Turbo Pascal leading to Delphi.
Share this:
Posted in BBS, Castalia, Delphi, Development, FidoNet, History, Software Development | 2 Comments »
ASCII is not just an RFC. It is an Internet Standard, but only recently.
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.
Share this:
Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Some links to Delphi Unit Testing history
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.
Charlie Calvert
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.
DUnit; Juanco Añez Read the rest of this entry »
Share this:
Posted in Agile, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Dependency Injection, Design Patterns, Development, Event, FreePascal, History, Inversion of Control / IoC, Pascal, Software Development | 3 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 