Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/10
Sometimes Wikipedia entries are way too short, for instance Philip A. Kaufman – Wikipedia, who in 1992 – at the age of around 50 – died way to early, does not do justice to his time at Intel.
His name rang a bell when searching for early Intel 8087 documentation distributed via LISTSERV, so below is a bit more information on Phil.
True, his life after Intel was very important especially on the front of electronic design automation. That in fact sparked the posthumous instantiation of the Phil Kaufman Award which you can read for instance at [Wayback/Archive] The Phil Kaufman Award Dinner Is Later this Month. Who Was Phil Kaufman? – Breakfast Bytes – Cadence Blogs – Cadence Community.
After his floating-point endeavours at Intel and the IEEE, he was also very instrumental at Intel in finding another big market for silicon: network controller chips (and getting the Ethernet standard going: think DIX (Digital/Intel/Xerox) [Wayback/Archive] Ethernet Blue Book (1980) which was named that way earlier than the PostScript Blue Book (1986) and CD Blue Book (1986)).
This period is very well described in the [Wayback/Archive] 1988 Computer History Museum interview of Phil Kaufman by James L. Pelkey (via [Wayback/Archive] Phil Kaufman | History of Computer Communications).
Back to floating point: Phil’s post from 1987 way better describes what early processor technologies at Intel he was involved with than the above links. That period was instrumental in getting IEEE_754-1985 going (it was released way after the 8087!) and still shapes the floating point aspects of almost any CPU from any vendor today so I quote it in full from [Wayback/Archive] Info-IBMPC V6 #59:
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Posted in 8086, 8087, 8087, 8088, Algorithms, Assembly Language, Development, Floating point handling, History, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/04
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, History, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Development, Windows XP, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/30
Houdoe Pieter: [Archive] Striptekenaar Pieter Geenen: ‘Soms had ik de neiging om Anton Dingeman weer op te laten duiken’ | Trouw
Via: [Wayback/Archive] Post by @sandradehaan.bsky.social — Bluesky
Hoe gaat het met Anton Dingeman? Tekenaar Pieter Geenen vertelt. Een gesprek over het verdwijnende dialect. En twee strips! ❤️ “Af en toe dacht ik nog wel aan hem hoor, als ik de krant las en het nieuws zag. Dan had ik soms de neiging om Anton weer op te laten duiken”.
www.trouw.nl/tijdgeest/st…
--jeroen
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Posted in History | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/20
Nice memories of the TBAV/ThunderByte Anti-Virus story.
Together with Jeroen Smulders, I was sort of on the sideline in the early days as we both were at the university had access to FidoNet (I as host, other Jeroen as point), Internet, mailing lists and newsgroups.
I used it because it was the fastest Virus Scanner around and a need when scanning all incoming FidoNet data for viruses (I had seen at university what damage a spread could do).
Some VIRUS-L, comp.virus and book links from that past:
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Posted in 8086, 8088, Antivirus, BBS, Compuserve, FidoNet, History, Internet, Power User, SearchEngines, Security | Tagged: 96 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/08
I feel old, because I vividly remember the PCX (1985) graphics file format: it was the defacto standard under DOS.
TIFF (1986) was slightly younger, and came from the scanner background resulting in very large files though unlike PCX (which had lossless compression), TIFF supported both lossless and lossy compression.
On Windows and OS/2, you had BMP (1985, lossless initially only black and white).
All three suffered from the same problems: different implementations causing all sorts of compatibility problems
Those were the reason for the implementation of newer file formats for graphics like JPG (1992, lossy) and PNG (1996, lossless).
[Wayback/Archive] What was before JPEG? #pcx #shorts – YouTube – @Vitaskhr
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Posted in Development, History, Software Development | Tagged: pcx, shorts | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/25
Na elk jaar lijkt de lijst te verdwijnen, dus daarom gearchiveerd:
NB: Archive.is kan geen .xls bestanden archiveren.
--jeroen
Posted in archive.is / archive.today, Archiving, History, Internet, InternetArchive, LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/24
Before Firebird version 1.0 got released, a gaping security hole that InterBase introduced in 1994 before InterBase 6.0 (mostly written in C) got open sourced in 2000 was detected by the team that frantically tried the Firebird fork to first get building on various platforms, then released.
It had a maximum CVSS score of 10.0 because it could access the security database in read/write mode, thereby allowing adding users with SYSDBA privileges.
The detection is now about 25 years ago; on 20260109 the publication (by IBPhoenix) of the bug will be 25 years ago too.
So below are some links, including the original InterBase 6 source which was hard to find as the attachments of the original release links had not been archived in the Wayback Machine.
But first some of the code parts, which also shows the source file I did find back:
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Posted in C, Database Development, Development, Firebird, History, InterBase, Software Development | Tagged: define | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/19
With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code/
Posted in 68k, Adobe, Apple, Apple Pascal, Classic Macintosh, Development, History, Macintosh SE/30, Object Pascal, Pascal, Power User, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 