If you were using a dial-up modem and sending raw data -- extremely common -- then sending +++ATH0 would cause most modems to hang up.
If you could get that sent over to someone else, their session would be abruptly terminated.
(Hayes patented requiring a no-data-sent time between the +++ and the ATH0. Avoiding the patent but being otherwise compatible introduced the vulnerability. In-band signalling is usually bad.)
If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork and animation for those displays was done entirely by hand in Deluxe Paint Animation for MSDOS.
The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.
Same year I faxed them a resume touting my 8-bit assembly experience. Dodged a bullet there, although I'm sure I could have picked up another architecture pretty quickly.
We switched to C++. Nobody had a problem with the switch, although multitheading became a sticky point with some of the developers so we had to write an API to simulate nonpreemptive tasking like the old assembly system.
I was working on an 8-bit system back in this same time period. We couldn't afford flash devices and the kit required to reprogram them. But we did a similar trick with an extra write pin located near the ROM socket, then used a special daughterboard filled with SRAM that replaced the ROM and also touched the write line. Now we could just use our cheap debugger and blow an image into the address space the ROM used.
Only downside was that you lost the image on power down, so I can see why EEPROM was more important to Apple in developing their systems.
And a lot of smaller microcontrollers still use a UART port and serial protocol to reflash the device. It's the lowest common denominator for hardware interface and the simplest thing that works.
Hah, to me flashing an MCU over UART is a luxury. When I first started working with MCUs I needed to use a chip programmer that cost several hundred $ and flashed using a high-voltage (relatively speaking) parallel interface. Then there were serial programmers that used a proprietary protocol to talk to the chip. And then finally we had bootloaders and self-flashing MCUs that made this whole process sane and affordable!
And of course to our ancestors, we're spoiled kids with our electronically erasable ROM ;)
I remember being blown away as a modern teen seeing an old EPROM being erased and how to do it. It felt more hacker like than todays "just push a button"
And, not you specifically, but you're the guy that ruins RTO for everyone else.
I'm hybrid and every Wednesday there's a wave of people that slide in, put in their earbuds, and shout into Teams calls for eight hours. It's impossible to concentrate.
I've managed to get some of them to get self aware and use conference rooms or those silly phone booths, but it's a nonstop problem now.
Much like sibling, our 6 meeting rooms are booked so far in advance I’d never have a chance. For people who have no choice to be in meetings all day, we’d also much rather not be in the middle of the floor, but ever since I joined the workforce I haven’t even had a cubicle let alone an office, so the business world demands that I sit at my desk next to people who’d much prefer to concentrate feeling bad about it all day.
Our conference rooms and phone booths are booked out weeks ahead, so it's not like there's a choice. They even turned a bunch of them into desk space because of the hiring that happened during wfh. I'd never met the people I sit next to before, and we work on totally unrelated projects. What is the point?
Cool! Love the game, by the way. Feels like it's a bit underrated because of the golf theme, but it's one of my favorite multiballs and I like the progression of the scorecard.
My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only bypassing every single restriction but also tanking my iCloud storage quota.
Here's a review of what showed up at Pinball Expo 2024: https://pinballexpo.com/homebrew/
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