Wow, the enshittification over at Dropbox has reached a terrible level. They make it super hard to just download a file in a browser, something that is supposed to be their core function. Why even use Dropbox these days?
Oh, 350 prototypes were built. Many were incomplete. The finished ones tended to go home with engineers--TI didn't exactly watch what went out the door.
I owned a 99/8 (without Pascal GROMs), so for me it was definitely real! Extended BASIC II was onboard, and showed this:
> SIZE
62235 BYTES FREE
The manuals and most schematics are long known and archived at ftp.whtech.com. I have/had paper copies of many of them. Sadly, TI never archived any Home Computer work from Lubbock, TX. Those employees had been laid off or transferred just as TI got interested in preserving archives (starting in 1983. Described in Ed Millis book: TI, the Transistor and Me.
The TI Records are at DeGolyer Library, SMU but contain very few Home Computer folders. Conspicuously missing are the papers of CB Wilson, which turned up at an estate sale and were fortunately scanned.
Wilson's office in Dallas seems to have contributed a few things to the archives. That is typical: mostly executives and Fellows were canvassed for documents. Ed Millis revived obsolete floppy formats for the cause in 1983!
@Shift838 made a ready configurator for the 99/4A MESS. He calls it OoeyGooey.
You might also try running Classic 99 under WINE. That works on my x86 MacBook. Classic99 has the legal license to ship with ROMs. (Well PC99 as well but it's hard to get.)
I'm not sure if JS99er runs standalone --that's a very good emulation in the browser, which you can load up anytime.
Perhaps so, but ISTM that it encapsulates the same basic point. Try to make something rich and general and you often end up re-implementing a whole computer inside your computer.
Which is why these days it's easier in many cases to just embed an Arm core and implement your controller's functionality in software.
It's honest. If we can serialize our ideas to any language for durability, Rust is the way to go.
It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust.
If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go.
I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I wrote a lot of Rust, but it definitely was a slow to author language. Claude helps me produce it as fast as I can think. I spend most of my time reviewing the code and making small fixes and refactors. It's great.
While Rust is excellent, you must acknowledge that Rust has issues with compilation time. It also has a steep learning curve (especially around lifetimes.) It's much too early to say Rust is the "final" language, especially since AI is driving a huge shift in thinking right now.
I used to think that I would never write C code again, but when I decided recently to build something that would run on ESP32 chips, I realized there wasn't any good reason for me to use Rust yet. ESP-IDF is built on C and I can write C code just fine. C compiles quickly, it's a very simple language on the surface, and as long as you minimize the use of dynamic memory allocation and other pitfalls, it's reliable.
If you're programming for ESP, then embassy is the way to go in most cases. You don't need to learn much about lifetimes in most of the application code. Steep learning curve people refer it is "thing blow up at compile time vs runtime." It's easy to write JS or C that passes all tests and compiles and then wonderful blows up when you start using it. It just forces you to learn things you need to know at IMO right now.
My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.
> My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.
We're working on that and it should get better soonish. We're working on shared caches, as well as pruning of old cached builds of dependencies that are unlikely to be reused in a future build.
And my USB-DOS project includes it, for a complete environment you can boot and run direct from USB, without installation, on any PC which supports legacy boot.
Around COVID lockdown #1 I did a lot more walking outside, pushing a pram and listening to music on headphones.
For years I'd been using cheap wired headphones from exhibition swag and things.
I put a pair through the washing machine. Top tip: this is really not good for them.
I looked online and found I could buy a brand new pair of my preferred Sony in-ear ones for $NotALot.
I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
They cost the equivalent of $20 (about £15) and the sound is amazing.
The point being here: because all the fashion-victims want Bluetooth, wired headphones have got really cheap and top quality premium grade ones cost less than a modest meal, or alternatively perhaps, less than I could easily drink in beer while listening to 1 CD or album.
Shun wireless. Go back to wired. Get an adaptor if your phone doesn't have a socket. You can get really good earphones for very little money now, they never need charging, never go flat, never need pairing, are compatible with every OS able to play sound, and they come with a handy tool to stop them falling out and you losing them, called "a cable".
Also: the microphone is great as well. I've recorded podcasts with them. The quality is way better than my £300 over-ear sound-cancelling premium Bluetooth headset, which I now only use while onboard aeroplanes.
Sorry for the slow reply. I've looked and there doesn't seem to be any way to tell.
I've used them regularly for about 5 or 6 years now and the paint is wearing off. The only readable markings are the [L] and [R] indications for which goes in which year.
Nickel/neodynium bass drivers, quite large and chunky compared to cheaper Sony 'phones. The cables go into a separate fat little cylinder to which the earbud itself is permanently attached at a fixed angle.
However, they're not noticeable in the ear at all and they're very comfy to wear.
These are listed at £40 now but before the recent burst of inflation I think about half that is plausible.
> If I wanted to change most MS stuff, like Office, I could grab the COM object out of a registry, and override it with mine
This goes back a very long time -- at least to the Windows 3.0 timeframe.
The IBM-only 32-bit OS/2 2.0 came out around the same time as Windows 3.1.
OS/2 2 could run Windows 3 inside what was effectively a VM (a decade before true VMs came to the x86 platform), running the Microsoft code on top of OS/2's built-in DOS emulator.
I remember an IBM person objecting to a journalist saying "so you have access to the Windows source code, and you patch it to run under OS/2?"
Reportedly, the IBM engineer looked a bit pained and said "we don't patch it -- we superclass it in memory to make it a good citizen, well-behaved inside OS/2's protected mode."
(It is over 30Y ago so forgive me if I am not verbatim.)
This was subsequently demonstrated to be true rather than a marketing claim. OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 included a "WinOS2" environment. OS/2 Warp 3 made this an option: it was sold in 2 versions, one with a blue box which contained a Windows 3.1 environment, and one with a red box which did not contain WinOS2 but could be installed on top of an existing Windows 3.1 system and then took over the entire Windows environment, complete with all your installed apps, and ran that inside OS/2.
So you kept all your installed 16-bit apps and settings but got a new 32-bit OS with full memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking as well.
Bear in mind that Windows has not activation mechanism then, so you could copy a complete Windows 3.x installation onto a new PC, change some drivers and it just worked without complaint.
So you could buy a new high-end 486 PC, copy Windows off your old 386, install OS/2 Warp over the top and have a whole new OS with all your apps and their files still running.
This was amazingly radical stuff in the first half of the 1990s.
They invested huge amount of resources to make sure it is backward compatible in NT, to the disagreement of David Cutler. There is a NTVDM extended with WoW for Windows 16-bit, AFAIK. I have a copy of leaked source code of NT 3.5 but I'm not good enough to understand the code. Also probably modern VMs such as DOSBOX do a better job emulating 16-bit stuffs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47150723
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148292
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142500 (1 comment)
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