Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Computer Chronicles" channel.

  1. 7:33 Actually only 170K of the ROM was used. The other 80K had digitized pictures of the crew that created the product. To see the slideshow of the pictures, hit the interrupt button and, and the “>” prompt, type “G 41D89A”. Note that the only way to stop the slideshow is to reboot the machine.
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  2. 1:52 As a software guy, I resent the idea that a ground-breaking OS with integrated graphics engine could not be “technological innovation”. Remember, this thing let you interact in real-time with on-screen drawn images using just a CPU running at 7.8MHz, with no hardware acceleration!
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  3. 7:27 If you watch the SF film The Last Starfighter which came out this same year, its CG is just streets ahead of anything from around the same time. These were rendered on a Cray X-MP super. The cost of the computing time was a third of the entire movie budget, and the result took up a similar portion of the movie running time.
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  4. 13:53 “Open source code”? Never. In fact, AT&T sued the BSD people just a few years later over their inadvertent inclusion of a few lines of Unix source .
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  5. 22:53 This was true. Deliberate vendor-introduced incompatibilities between different Unix platforms was what killed it. But it also allowed Linux to step into the breach. And conquer the entire computing world.
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  6. 16:00 The infamous power button, located right where you might expect to find an eject button on non-Mac machines...!
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  7. 12:36 No need to worry about DIP switches, IRQs or any of that nonsense. Plug-and-play! In 1987!
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  8. 20:37 Interprocess communication I thought would be a big one: the ability to pipe data directly between running processes, rather than having to go through temporary files.
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  9. 2:59 OS/2 for PowerPC never shipped. In fact, this is the first I heard that it ever existed.
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  10. 4:22 That GUI is called “CDE”. I remember using it on DEC Alphas.
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  11. Too dependent on specific hardware features, which meant the architecture could not evolve without breaking all the software.
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  12. 7:22 “Personal” because it was a cheap enough purchase (5 figure price tag) to be OK’d by the head of an engineering department.
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  13. 18:43 The first LaserWriter we got, took so long to image graphics pages, that I named it “Deep Thought”. It was built around the legendary Canon LBP-CX engine, also used in HP LaserJets of the time. That thing could really cope with abuse--i.e. high print loads.
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  14. They were comparing like with like, which sounds completely fair to me. Note that Intel’s Pentium 60 and 66 processors were pretty crap. The 90MHz chips they brought out the following year were the real killers that fought back against PowerPC.
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  15. 7:25 No 640K limit! No extended/expanded RAM nonsense! Completely uniform linear address space!
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  16. 25:05 That never happened. Aren’t you glad?
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  17. 2:45 The RT/PC was such an absymal performer, the joke was that “RT” stood for “Reduced Technology”*. Just a few years later, though, IBM came out with its POWER architecture, and then the world really stood up and took notice. *Echoed also in Microsoft’s more recent cut-down “Windows RT” OS.
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  18. It’s like the whole of reality itself has a liberal bias...
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  19. The Toaster really sparked a big wave of budget analog video production. However, by about five years after this, video was moving to digital, and the Amiga couldn’t really keep up. The Video Toaster Flyer was never quite as successful as the original Toaster.
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  20. 21:34 Having lots of on-chip registers was the single biggest thing, in my view. But that was already enough to create a big headache for code compatibility.
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  21. The Canon Cat was the most faithful incarnation of Raskin’s original idea. Guess what--it didn’t sell...
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  22. 19:10 Print is right next to the Delete button!
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  23. 21:01 For those too young to know, “POKE” was a BASIC command to directly set the value of an arbitrary memory location. This was commonly used to control low-level machine features like display modes and colours, but if you poked the wrong location, you could easily corrupt some important part of system memory, and the only way out would be to reboot.
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  24. 23:00 I remember discussing the 386SX chip with colleagues. They saw it as a waste of time, but being the software guy, I pointed out how this was an opportunity to get rid of the ball-and-chain that was the 286 chip and start writing code for a linear 32-bit address space.
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  25. 18:15 Notice it’s Windows NT, not 9x. Silicon Graphics was starting to feel the pain at this point.
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  26. But there were AT compatibles from other manufacturers, and the PS/2 line did include 80286-based machines in its lineup for a while longer.
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  27. 11:42 The original LaserWriter (Canon LBP-CX engine) looked great, until you asked it to print a full page of black. Then you saw that it was really grey.
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  28. 22:21 Unfortunately the Pentium Pro did poorly on 16-bit workloads. And since the Windows world was still largely stuck in 16 bits at this point, it made the new 32-bit chip look bad.
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  29. 09:35 “Short-term product” that turned out to be the future of Windows. While OS/2 receded from the limelight into a niche, it was the ability to multitask existing DOS programs that really drove the marketplace to embrace Windows. GUI programs specifically written for Windows came later.
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  30. 15:16 This was a sore point with other makers of Microsoft*-compatible PCs: IBM had the sole right to sell “OS/2 Extended Edition”, which came with a built-in relational DBMS, which other vendors did not. *Even back then, the standard for compatibility was not any product from IBM, but Microsoft Flight Simulator. So from very early on, it was not IBM that defined what “compatible” meant, but Microsoft.
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  31. 5:02 Cairo never made it to production quality.
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  32. It took a giant leap forward, then stood still as other caught up and surpassed it. The Video Toaster was groundbreaking for analog video, but the Amiga never made the transition to digital video. LightWave 3D was (for its time) a powerful 3D tool, but the Amiga hardware was never very good for 3D work.
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  33.  @kyle8952  For example, Amiga apps could not adapt to higher-resolution screens, the way they could on the Mac.
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  34. 21:42 The legendary LightWave!
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  35. Hard to believe there was a time when people reflexively looked to IBM for leadership on all things computing-related ... Just a couple of years after this, their introduction of the PS/2 range demonstrated quite clearly the shrinking limits of their market control.
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  36. 25:16 Why not KERMIT? One of the early highly-regarded open-source projects, with implementations of a common file-transfer protocol available for just about every platform under the sun -- for free! (Yes, I was using it to move files between disparate micros as part of my user-support job back then.)
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  37. This was also the beginning of the “white box” industry, where companies in various markets would import cheap but good-quality machines from no-name Taiwanese manufacturers and sell them locally under their own brand names.
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  38. 08:45 Did he just switch it off and on again? Didn’t they have the Programmer’s Switch installed? Just hit reset!
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  39. “Unix” is a trademark. Apple has licensed the trademark, Linux hasn’t. Linux matters more than Unix nowadays, anyway.
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  40. The Toaster was both enabled by the Amiga hardware and held back by it. It was NTSC-only, which made use in international markets difficult. And it came along at what was the tail end of the analog-video era, soon to be replaced by digital operation. Which the Amiga was not good at.
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  41. Remember, Photoshop wasn’t out yet. That came along in 1990, I believe. There were also rivals, like Letraset ImageStudio, and SuperPaint from Silicon Beach — all now extinct.
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  42. 0:26 “Who is this man, and why is he in your office?” “What man?” (Makes note on pad.)
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  43. 1:37 Ah, ReadySetGo. I preferred that to PageMaker and QuarkXPress, because of one neat little feature: each tab stop not only had a position, it also had a width. That meant that you just had to tab while typing text, and you automatically got a block of text which had inset margins on both sides. I’ve never seen that in any other package since...
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  44. 11:14 Some of those early colour printers did multipass printing. That meant that the paper had to go through the mechanism 3 or 4 times, once for each colour. To ensure that the separate passes were properly aligned, the paper-feed mechanism had to keep a ferociously tight hold on the paper. This meant that paper jams could be fun. If the paper got caught on some internal obstacle, the feed mechanism would not let leave it behind, but would simply rip it to pieces and continue feeding it through.
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  45. 8:09 The term is “onionskin”.
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  46. 10:35 One important difference, which still remains true to this day, is that on Unix and Linux systems, process creation is carefully designed to be a very low-overhead operation. Thus, a shell script can spawn any number of processes to implement the stages of a pipeline, run concurrent background tasks etc, and do so quickly and easily. Whereas on other common systems, including Windows, process creation remains expensive and complicated. Thus, when software originally developed on Linux is ported to Windows, it tends to work less well and less reliably for this among other reasons. Even the Mac, supposedly a Unix system, has had performance issues with multitasking.
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  47. Remember, this was back when the DOS/Windows world was still struggling with the 640K limit.
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  48. If Kildall had lived just a few years longer, he would likely have invested in Linux.
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  49. 15:58 “six-point-two” I believe meant “LU 6.2”, which was IBM’s standard for peer-to-peer networking. Its overall networking architecture was called “SNA”, and already went back decades by this point. But it had always been hierarchical-based, with a centralized mainframe controlling everything. But everybody else was favouring the peer-to-peer paradigm, to the point where even IBM realized it had to get in on the act.
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  50. 27:44 Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth by Adobe. But in fact that never came to pass. Microsoft licensed its newly-acquired PostScript clone to Apple, in return for which it got access to TrueType. One of them turned out to be spectacularly successful, the other was never heard from again. Guess which company got the better deal?
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  51. 23:41 I remember thinking as much at the time (and telling everybody who would listen): when OS/2 finally shipped, it was a 16-bit OS in a world which was already firmly moving to 32-bit hardware. It was too little, too late.
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  52. 23:53 And then ... there was PageMaker.
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  53. Windows NT had full multitasking from the beginning. Its main architect, Dave Cutler, had already been responsible for two major multitasking OS architectures--RSX and VMS--for his previous employer, DEC.
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  54. 17:54 What seems to have happened is that FORTRAN has evolved to include features to take advantage of vector units and highly-parallel processing.
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  55. 2:35 Tog! Long-time UI guy. Ran the “Ask Tog” column in one of Apple’s developer publications, and I have the book of his compiled columns.
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  56. The Video Toaster was groundbreaking, but it was analog-only. Within just a few years, video production would move to digital, and leave the Toaster behind. Apple’s QuickTime was pretty cool: from the beginning it was supposed to be a generalized architecture for dealing with time-based data, i.e. not just audio and video. There were options for MIDI and text tracks, and custom media handlers that programmers could create. Unfortunately, the suits decided that they had to monetize this somehow. So the “QuickTime Pro” thing came in, and it all went downhill from there.
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  57.  @rabidbigdog  We know what happened to the Amiga. Its hardware was ground-breaking, but then it could not progress, because too much of the third-party software was making assumptions about that hardware, and any meaningful enhancements would break them. This is what happens when you lack a software abstraction layer. Remember that Radius was able to build products for the Mac that, for the most part, worked with existing software.
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  58. 22:31 Cyber Promotions — featuring Sanford (“Spamford”) Wallace, the spam king! Yes folks, spam was still a new thing, then. And this guy was not only a pioneer, he pioneered it big. Even after repeated court verdicts and penalties and injunctions against him, he kept popping up again and again, under different names and locations, bombarding the world’s hapless email users with unwanted crap. Seems he just couldn’t give up the spam habit.
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  59. 20:34 Chromosaurus is a classic piece of early CG. But like all CG, there are cheats involved. The mirror-reflectiveness of the dinosaurs’ skins looks like it is ray-traced, but it’s not. It’s a simpler (and less CPU-intensive) technique called “environment mapping”. The giveaway is that the reflections only show the surrounding static landscape, the dinosaurs themselves are not reflected in each other. Still, ground-breaking for its time.
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  60. 6:49 Worth also mentioning: SQUARE PIXELS! Unlike EGA, VGA finally offered a mode where the pixel density was the same in both the X- and Y-directions. So if you drew a circle, it looked like a circle on-screen, not an ellipse.
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  61. Unix was never “open source”. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
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  62. 22:16 Luckily, that couldn’t happen, because an important restriction feature of MultiFinder is that you could not launch more than one instance of an application at the same time. I forget what happened in pre-System-7 days, if you tried to double-click a document belonging to an already-running application; maybe the Finder just threw up an error message. System 7 added the “AppleEvent” mechanism, and running apps that supported this would get a notification that they were being asked to open another document.
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  63. 6:25 I feel there was a missed opportunity there. As a minicomputer guy at the time (DEC PDP-11, then VAX), the one revolutionary new thing that the micros brought to the table was being able to access the video memory directly from the CPU. This mean instant full-screen updates, allowing a level of interactivity beyond anything a bigger and more powerful mini could manage by accessing text terminals through anemic serial lines. But there was no hardware-independent way of accessing the video RAM. And when the display hardware became capable of graphics, this hardware dependence grew even worse. Imagine if CP/M had added another layer above the BDOS—call it the “BVOS”, the “Basic Video Output System”—to abstract away the details of the display hardware, allowing full-screen and even graphical apps to be portable across different machines, they could have stolen a big march on the Apple Macintosh.
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  64. 20:43 Not long after this, I think it was, one major US university was about to choose to buy a Fujitsu super, until Government pressure made them change their minds and go back to a good old all-American Cray instead.
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  65. George’s questions are focusing on two main points: one is that the online services were notorious at the time for being overloaded and slow to respond at peak times, and the other is the bewildering inconsistency of command and navigation conventions between different services. I don’t think they really solved either problem. Before another ten years were up, they were rendered obsolete by the Internet and its “killer apps”: email and the World Wide Web.
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  66. 21:44 Which is what happened: in the latter 80s, the Unix workstation makers moved en masse to RISC architectures, and they found quite a profitable market for about another decade in the scientific/technical/CG area ... until Windows NT came along and wiped them out.
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  67. 15:01 QuickDraw 3D -- anybody still remember that?
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  68. 12:49 With X.25, it wasn’t time, the charge was per data packet. Something like a few cents per 64K as I recall. That can add up to big bucks pretty quickly.
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  69. 27:04 Unix workstations were still Motorola-based at this point. I think the RISC revolution really kicked in the following year.
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  70.  @jameswebb5080  But the apps would not be compatible. Also consider that the Video Toaster, for example, only came in an NTSC version--it never was able to work with PAL. All down to hardware limitations of the Amiga architecture.
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  71. 11:20 That was the theory. Right from the beginning, Ethernet would attract criticism for its collision-based approach. To most communications engineers, it just sounded wrong--too lackadaisical, too quick-and-dirty. Something with an explicit TDM schedule like Token-Ring just has to be more efficient right? And yet, in the real world, the price/performance of Ethernet beat the competition every time. Around this time (the mid-1980s), big manufacturing corporations like General Motors and Boeing put their marketing muscle behind a protocol called “MAP” (“Manufacturing Automation Protocol”) which was built on IEEE 802.4 Token Bus connections (Token Ring was standardized as 802.5). Yet that never went into widespread production, as even its own biggest backers found that 802.3 (Ethernet) gave perfectly acceptable performance in the very situations where they said they needed absolutely predictable latencies.
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  72. 24:55 Lotus cosies up with IBM, just as the latter is starting to slide from its peak in control of the market. So it goes on to create 1-2-3/M (I think it was called) for IBM’s mainframes, and also 1-2-3/G, the version with the GUI, but for OS/2, not for Windows. This leaves the Windows market, when it starts to take off not long after this, wide open for Microsoft to dominate.
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  73. 23:43 Remember, these were the days before PDF became wildly popular. It seems Farallon’s DiskPaper never made it out of beta. Soon after, Apple introduced its own proprietary DocViewer format, which I remember being used heavily for developer docs for some years. And then, of course, PDF took over everything.
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  74. The Raspberry Pi was developed in direct recognition of the fact that most “personal” computers nowadays are far less welcoming of fiddling and poking under the hood than systems of those days. It encourages both software and hardware experimentation: the lower hardware cost makes hardware-type mistakes (like blowing up components on the motherboard) somewhat less expensive. ;)
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  75. 9:42 DOS 3.3 was the version where the disk error prompt was changed from “Abort, Retry, Ignore?” to “Abort, Retry, Fail?”. PC Magazine adopted the new prompt as the title of their column of tales about hilarious screwups involving computers.
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  76. Appropriate for somebody in the “Cranial Correction” industry, don’t you think ...
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  77. 6:09 “easy” “costly”. The licensing charges IBM was demanding for Micro Channel were best described as “punitive”. This was IBM’s last-gasp attempt to reclaim some dominance over the PC world. It partially succeeded, but in a way it also hastened their decline.
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  78. Apple’s marketing department could never figure it out. It didn’t fit into any conventional software categories. That kind of thing makes certain management types nervous.
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  79. Back in 1984 when IBM introduced the PC/AT, it promised that it would release an OS to take advantage of the protected-mode capabilities of the 80286 processor. By the time OS/2 came out in 1987, the Microsoft*-compatible world was already moving to 32-bit 80386 processors, and nobody really cared about a major new OS for the 80286 any more. Nevertheless, that initial version of OS/2 was very much 16-bit, not 32-bit. That was probably a fatal mistake. *because it was Microsoft software (specifically, Flight Simulator) that set the standard for compatibility, not anything from IBM.
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  80. 20:24 One area where I think the PostScript clones were still at a disadvantage at this point was over font rendering. Adobe was still keeping its Type 1 font format a secret, along with its special hinting algorithms for minimizing irregularities in glyph placement and shaping at typical resolutions like 300dpi and lower. The clones wouldn’t catch up to that for a few more years.
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  81. The 1980s superminis and Unix workstations were certainly way ahead of MS-DOS and CP/M: multitasking, memory protection and advanced memory-management capabilities, networking, linear 32-bit address spaces, and no silly single-character device names.
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  82.  @SeaJay_Oceans  The first Amiga came out in 1985, and did not significantly improve from that.
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  83. The supposed advantages of Token-Ring over Ethernet turned out to be more theoretical than practical. Ethernet won the price/performance battle every time.
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  84. 21:27 Cough “fragile-base-class problem” cough
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  85. The RetroBytes channel did a retrospective on ARCnet just a couple of months ago.
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  86. 6:00 It was going to run on a variety of platforms. But most of that was soon abandoned. Proprietary software finds it very difficult (and expensive) to be portable.
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  87. 7:08 Ah, listen to the sound of those old single-density floppy drives. Much more musical than the “uh-uh-uh” of the double-density ones that replaced them the following year...
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  88. 4:06 In the 1970s and early 1980s, you had programmable calculators. All that went away with the coming of the PC. But now you have the odd situation where somebody has a powerful computer in front of them, and yet will still resort to a separate calculator device to work out some numbers.
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  89. 12:45 Ward Christensen — created XMODEM, and it seems also the first BBS.
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  90. 24:24 Well, the bombshell PS/2 line would appear a few short months later. Or, it would turn out to be a bombshell for the market in some ways, less so in other ways.
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  91. 1:20 No it isn’t -- only if the copies are unauthorized. This kind of fudging of the truth is typical of all the “piracy” hysteria.
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  92. 19:37 These flashy effects became the hallmark of the amateur video maker. Professionals would essentially never use them.
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  93. Sometimes these shows are repeated, except that the “Random Access” news section gets replaced.
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  94. @Knobcore Considering I said “hardware limitations”, not “software” ...
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  95. I recall Bill Atkinson saying he had an agreement with Apple that, if it ever stopped offering HyperCard, the rights would revert back to him. Because some people were nervous right from the beginning about committing resources to it, if Apple should decide to give up and discontinue it. I wonder what happened with that agreement ...
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  96. If it really were only 1%, Microsoft would not be working so feverishly to add a Linux interface to Windows.
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  97. Some supers today use programmable GPUs, too. How high do you think your gaming rig would score on a list of the world's top supers https://www.top500.org/ ? Wouldn’t make it anywhere near the list...
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  98. 13:59 “Environment map” -- term used but not explained. Should perhaps have said “picture of the surroundings”.
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  99. A standard has to be open, so that others can copy it. The Amiga hardware took a giant leap forward, then stood still as others caught up, and then overtook it. It never had a good software layer, like the Macintosh, that was capable of adapting to newer hardware.
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  100. And it was only NTSC analog video editing. It couldn’t cope with PAL, for example. And the digital transition pretty much left it behind.
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  101. 19:41 Me too, matey.
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  102. 6:40 Netware Lite ... at this point I don’t think Microsoft Windows had built-in peer-to-peer file sharing. Apple’s System 7 (introduced earlier this same year) did.
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  103. 24:11 I knew it would get mentioned at some point.
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  104. 17:55 MultiFinder was very useful, but it was such a hack. Windows belonging to different applications were kept in separate “layers”, and only those belonging to the foreground application could be moved/resized/interacted with. The ones in the background were effectively just painted onto the desktop, not real windows at all. Interestingly, this “layer” concept seemed to carry over to some extent to OS X, which you’d think, being a true multitasking OS, wouldn’t be bound by such obsolete restrictions. While OS X let you interleave windows belonging to different applications, it had this weird quirk where, when you closed the frontmost window, the next window to come to the front would come from the same application (if there was such a window), in preference to one from another application, even if the latter was next in stacking order. I think this limitation still exists in OS X/macOS today.
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  105. VNC can tunnel over an SSH connection. X2Go can do that as well.
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  106. 2:15 Whaddaya know, today having multiple phone companies is the norm, but the ability to talk to people regardless of which network they (or you) are on is taken for granted, thanks to something called “common standards”. That’s not something that private companies like to adopt on their own, they need Government regulators to push them.
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  107. 16:37 “Business applications” which nowadays involve access to SQL databases, for example. Which means having good string facilities for dynamically generating SQL statements. Which COBOL is lousy at.
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  108. 26:50 A follow-on to their previous outliner, called “ThinkTank” if I recall rightly. Nobody seems to use outliners any more. At one point their function was rolled into some word processors. But I think even that has disappeared.
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  109. 10:50 Ah, I remember that Adobe Illustrator demo disk, with the Brandenburg 6th soundtrack ... and my first exposure to interactive Bézier curves ...
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  110. 20:50 What’s the bet the encryption services were provided by Crypto AG, with secret backdoors under the control of the 🇺🇸CIA and the 🇩🇪FIS?
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  111. 4:38 In other words, the whole stupid Star Wars program took money away from Hubble and just threw it away. Well, it did finally get into space a few years later ... only for us to discover that infamous mirror problem.
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  112. 12:53 Not only founded SETI, he also created the (in)famous Drake Equation.
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  113. Ted Nelson has been working on his “Project Xanadu” for decades. I don’t think it’s reached production quality yet.
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  114. 14:48 Ah, the Poseion Adventure ...
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  115. The 486 had built-in floating point. Then Intel got the bright idea of getting some extra revenue out of 486 chips that had defective floating-point units, that would have been rejected, by selling them as “486SX” chips. Machines with these had an extra empty socket where you could put in a “487SX”, which was a variant of a full-function 486 that disabled the defective onboard 486SX and became your replacement CPU.
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  116. This is a standard part of the pace of the show. It could be because they wanted to minimize the need to shoot unused footage to keep costs down. This was not exactly a big-budget production.
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  117. Ah, the clip art: black-and-white or grainy it was, yet it had a definite style about it.
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  118.  @gblargg  That’s why I wrote GrainyPy, so you can experiment with different dithering algorithms (pattern dither, diffusion dither), in black-and-white and colour.
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  119. I watch Al Jazeera. They have local correspondents all over the world.
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  120. 3:00 Adobe Illustrator was breathtaking when I first saw it in 1988. And the demo disk had Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg on it, which was also pretty cool. However, techno-geek that I am, I soon discovered that it would not let you easily change the type of a control point between a smooth and corner join. When Aldus FreeHand came out soon after, it did have that feature, so I preferred it. Then, sometime in the 1990s, Adobe acquired Aldus, and Macromedia along the way as well. It kept PageMaker and Flash, and possibly also Fontographer, but it got rid of FreeHand. These days, I use Inkscape. Which has all these features, and more. And interoperates nicely with other tools, like GIMP and Blender.
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  121. Not just software, but hardware. “Pixar” was short for “Pixel Array”. The company took its name from its one and only hardware product, which it didn’t even sell for that long.
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  122. Certain computer OSes try to hide the fact that you are using a computer at all. Stay away from them, and there is still plenty of fun to be had.
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  123. 25:15 “Juggler” was the code name. It was based on technology licensed from, and originally developed by Apple luminary Andy Hertzeld, which he released as “Servant”. When the Apple product finally shipped, it had the much less spicy (and more confusing) name of “MultiFinder”. It wasn’t a new OS, it was an addon to the OS.
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  124. 22:36 Even today, page-layout apps still exist as a category separate from word processors. Beyond that, the markup-based systems (troff/groff, Tex/Latex) which were supposed to be obsoleted by the WYSIWYG revolution still exist and still thrive today.
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  125. We had entire buildings cabled with PhoneNet, using a VAX/VMS machine to offer AppleTalk AFP (AppleShare-compatible) file sharing and printer access via AppleTalk PAP (Printer Access Protocol). The Mac clients also had TCP/IP access via MacTCP over the same cabling. This was when Ethernet was still too expensive to run to every desktop.
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  126. Stuart on his own. Gary busy, George and Jan not available to stand in for him? Or Jan deciding she’d had enough of being, not second fiddle, but third fiddle?
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  127. 7:11 So IBM was doing the whole patent-protection racket before Microsoft: claim that your patents are being infringed, but never say which ones. Naturally any legal settlements will also keep this information secret.
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  128. 5:19 So this one was “Navier” ... was the other one “Stokes”?
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  129. RSG was the only program I came across where tab stops had a width. That meant you could you could tab to create a paragraph that was indented on both sides.
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  130. 27:12 LA traffic burn?!?
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  131. “Turnipseed” is a real name. I looked her up online, found a small handful of computer game credits from the early 1990s, that was it.
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  132. Excel 1.x was Mac-only. The first Windows version was 2.2, if I recall rightly. Microsoft had a longtime habit of screwing up something somewhere. The 1.x versions of Excel only used the bottom 20 bits of each address--I think they used the leftover 12 bits for some odd purposes internal to the application. This caused problems on Macs with multiple megabytes of RAM, where more than one app was loaded under MultiFinder: Apple had to include special code to check for Excel, and ensure it was always loaded at the bottom of RAM.
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  133.  @jonathanvanier  You have to admit, the whole idea of tying the GUI inextricably into the OS kernel is one that should have been left behind in the 1990s.
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  134. 16:08 Premiere was originally called “ReelTime”. It was written by Randy Ubillos at SuperMac, and bundled with the VideoSpigot as you see here. Then SuperMac transferred ownership (and the developer) to Adobe, who renamed the product Premiere. I had the version of the VideoSpigot for the Mac LC. I think it could capture 160×120 resolution at about 15fps, Ah, in those days we could only dream of 320×240 resolution ...
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  135. The Web didn’t exist back then.
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  136. 24:50 Reference to John Sculley moving from Pepsi to boss of Apple.
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  137. 17:57 Alvy Ray Smith — one of the grand old pioneers of computer graphics. Quote: “a pixel is not a little square”.
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  138. 20:50 Oops, the player software has failed to keep the video overlay aligned with the GUI window ...
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  139. 10:00 I don’t think HP even got as far as shipping a DDL-speaking printer. They caved to the industry trend towards PostScript, I think not long after this.
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  140. 26:14 I had one of those—or a very similar model. I originally bought it to work with an Apple Mac, and was gratified to find it had good Linux driver support, too. On second thoughts, I think mine was the 900, not the 980. It certainly didn’t have double-sided printing capability.
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  141. 21:18 Remember, he’s talking Pentium 60/66, which were pretty bad. However, the following year, I think it was, the Pentium 90 came out, with much better performance and much lower power consumption, and that completely changed the game.
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  142. “Royal” was Apple’s code-name for TrueType.
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  143. 7:31 The DEC Alpha was a 64-bit processor. But NT could only run it with 32-bit addresses (“TASO” mode). The only full 64-bit OSes to run on the Alpha were DEC’s own Unix, and Linux.
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  144. 19:17 The delay between the camera operator’s instructions and the camera responding meant that, in all the previous liftoffs from the Moon, the camera looked up too late, and failed to track the ascent stage properly. This was the last chance. The operator had to work out how many seconds in advance to issue the elevate-camera command, and hope that it would coincide with the actual liftoff. This time, it did.
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  145. 24:13 Very possibly the PowerBook 100? Very well received, unfortunately had to be discontinued due to some serious miscommunication between Sony and Apple over manufacturing cost ...
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  146. 09:15 “Data-handling” and “file-manipulating” firmly built around the concepts of fixed-length fields and records, and ISAM files. These days “data-handling” and “file-manipulation” are more descriptive of what you might do in Perl or Python. They mainly involve free-format lines and text-heavy data, where you have to recognize patterns and delimiters rather than count columns.
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  147.  @tyeman3039  Sounds like a cross between “Mosaic” and “Prozac” ...
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  148. 6:04 Quirky PageMaker feature: when you have something selected that the text tool applies to, then any settings changes you make apply to that text. If you have nothing appropriate selected, then you are changing the text defaults!
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  149. 22:25 <blink> ... twitch
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  150. 23:35 cgi-bin in the URL ... those were the days ...
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  151. Back then, there were about 10 companies making mainframe computers worldwide. Today, all the the others are out of that business, and even IBM isn’t making much money out of them any more. It keeps shrinking and laying off swathe after swathe of staff, and I’m not sure it has had a single profitable year this century.
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  152. The “Random Access” section at the end is not a repeat.
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  153. We’re talking analog Toasters, right? Not digital “Toaster Flyers” or such? Strictly NTSC-only.
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  154. @Knobcore Precisely my point.
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  155. Linux desktops are more configurable than that. And it’s all done without needing an “object-oriented” kernel.
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  156. 18:09 They’re using an address in the 3/8 block. I think that was originally assigned to General Electric.
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  157. 7:10 Atlanta Olympics? My condolences ...
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  158. No, Windows didn’t. It wasn’t (yet) an OS, the OS was only DOS.
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  159. We have Jupyter notebooks, which let you type a few lines of Python to do interesting things — “scratchpad” programming, if you like.
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  160. In 1987, Compaq brought out a 32-bit PC. In 1988, IBM brought out OS/2, a 16-bit OS. I think Linux was indeed the first proper 32-bit OS for 386-based Microsoft-compatible machines. It came out in 1991 or so, while Microsoft’s Windows NT wasn’t ready until 1993.
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  161. The Mac II had a full 32-bit NuBus.
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  162. 3:13 That magnifying glass with a wire on it ... what purpose does that wire serve?
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  163.  @floydjohnson7888  To be fair, VNC and SSH would not have existed back in the (earlier) 1990s.
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  164. This was about the year the Acorn Archimedes came out. Remember that had an ARM chip in it which, at 8MHz and RISC-based, ran rings performance-wise around anything else in its price range. Its misfortune was that it was non-IBM-compatible ... and British.
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  165. I would say it was his personal enthusiasm for the subject matter. Remember besides DRI, he was running a startup called KnowledgeSet, to take advantage of this new CD-ROM technology (they were profiled in another Computer Chronicles episode). Hence his interest here.
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  166. 26:26 “1-800-PYX-IX-IX”. Sorry, best I could do ...
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  167. 4:42 Portable Digital Documents!? That was a QuickDraw GX thing. (A moment of silence, please, for the next-generation graphics architecture that might have been...)
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  168. 11:44 Unfortunately, Sun abandoned NeWS when X11 was standardized for Unix systems. So, from “level of confidence” to “left in the lurch” ...
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  169. 17:13 Unless the process initiates asynchronous I/O ...
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  170. I met C K Haun at an Apple developer conference in the early 1990s. He sampled his wife’s voice for a shareware game he put out. And then somehow somebody else picked up the sample and submitted it for inclusion as one of the standard System 7 beep noises.
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  171. I learned notation (classical training). But yeah, I prefer piano-roll, too.
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  172. 14:09 Poor old DOS, struggling with truncated 8-dot-3 views of long filenames ...
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  173. 5:10 The IBM PC JX — their attempt at a follow-on to the failed PC Jr. They were sufficiently nervous about its prospects to only release it in Japan and Australasia, where it soon sank without trace.
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  174. 6:36 What they did was add a new type of window, the “XWindow”. Instead of showing a card from a stack, this was totally under the control of an XCMD (which could be written in any external compiled language); the external code could respond to events in that window and draw whatever it liked. So basically they greatly extended the capabilities of HyperCard as a UI toolkit.
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  175. And then later on, in the 1990s sometime, IBM released a range of home-oriented machines called the “PS/1”. It was just as much a failure as all their other home-oriented efforts.
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  176. It was protecting real-mode DOS applications from each other, and that did work. Nobody used 80286 protected mode apart from OS/2. Linux was full 32-bit from the beginning, and also native on 64-bit architectures not long after that.
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  177. But one of the key points about COBOL was its portability between completely different machines from completely different manufacturers. So all that goes out the window once SQL comes in?
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  178. Said standard including no good capabilities for dealing with that standard business requirement called SQL, which was my point.
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  179. The move to SQL happened right through the 1980s. That’s when Oracle became a big corporation, if you remember. And when IBM brought out DB2. Older-style hierarchical and CODASYL databases rapidly became “legacy technology” at that point. As did COBOL, along with them. “you can't just "lift and shift" a COBOL application into an SQL database and expect everything to work” — precisely the point I was making, that COBOL was a poor fit for this new world.
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  180. 25:23 That overlay player window having to always be in front to hide the fact that the video overlay cannot be clipped ...
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  181. No simulation. It totally clips off the heart.
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  182. 3:21 Apple Adjustable Keyboard! (In the closed position.)
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  183. Apple would have controlled it all.
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  184. Waiting for: How to get on, off the Internet.
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  185. 10:04 Why did they use backslashes? Surely they could have copied SGML, as HTML did.
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  186. 19:21 I can’t get a four-hour difference between San Francisco and New York. How does that happen?
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  187. 3:20 Near as I can tell, Kildall’s PL/M compiler was always a cross-compiler: it never ran native on any 8-bit microprocessor. To use it, you had to have access to a big (and expensive) DEC PDP-10 machine. I think this ran the TOPS-10 OS, which was a pretty typical DEC OS. A filespec consisted of a device name, a directory part, a name part, an extension and a version number. Clearly this was the inspiration for CP/M filespec syntax: the device name (which could be multiple characters) was simplified down to a single character, the directory part and version number were omitted, the name limited to 8 characters, and the extension to 3. And aspects of that syntax were carried over to MS-DOS, and still persist in Windows to this day. Particularly the single-character drive names, which seem pretty ridiculous on modern hardware.
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  188. 14:00 Apparently Editdroid was not a success. Lucas didn’t even use it himself.
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  189. Mahjong solitaire can’t have been a new game, though, even then. The KDE version lets you choose from differently-themed tile sets and different board arrangements. I like the Egyptian-themed tiles.
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  190. 8:00 Nowadays you can do all this for free, via users’ web browsers,
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  191. with BigBlueButton.
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  192. 21:27 ERSO, the creators of the “ERSO BIOS”, commonly found in these white-box clones.
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  193. 10:24 Surprising that the MacDraw family never had the ability to handle Bézier curves, as far as I can remember. Illustrator showed the way, and other tools, including GraphicWorks/ComicWorks and Canvas from Deneba (which I bought a personal copy of) did follow that.
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  194. 12:08 “Move it away from the O’Ridgin”.”
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  195. 8:42 KStars only shows me 5 planets at that time. Could the extra “planet” have been Pluto?
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  196. CP/M only ran on Z80 and 8080/8085 chips. There were other popular microprocessors out there (like the 6800 and 6502), which it never supported. At this point, Unix was already available on machines with entirely different hardware architectures and instruction sets. So you could say that Unix portability was aiming for a much more ambitious target.
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  197. 23:42 Does it have a 14th floor? I suspect not.
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  198. 27:46 Pixar would soon be spun off and sold to Steve Jobs, to raise money for George Lucas’s divorce settlement. The company took its name from its one and only hardware product, which it only sold for a short while. Once it became economical to fit general-purpose computers with multi-megabytes of RAM, the need for special-purpose frame-buffer-type devices disappeared.
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  199. 12:00 Right on.
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  200. 13:06 Right on, again.
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  201. 28:47 Did they have any network/comms engineers at their company? Let me introduce you to this concept known as “random exponential backoff” ...
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  202. The past was full of history back then.
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  203. Xenix was running multitasking and multiuser on 8086 chips.
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  204. 9:37 I remember VideoWorks, as powerful as it was, was not taken seriously in its early days. Then, MacroMind doubled the price, renamed the product to “Director”, and suddenly it was seen as a professional-quality animation tool.
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  205. Unix was never “open source”. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
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  206. How widely was this seen, back in the day? It was made in San Mateo County, for one or two TV stations. Was it ever shown across much of the US? Somehow I doubt that.
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  207. I think he would have seen the benefit in supporting Linux, too. Even then it would have been clear that this was the only possibility for a real threat to Microsoft.
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  208. 23:05 There is room for multiple companies to compete where you have common standards that avoid vendor lock-in. Bill Gates built his business on vendor lock-in.
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  209. If you are looking for a Free Software
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  210. alternative to Painter,
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  211. try
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  212. MyPaint.
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  213. When would you say was their “time”?
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  214.  @OpenGL4ever  386, not 286. The 286 was a stupid chip that only IBM, with its bloated OS/2 offering, cared about.
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  215.  @OpenGL4ever  That success of Windows 3.0 actually started with its predecessor, Windows 2.1 a.k.a “Windows 386”. The name should give you a clue.
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  216.  @OpenGL4ever  Just do a search for “Windows 386”. I was there.
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  217. They were on a limited budget, and I guess that meant that shooting any extra footage that wasn’t going to appear in the show would add to the cost. Hence the need to keep the segments strictly within time limits.
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  218.  @halfsourlizard9319  Or better still, use one where the GUI is just a separate modular, replaceable layer, rather than something baked into an inextricable monolith.
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  219. 5:49 Actually, CU-SeeMe was originally developed at Cornell U (hence the “CU” part — geddit), and then they sold the rights to White Pine. The original codec was monochrome only, to reduce CPU usage and also keep the bandwidth down. Remember, we were talking early-to-mid-90s when that was first developed.
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  220. Buy a second-hand car. They depreciate less.
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  221. Windows still needs to run a background defragger even today.
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  222. 3:01 “Inaugural”.
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  223. 17:27 How many keys on that keyboard!?
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  224. 9:25 Why did the Internet win out over the proprietary online services? They had the content, but the Internet had the connectivity. So ultimately, the content had to go where the connectivity was. And that was the end of the high-priced online services. See also: Microsoft’s “Project Blackbird” from around this time. The original plan for MSN was that it was going to be a proprietary network, based on proprietary Microsoft tools. Even with Microsoft’s massive marketing clout, that vision completely failed to take off.
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  225. 25:05 Looks like that project fell through, and he left Apple that same year to co-found General Magic.
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  226. 18:17 Nowadays they call it a “podcast”.
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  227. HyperCard still lives on, in the form of LiveCode.
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  228. 25:41 It’s 1989, and there are still PC users stuck with the 640K RAM limit. Can you recall any other case like this, where the company brings out a 2.2 version to sell in parallel with its 3.0 version?
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  229. 27:51 “1-800-DO-MY-GUI” Heh.
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  230. I used a shareware Mac program called MIDIgraphy. I liked it so much I paid for it. Took me many years to find something just as simple to get started with on a Linux system: LMMS. Now Linux has PipeWire, which lets you interconnect different software apps in a modular fashion, all working to make music together. It can do video, too.
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  231. This was before the RISC era.
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  232. 26:57 Except there were no fractal graphics around in the 1960s. Benoit Mandelbrot only introduced fractal geometry in the 1970s.
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  233. Because Cams Control mode like 23:58 is just like “bad D rating movies”, isn’t it.
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  234. I wonder how long Paul Schindler’s resolve not to buy anything compatible with an IBM PC lasted ...
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  235. There is a saying: “it takes years to become an overnight success”. While the USA and others of that ilk were embracing “Reaganomics” and proclaiming that the Government should take a hands-off approach because it was not competent to pick winners and losers in business, the Taiwanese (and other Asians) were setting up partnerships between Government and business to invest in new industries for the long haul.
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  236. 16:00 I think at this point the “gorilla arm” effect was not yet widely known.
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  237. 17:20 I take that back. Gary hits the nail on the head.
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  238. Visicalc began on the Apple II, like he said.
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  239. 24:01 I don’t recall the 145B. Presumably it was introduced to fill the gap left by the dropping of the 100. That was a very popular model, but from what I heard, Sony gazumped Apple over the manufacturing cost (at least, Apple saw it that way), so the initial manufacturing run of 100,000 units was not renewed.
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  240. 6:46 No mention of process management and interprocess communication? Memory management? I can understand leaving out networking, as it was still early days for that.
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  241. 16:36 OK, process management comes in here, but still no IPC.
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  242. Minicomputer systems like Unix and VMS most certainly had a range of IPC mechanisms by that point.
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  243. Any OS textbook from the era would have discussed it.
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  244. 20:03 Soon as he said “Battlenet”, I thought “whatever happened to bnetd” ...
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  245. 21:32 Gosh, the text is just as badly kerned as the series’ own, presumably “professionally done” titling.
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  246. Capitalism is efficient when there is a level playing field without vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, the history of the computer history is full of instances of vendor lock-in, which has reduced the efficiency of market competition. On the bright side, most of these cases do go away eventually, so they mostly slow down innovation rather then prevent it altogether.
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  247. 25:59 When Lotus 1-2-3 3.0 finally did ship, it couldn’t fit in 640kiB of RAM, so expanded/extended memory was a must. This left a lot of existing users with older machines out in the cold, so Lotus brought out a new release of 1-2-3 2.xas well, to keep them happy.
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  248. LMMS rulez OK!
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  249. But surely all the scripts are done from templates according to a database from HR. Once the records are updated, then all the machine mappings automatically update to match.
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  250.  MichaelKingsfordGray  Wonder why Microsoft is so desperately trying to turn Windows into Linux, then.
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  251. 7:27 Nine planets ... those were the days ...
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  252. We have a few new things, like command history and editing, and tab completion. Shells like bash have also acquired new language features, like arrays and job control. But yes, the basics remain largely unchanged from that time, and even before that time.
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  253. Apple did create a Web browser around a compound-document format later, with “CyberDog” that was built on top of OpenDoc. That didn’t last long.
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  254. Microsoft tried with Windows Home Server, but that got wiped out by cheap NAS boxes running Linux.
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  255. It was a 16-bit OS, in a world that was already embracing the 32-bit 386-based machines. In other words, it was too little, too late.
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  256. Hard to believe that “baseband versus broadband” was a real controversy. In the end, the sharing of the wire was achieved by making everything digital, so the multiplexing was done at the frame/packet level, within a common transport protocol. So baseband won.
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  257. 15:28 You’re not going to reach 3K with liquid N₂, matey.
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  258. 13:32 That would have been LucasArts. I don’t think their games were a big success, since the division is now gone.
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  259.  @tilsgee  Think of KDE as a later version of CDE.
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  260. 7:00 It did draw some foundation from the minicomputer industry, though, particularly DEC machines. Natural, since CP/M was originally cross-developed on DEC machines.
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  261. 10:50 Barings ... went bust in 1995 owing to the shenanigans of one Nick Leeson.
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