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.
    46
  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!
    44
  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.
    37
  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 .
    36
  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.
    34
  6. 16:00 The infamous power button, located right where you might expect to find an eject button on non-Mac machines...!
    25
  7. 12:36 No need to worry about DIP switches, IRQs or any of that nonsense. Plug-and-play! In 1987!
    23
  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.
    22
  9. 2:59 OS/2 for PowerPC never shipped. In fact, this is the first I heard that it ever existed.
    19
  10. 4:22 That GUI is called “CDE”. I remember using it on DEC Alphas.
    18
  11. Too dependent on specific hardware features, which meant the architecture could not evolve without breaking all the software.
    14
  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.
    14
  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.
    14
  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.
    12
  15. 7:25 No 640K limit! No extended/expanded RAM nonsense! Completely uniform linear address space!
    10
  16. 25:05 That never happened. Aren’t you glad?
    10
  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.
    10
  18. It’s like the whole of reality itself has a liberal bias...
    9
  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.
    9
  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.
    9
  21. The Canon Cat was the most faithful incarnation of Raskin’s original idea. Guess what--it didn’t sell...
    8
  22. 19:10 Print is right next to the Delete button!
    8
  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.
    8
  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.
    8
  25. 18:15 Notice it’s Windows NT, not 9x. Silicon Graphics was starting to feel the pain at this point.
    8
  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.
    8
  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.
    8
  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.
    8
  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.
    7
  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.
    7
  31. 5:02 Cairo never made it to production quality.
    7
  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.
    6
  33.  @kyle8952  For example, Amiga apps could not adapt to higher-resolution screens, the way they could on the Mac.
    6
  34. 21:42 The legendary LightWave!
    6
  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.
    6
  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.)
    6
  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.
    6
  38. 08:45 Did he just switch it off and on again? Didn’t they have the Programmer’s Switch installed? Just hit reset!
    6
  39. “Unix” is a trademark. Apple has licensed the trademark, Linux hasn’t. Linux matters more than Unix nowadays, anyway.
    6
  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.
    5
  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.
    5
  42. 0:26 “Who is this man, and why is he in your office?” “What man?” (Makes note on pad.)
    5
  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...
    5
  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.
    5
  45. 8:09 The term is “onionskin”.
    5
  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.
    5
  47. Remember, this was back when the DOS/Windows world was still struggling with the 640K limit.
    5
  48. If Kildall had lived just a few years longer, he would likely have invested in Linux.
    5
  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.
    5
  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?
    5