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

  1. 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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  2. 23:53 And then ... there was PageMaker.
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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7.  @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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. Unix was never “open source”. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
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  12. 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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  13. 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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  14. 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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  15. 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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  16. 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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  17. 15:01 QuickDraw 3D -- anybody still remember that?
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  18. 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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  19. 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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  20.  @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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  21. 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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  22. 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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  23. 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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  24. 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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  25. 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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  26. Appropriate for somebody in the “Cranial Correction” industry, don’t you think ...
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  27. 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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  28. 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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  29. 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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  30. 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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  31. 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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  32.  @SeaJay_Oceans  The first Amiga came out in 1985, and did not significantly improve from that.
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  33. 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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  34. 21:27 Cough “fragile-base-class problem” cough
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  35. The RetroBytes channel did a retrospective on ARCnet just a couple of months ago.
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  36. 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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  37. 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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  38. 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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  39. 12:45 Ward Christensen — created XMODEM, and it seems also the first BBS.
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  40. 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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  41. 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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  42. 19:37 These flashy effects became the hallmark of the amateur video maker. Professionals would essentially never use them.
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  43. Sometimes these shows are repeated, except that the “Random Access” news section gets replaced.
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  44. @Knobcore Considering I said “hardware limitations”, not “software” ...
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  45. 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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  46. If it really were only 1%, Microsoft would not be working so feverishly to add a Linux interface to Windows.
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  47. 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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  48. 13:59 “Environment map” -- term used but not explained. Should perhaps have said “picture of the surroundings”.
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  49. 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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  50. 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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