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

  1. 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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  2. The past was full of history back then.
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  3. Xenix was running multitasking and multiuser on 8086 chips.
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  4. 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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  5. Unix was never “open source”. https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. If you are looking for a Free Software
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  10. alternative to Painter,
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  11. try
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  12. MyPaint.
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  13. When would you say was their “time”?
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  14.  @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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  15.  @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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  16.  @OpenGL4ever  Just do a search for “Windows 386”. I was there.
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  17. 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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  18.  @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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  19. 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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  20. Buy a second-hand car. They depreciate less.
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  21. Windows still needs to run a background defragger even today.
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  22. 3:01 “Inaugural”.
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  23. 17:27 How many keys on that keyboard!?
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  24. 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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  25. 25:05 Looks like that project fell through, and he left Apple that same year to co-found General Magic.
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  26. 18:17 Nowadays they call it a “podcast”.
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  27. HyperCard still lives on, in the form of LiveCode.
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  28. 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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  29. 27:51 “1-800-DO-MY-GUI” Heh.
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  30. 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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  31. This was before the RISC era.
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  32. 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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  33. Because Cams Control mode like 23:58 is just like “bad D rating movies”, isn’t it.
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  34. I wonder how long Paul Schindler’s resolve not to buy anything compatible with an IBM PC lasted ...
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  35. 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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  36. 16:00 I think at this point the “gorilla arm” effect was not yet widely known.
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  37. 17:20 I take that back. Gary hits the nail on the head.
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  38. Visicalc began on the Apple II, like he said.
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  39. 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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  40. 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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  41. 16:36 OK, process management comes in here, but still no IPC.
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  42. Minicomputer systems like Unix and VMS most certainly had a range of IPC mechanisms by that point.
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  43. Any OS textbook from the era would have discussed it.
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  44. 20:03 Soon as he said “Battlenet”, I thought “whatever happened to bnetd” ...
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  45. 21:32 Gosh, the text is just as badly kerned as the series’ own, presumably “professionally done” titling.
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  46. 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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  47. 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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  48. LMMS rulez OK!
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  49. 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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  50.  MichaelKingsfordGray  Wonder why Microsoft is so desperately trying to turn Windows into Linux, then.
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