mschaef

8 ms·

1.
by mschaef 6d ago
Back in 1983, my elementary school was a part of a Logo pilot program. We had a lab of Commodore 64's that I had free run of (my mom was a teacher there), and it's why I do what I do all these years later. What I find interesting
2.
by mschaef 2mo ago
Many of those pictures look like great reasons for lockout tagout.
3.
by mschaef 3mo ago
> Even 256 meg of hard drive. That would have been impressively expensive in the 80s. I only have a couple reference points around this scale: My dad's company had a system set up with a searchable index of a bunch of legal testimon
4.
by mschaef 3mo ago
> OK, but we spent a decade having to worry about this garbage, until the tooling finally caught up. This was less about tooling than it was about economics - there was 32-bit hardware available in the personal computer space in 1984, if
5.
by mschaef 3mo ago
> And this is the problem, it was very painful just to walk through a 200 KB buffer. This required compiler/runtime tricks, different selector increments in real vs protected mode, and special pointer types. Most of that could be (a
6.
by mschaef 3mo ago
That would make more sense. I was trying to imagine what sort of (custom?) hardware would accommodate that amount of memory back then. That was large storage even for mainframes the time. (The Cray 2 in the mid-1980's had 2GB, which wa
7.
by mschaef 3mo ago
I should preface this by saying I'm taking about x86 segmentation in general. On the 8086 you're right, but the 8086 can't address 2MB of memory to begin with. On the 80286 in protected mode, the situation is different in th
8.
by mschaef 3mo ago
There is no such thing as a "2MB program".... all you have is a program composed of <=64K segments, which are easy enough to fit into the hole. If you do need something approaching a 2MB block of memory, you don't need a c
9.
by mschaef 3mo ago
> I had to use it to do image processing on a 256MB image buffer back in the 1980s in assembly language.... Give me a flat 32 bit memory address space any day (e.g. MC68000 around the same time.) Huh? There were no segmented x86 machines
10.
by mschaef 3mo ago
The 8086 was a stopgap measure to accommodate the fact the iAPX432 was in the middle of turning into the disaster it did. Given the engineering resources and timelines involved in the 8086, it wasn't a bad compromise approach. > But
11.
by mschaef 3mo ago
This is a small one, but significant to me. I asked Claude to add support for multiple lights to my toy ray-tracer. It correctly added the support and then suggested adding colored lights to make it easier to diagnose. It felt more like a
12.
by mschaef 6mo ago
From the sound of it, You may know this already, but there was a 1950's era plan to do something very similar to what you imply here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...
13.
by mschaef 6mo ago
I think there are a couple questions you need to ask yourself - the first is why is it hard for you to be alone? You're the one person you're stuck living with for your entire life - it shouldn't be hard to be alone with your
14.
by mschaef 7mo ago
Agreed, re: DeMuro.... I'm long past tired of hearing how "The ____ is the ____!" I do like Tedward's videos, though. He seems a lot more honestly enthusiastic about it, and definitely has fun with the cars.
15.
by mschaef 7mo ago
That's a $125 salad spinner... I get the appeal, but it's definitely a premium product.
16.
by mschaef 8mo ago
I have half a dozen of them (including my father's from college) that I cherish, but do not use. I love the simplicity and elegance of the design. (Slide rules do a lot with operations that essentially boil down to addition, subtractio
17.
by mschaef 8mo ago
> The disinterest programmers have in using 80 bit arithmetic. I don't know, other than to say there's often a tendency in this industry to overlook the better in the name of the standard. 80-bit probably didn't offer enou
18.
by mschaef 8mo ago
Does this have any similarities at all to the fact that the Pentium 4 used a 16-bit ALU?
19.
by mschaef 8mo ago
Thank you. As always.
20.
by mschaef 8mo ago
What do you mean by respect? Here's a layperson's perspective, at least. Up through the 486 (with its built in x87), the x87 was always a niche product. You had to know about it, need it, buy it, and install it. This is over and o
21.
by mschaef 9mo ago
> I'm curious what the CX-83D87 and Weiteks look like. The Weitek's were memory mapped. (At least those built for x86 machines.). This essentially increased bandwidth by using the address bus as a source for floating point inst
22.
by mschaef 9mo ago
> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting. Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than
23.
by mschaef 11mo ago
Knowing what I know now, I'd have appreciated it much more than I did at the time. (Also, fixing the link rate on the C64 would've been nice too.)
24.
by mschaef 11mo ago
> My first idea was to get the source cleaned up a bit and compile it again to 32 bit with Visual Basic 4, but I couldn't figure it out, it required some 3rd party libraries that I just couldn't get a hold of. This was super co
25.
by mschaef 11mo ago
He's been blogging continuously for close to twenty years - he was one of the original wave of Microsoft bloggers (along with Larry Osterman, Michael Kaplan, and several others I can't remember). It is very much an engineer's
26.
by mschaef 11mo ago
That derives logically from the way Commodore implemented disks. If you bought a 1540 or 1541 (or any other Commodore drive) for a C-64 or VIC-20, it had an onboard 6502 to run the disk drive. The interaction between the computer and the di
27.
by mschaef 1y ago
I had it done about eight years ago... there's nothing quite like waking up after a fifteen minute procedure and seeing better than you have without correction since you were five. > It's nothing short of a man-made miracle but
28.
by mschaef 1y ago
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world Asking out of curiosity, why is this? What's the functionality you miss on Mac?
29.
by mschaef 1y ago
> The RX100 has had wifi transfer since the 3rd gen. On an iPhone, I can take the picture and I'm immediately a button press away from a photo editor and then whoever I want to send it to. (A camera that automatically tethered to a
30.
by mschaef 1y ago
Some of it's size, some of it the fact that the camera is a second device, and some of it's workflow. I tried a Sony RX100 (1" sensor) when they first came out, optimistic about the possibility of using it for 'general p

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