Recent content by cjs

Actually, I'm thinking that the DDG AI summaries might not be so bad: it appears to work with the information from the top search results, rather than just whatever happens to be in its training. It did manage to get this question right. Then again, I just checked with GPT-4o mini and it got...

Isn't human breath rather loaded with moisture?

The 386/486 upgrades were great, though; with DESQview 386 it was like having a half dozen 8088 machines on your desk!

Is that any different from the results you see when you do a regular search and then select the "Web" tab at the top?

Well, yes, but no. "Yes" in that, whatever you' re thinking of by "tie" (and I'm not clear on that), it probably could be done. "No" in that European governments are unlikely to design software and systems to do that. (American corporations might, but we'll see how far they get in the face of...

TI can legally go after any product creator. There's no law against filing a lawsuit, no matter how absurd the lawsuit may seem to some people. At that point you're stuck defending yourself against someone who's got fairly deep pockets and a strong desire to hold on to a near-monopoly. And...

I am seeing equivalents for a lot cheaper than that. Here's a listing from a local shop for an HTC Korea part in DIP at ¥70 (about USD 0.50), and a Digikey listing for a TI part in SOIC at $0.69 (qty 1).

I'd expect that the largest part of the cost was actually the licensing fee paid to Microsoft for Level II BASIC. I wonder how much it was. IIRC, Commodore was the only company that ever managed to get a flat rate, rather than per-unit, license to MS-BASIC. Though the trs-80.org page does state...

Oh, so it did! Holding Shift and Down-arrow together subtracts $60 from the shifted value (which in turn was the unshifted value plus $20). This happens at the end of the $040B routine just after the one I linked above. How did I go so long without ever knowing this? Argh! Unfortunately, this...

Oh, interesting. Yeah, I had a quick look at the keyboard input scan code at $3E3 in the Level I ROM and from the way it deals with assigning values to the letters, yeah, it will just carry on after z through {|}~ and DEL, and of course Z[\]^_ if shifted. Nice! And looking at the keyboard...

From looking at the first catalogue entry for it, and noting that the upgrade is exactly the same price as the price difference between the Level 1 BASIC/4K and Model III BASIC/16K, I would guess that it's just a RAM and ROM swap. Weirdly, the price of that kit remained at $299 for years, even...

Akizuki Denshi is just the shop selling these; according to the product page the manufacturer is 株式会社マルコ精密工業, or Maruko Precision Industries in English. (That's not anywhere on the datasheet; I have no idea why.) That company, which seems to do mainly lead frames for electronics parts, doesn't...

Ah, this one. I'd forgotten about that. Well, it was the 1970s. Buying things is for losers: of course you build your own RS-232 interface and, while you're at it, terminal program.

I am totally good with just bringing wires out of the case for the programmer. In fact, I personal would prefer that because Bluetooth seems to bring a lot of extra configuration pain for no real gain, at least for me. BTW, one of the members of my Tokyo Retrocomputing group works for ST, and...

Oh, it would also be worth adding pointers to sources for proper "IC-style" pins to go into the socket on the host instead of the presumably machine-tool pins you're using to go into the socket on the host. Those won't even fit in the socket of my PC-8001, and even for sockets that do accept...