Recent content by cjs

Yes, seriously. Restricting your comparisons to 8-bit computers looked to me like a strategy to make the C64 stand out as "hugely popular" when it was far from that in the overall computer market. In the twelve or so years from 1982 to 1994, Commodore sold around 12.2 - 17 million units. In a...

Those are the least of your worries about SMS or phone authentication. The big problem with it is that it's almost invariably quite insecure. It's usually not hard to social-engineer a mobile provider into giving the attacker a working phone on that number, at which point the attacker has your...

If the devices use JEDEC pinouts the EPROMs are probably pretty close to, but not exactly, the EEPROM pinouts. From 256 kbit (32 KB) upwards the two are incompatible on just a few pins, starting with A14 being in different places. You can see some pinout comparisons for sizes up to 512 kbit (64...

Why do you look at the popularity of 8-bit computers but not 16-bit computers? And in the end, it's not about popularity at the time, or sales, or anything like that. It's about how many messages get posted about these things. If you have to search through five or ten times as many messages in...

That is my guess, too, and I think it's a reasonable aim. I'm not asking for new topics for any of those manufacturers to be created.

Ok, it's uploaded to https://archive.org/details/Model-4-TRS-80-C. I'm not clear why it's not properly previewing the manual (I explicitly separated the manual from a ZIP file containing all the other files), but I've got a query open with archive.org about this.

Count your blessings. :-) There are several major manufacturers that released dozens of different models over a decade or more and sold in the hundreds of thousands to millions of units overall that are simply not present at all here. (NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp are the first three that come to mind.)

Is one of the creators of that collection of files going to upload it to archive.org, or shall I do it?

So once a desoldering needle has sucked up some solder inside it, how do you get it back out?

I've found soldering braid to work better than a solder sucker, though I have both. The best tip I ever received about desoldering was to get a bottle of flux with a brush cap, and brush some flux on the desoldering braid before using it. It makes the braid slurp up solder like nothing I've ever...

If someone manages to get (or create) another copy of the full working version, it would probably be a good idea to upload it to archive.org so that it doesn't vanish again.

I think that this general form of analogue joystick is pretty common; it looks very similar to the internals of an Apple II joystick that I have. So there might be things less valuable than the Kraft servo system to cannibalise. (Perhaps even a Kraft joystick—they made joysticks for the Apple...

Sorry I was unclear. I am going on the basis of what people who allege themselves to have been involved at the time have said. And note that I am expressing a conditional: if the conditions are/were too poor to be storing magazines and the like, then they are/were far too poor to be storing...

Well, if it was represented to Jason Scott as, "warehouse by the ocean with no climate control and we intend to leave the documents there indefinitely." But paper documents aren't going to come to great harm in a New Jersey warehouse if not left there for a particularly long time. What puts it...

Yup, that was the point I was trying to make when I suggested an original IBM PC. If you're not terribly concerned about what software the machine can run, look for any random thing built with a lot of metal and screws, and maybe evaluate by weight. Well, if the job of the IBM PC is to smash...