Recent content by Eudimorphodon

... I think the first time I ever went into one of the Apple-centric shops was when I was given an 800K Mac floppy disk that had a mailing list on it that someone was paying me to port to a PC mailmerge program; I went in there to get the files copied to a disk I could read. It was swank; the...

I grew up in a "government town" with a lot of engineers, so I was probably unusually spoiled for choice when it came to hole in the wall computer shops; there was the one behind a gas station down by the river that was the Commodore shop (although I suspect they sold more Commodore PCs than...

Man, drop this whole paranoid persecution complex. You're the one who's coming up with stupid garbage like this: To stick in my mouth. You keep taking things *I* didn't say and twisting them in the stupidest ways to try to make utterly moronic points. I'm not saying they're "lying about their...

There's a blank space between those two statements, and I think that's where the truth actually lies. Although let's be frank: for all practical purposes it's closer to the second one, whether you agree with me or not. The manufactured product, the thing that went out the door, was exclusively...

I was just about to pop back in here and throw that bone: there are several sources that *do* say that Woz had been reading the manuals for the 6800 and had to a greater or lesser degree sketched out a plan for a system using it, but hadn't built anything before that (in)famous trip to Wescon...

Look, I’m telling you what every scrap of evidence that is out there says. Google it all up yourself if you don’t believe me. There’s an anecdote out there that the reason that jumper says “6800” is when they started shopping it around they had the impression they might run into a customer that...

The 6501 was $5 *cheaper* than the 6502, not $5 more. “If you can get clocks for less than $5, buy the 6501 and give your purchasing agent a bonus”. And here’s a letter in Steve Jobs’ handwriting where he lists the three CPUs the board physically supports, but says “(6501, 6502 recommended...

That 2008 figure is bonkers. So that calculus of wanting to make around $100 a unit if they sell them all isn’t far off. Of course he was talking about mortgaging his house and all that, so maybe they don’t have to make the whole wad on just this one offering but… eesh. We’re gonna find out...

Huh. It's funny, I was going to ask about that. I *just* noticed those progress bars on the sales pages as to how many were left to sell today, and since they only say how many are left I was wondering what the total run was supposed to be. (My wild guess looking at the bars was somewhere around...

Been there, done that,*hard* with an Osborne I, very early on. I actually got into the "retro computer" game *way* before it was cool after buying a *huge* TRS-80 Model I haul at a garage sale around 1992, I don't even really know why I bought it, I had a 486 by this point, but I was still...

I had TRS-80 Color Computer (with Extended BASIC) first. The C64 outclasses it in almost every conceivable way, but if I'm turning my brain off and pretending to be living in my single digits again I'd still much rather hack away in BASIC on the CoCo than a Commodore. (I have this huge soft spot...

I've 'vastly misinterpreted' your argument because it's not coherent. One minute you're saying that this thing is great because it will let customers wire lights to the user port and learn how to make their own PCBs, and the next second you're griping that putting one thing inside of another...

Almost 20 years ago there was this harebrained scheme going around (here's a thread with some links) which suggested with a straight face that it would be a great idea to buy these weeeeird 8-bit computers being churned out in China (they may still be making them) which were based around SOCs...

What's "vintage"? RiscOS' GUI is positively *marooned* in the 1990's and the OS features the same BBC Basic as the Acorn BBC Micro from 1981. Seems pretty retro to me? Like I pointed out above, that BASIC can directly flip bits on the GPIO port, that's the use case we're trying to replicate...

A Raspberry Pi with RISC OS on it? Or how about an Agon Light? Or is this all hinging on whatever is suggested here having to be compatible with some *real* 40 year old computer? It should be obvious this is an impossible question to come up with one answer for. Is this person mostly interested...