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Condolences about your Dad, G.

Yes, that was a later version of BASIC. And it did, indeed, bundle an ISAM component. Several BASICs, particularly on mini's, had some ISAM/BTREE subsystem. I did a lot of work on the AlphaMICRO with such a system. But it wasn't until these much later MS releases, that such a capabilities were...

I've seen life philosophies shared on T-shirts, but never a keycap.

I take it that's a different display than the early photos with the Tetris game? The resolution looks very nice here, compared to those earlier photos. Was that because those were flat panels and the conversion from composite to digital? Or do you think the resolution was en route to be improved...

What a great success!

I promote Forth simply because of the simplicity in getting someone from a monitor prompt to an interactive environment where one can start iterating. I think a Forth is the shortest path. Sector C looks fully capable as a language, but still needs a supporting environment to make it work...

It's not necessary today. The whole idea of a what a "computer" is today is vastly different from when a CPU was 3000 transistors. And there's a LOT of stuff that is simply not applicable to todays architectures. As they say, disk is the new tape, RAM is the new disk, and cache is the new RAM...

Is there a goal here, or is this just an elaborate experiment? There's a story that when Chuck Moore developed ColorFORTH, he just started with MS-DOS, DEBUG and floppy. Working through enough cycles of that, he got his ColorFORTH working, which booted off the floppy (he dumped MS-DOS), and...

Yea, but the PDPs have all the blinkenlightens and flippinswitches. VAXes look like washing machines without the dials. 1401s look like a chest freezer (at least the ones I've seen). Anything with a visible reel-to-reel tape drive will look like a mainframe, even it's it's interfaced to a Z80...

I guess the primary difference between ISAM and B-Tree is that B-Tree is self maintaining (to a point), whereas ISAM appears to need to be reorganized after some period of activity to maintain performance. I was curious as to the workflow about when the indexes were rebuilt. I can easily see it...

How were business apps done in BASIC back in the day? Nowadays, and even back then, there are/were more specialized tools focused on doing things like Inventory, and Accounting, and other back office systems. A key component of most, if not all, of these systems was some kind of (likely)...

Well that's very curious. I know back in the day, I did exactly what you were doing. We had some machines with some random graphics card that offered a bunch of extended character modes. I distinctly remember that the modes were unique, in that there was no guarantee that any other random card...

It's not a Sun i860 workstation, it's Sun workstation that also happens to have an i860 board in it, right? Like it would have a graphics card or so other VME card (if you machine was, indeed, a VME machine)?

Sure, but that was for just random applications (as I understand it), in contrast to system software. Surprising nobody has an old DECUS tape hanging around. Did RSTS or RT11 ever float about in source form? Or any of the PDP 11 systems (TECO, BP, DCL, etc.)?

I was watching a video, the details of which I can not recall. But the speaker was talking about how computing, historically, was a source code culture. He was citing IBM specifically, about how the relationship with the customer was focused on that hardware more so than the software, so they...

Considering the wild west UI atrocities that show on the web and mobile, picking up Windows 1 should be easy!

That's dated 1961, so I doubt it's that germane to Apple.

To read byte by byte, you can just use `fgetc`. Internally, the system will buffer and hand off 1 char (byte) at a time. Doing it yourself is not difficult. #define BUFSIZ 1024 char buf[BUFSIZ]; FILE *infile = fopen("file.dat", "rb"); size_t bytes_read = fread(buf, BUFSIZ, 1, infile)...

RIP🌹 So helpful early on.

If you have any pieces of particular value, the best thing you can do is sell them yourself. Anyone who has had to clear out an estate has had that conversation "You sold it for how much? You could have got XXX!" without appreciating the intangible stresses of dealing with an estate. If you...