SeenNotHeard

"I couldn't find that technical note in the Apple III Technotes page of apple3.org. Was this really a recommended procedure by Apple or is it just an urban legend?"

As a side note, this means that Microsoft now owns the copyrights to all of Infocom's interactive fiction: Zork, Enchanter, Deadline, HHGttG, etc.

"Why do people find DNS so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things."

https://twitter.com/jdub/status/739110670562557952

You're thinking of what is sometimes called "European MS-DOS 4.0" which did indeed have limited multitasking features, including shared memory and pipes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_4.0_(multitasking) https://virtuallyfun.com/2013/03/17/european-ms-dos-4-00-aka...

It should not be confused with the mostly unrelated DOS 4.0 later released.

A Microsoft executive later said the multitasking DOS should probably not have been named "4.0" because it created a lot of confusion.

It doesn't sound like you've ever maintained an active free software project.

It's not "tutoring" to perform a code review and request additional changes to the patch. That's a standard feedback mechanism in free software development.

kazinator's analysis may be right, but it doesn't sound like it would have taken the maintainer more than a few minutes to explain his objections and given the contributor a chance to shore up his patch.

There's plenty of examples in the history of the kernel project of much larger patches going round and round until they land. From kazinator's description, it's possible the patch could have been made ready in a single review round.

> All three issues brought up by kazinator are reasonable grounds for ignoring the patch.

The patch (and bug report) wasn't ignored. That's kind of the point.

Vala offers async/yield and compiles down to native code (after being transpiled to C): https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Tutorial#Asynchronous_M...

More info: https://vala.dev/

Her first recorded song was with The Edge on the criminally overlooked soundtrack for "Captive": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvKV4_9nV2M

One striking thing about pointing the finger at high tech for the death of literary fiction is that literary fiction has survived so many other technological advances. Why is this the one that topples it?

While I'm sure Blythe would sneer at manga in Japan, that country has adopted high tech just as much as this country has, and yet reading paper-based stories remains as popular as ever. He would probably sniff that manga is not "literary"—and that's probably closer to the heart of the matter.

Could it be that literary fiction today is not producing the stories Blythe claims it's producing—stories of memory, stories of "average" people working through the contradictions of life? Like NPR and PBS, so much literary fiction today is geared toward a rather narrow slice of American culture, a culture that implicitly agrees on a particular set of politics and cultural mores as beyond debate. If you don't agree with those mores, contemporary literary fiction reads like entering a slightly "off" world.

I'm not sure Updike's short stories in the 1950s really were for "everyone" in America, but I am certain that the stories being published today in Best American Short Stories are not.

Previous comments from original Politico article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36527284

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519833 (includes comments from article's co-author)

JAL was privatized in 1987.

> I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end hardware installations was a lot more than 80.

Are you sure? Wikipedia notes that for the Cray-1, released in 1975, eventually "eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

Yes, yes, there's a difference between high-end mainframes and supercomputers, but there's also a difference between mainframes and the PDP-11, which is better categorized as a minicomputer.

Personally, I find the dismissal of Multics to be less about reality and more about the perpetuation of pre-existing lore. The Xerox Star and Smalltalk also did not fare well in terms of commercial sales, but they tend to be lionized in computer history rather than treated as a joke.

Dr. Johnson said Shakespeare's output could be obscene, shoddy, lack cohesion and moral instruction, and ignore the classical unities, but that "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life."

Reminds me of a startup I worked for in the 1990s. The C code base was organized into "units" (modules). Each unit allocated/destroyed its own data structures, but used the "ref" unit to return a reference (really, a handle) instead of a pointer. Each module used a "deref" function to convert the handle to a typed pointer for internal use.

ref used many of the tricks described in the above post, including an incrementing counter to catch stale handles.

All pointers were converted to handles in debug and testing builds, but in release builds ref simply returned the pointer as a handle, to avoid the performance penalty. As machines grew faster, there was talk of never turning off ref.

Side win: There was a unit called "xref" (external ref) which converted pointers to stable handles in all builds (debug and release). It was the same code, but not compiled out. External refs were used as network handles in the server's bespoke RPC protocol.

> I still don’t know if all of those statements are true (is it true that PHP programs can’t have long-lived persistent TCP connections? maybe not!)

They can, depending on how the PHP program is coded. PHP even supports non-blocking I/O.

One of the great video games of the late 90s, Rollercoaster Tycoon, was coded in assembly. Even back then, that was considered a feat.

Related: "Papyrus: The World's 2nd Most Hated Font"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1D3ebc6h0

An interesting perspective on Cordwainer Smith can be found in Robert Silverberg's "Science Fiction: 101." He reprints Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," offers his analysis, and reminisces on how the sci-fi community buzzed over this newcomer's strange approach to the field.

As long as we're playing "what if," it's worth reflecting on all the hair-raising hacks and tricks Microsoft had to play to deal with the x86's quirks as they built Windows. XMS/EMS and DPMI were also incredibly painful engineering feats.

While the M68K had its own growing pains (as seen with the evolution of the Macintosh), none of them seemed nearly as onerous as what was done to squeeze a few more years out of MS-DOS compatibility.