WillAdams

This is still an on-going thing for the LinuxCNC project (which mostly follows Mach3 in using a Parallel port interface to drive a CNC controller).

Best example of how far BeOs fell short was that for a very long while it lacked printer drivers of any kind --- by contrast, not only did NeXTstep essentially get printing "for free" since it used Display PostScript, the implementation of that was such that Adobe demanded a modification to the user agreement limiting the output resolution so that print shops would not be able to purchase NeXT computers and use them as RIPs for imagesetters.

Do you know if other of his works merit the sort of effort which has gone into re-translating and correcting _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_?

I was very glad to re-read it when:

https://www.usni.org/press/books/20000-leagues-under-sea

was published.

The context is that it was suggested as a Hugo Award Winner for the year of its release --- my comment was an effort to reframe that suggestion.

It would have been more interesting if it had been published in 1991 so as to directly invite comparison to David Brin's _Earth_ in which that author did much the same (imagine life in the future), or not until 2012 so as to be contrasted with KSR's _2312_.

Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).

It was rather more prosaic, but I did put a flipbook typographic animation into the printed version of my article on Zapfino in _TUGboat_

https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:

-------------------------------------------

House of Representatives, U.S.

Part of Congressional Record --- Free

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA

Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va

Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957

-------------------------------------------

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.

I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.

and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.

One technique which seems to work well for stuff with text/numbers is to ask that a JSON file be generated which contains the text, then edit that, then direct that the image be regeneratd with the updated JSON content.

I've been moderately curious if one could get such a description of the visual aspects of an image and make get consistency/repetition thus.

Does Moment of Inspiration have that same lack of suitability? (I've long meant to try it)

I use it (for choosing tools) with a drawing program and a stylus (for the actual drawing) and it makes things quick/interactive --- no Apple Pencil support, and no ability to lay the entire device down flat means it doesn't suit my needs.

A coworker of mine launched a Windows port (clone?) of emacs when he came in for the day, and never left it for the entire workday --- always envied him his facility with that, but never quite got comfortable with it (and even in a fit of pique gave away a printed copy of the LISP manual which I kind of regret now).

The ironic thing is I've been fascinated by similar graphical efforts such as the Glamorous Toolkit.

The thing is, there are already some notable projects:

- FreeCAD --- exactly what it says on the tin, and making huge improvements, so that I am quite hopeful of 26.3

- SolveSpace --- surprisingly capable/nimble/lightweight

- Dune 3D --- the new kid on the block, it is quite workable, and has quite good documentation: https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/simple-part.html

(and for the hardcore programmers there are OpenSCAD and derivatives such as PythonSCAD)

Wouldn't the compute from the tokens for these projects be better used improving existing projects? (there are more of these new 3D CAD tools than I can count: Cadivari, Layerling, OpenSketch, &c.)

The Release page has:

>Download the Source code ZIP below and extract it. It includes the application, its libraries and the OpenCASCADE WASM/data files.

Fundamentally, poverty is a lack of energy, so this is potentially absolutely transformative.

A further consideration is that roughly 50 percent of the cost of traditional energy sources is transmission, so balcony solar is far more efficient on that basis.

It also enabled nxhosting, which was magical --- allowed one to do remote control over dial-up (so long as one didn't manipulate too large a pixel image).

I really wish Display GhostScript had gotten traction w/ the GNUstep folks.

On comp.sys.next.advocacy Mike Paquette talked about how he might not have stayed at Apple after the NeXT acquisition if he'd realized that that first decade was going to be a re-tread of his first decade at NeXT (writing Quartz vice writing Display PostScript) which I think really understates how important that code is.

An Uncle of mine, who paid to have electric run up to his mountaintop home at the insistence of his wife would have loved that sort of self-sufficient install --- he always complained that after running that wire he suddenly had neighbors, when before, there weren't any.

Any possibility that these will also support the Apple Pencil?

It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:

https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html

(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:

https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history

which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)

Same, although these days, all-too-often one learns of this when one sees a garage sale notice that the shop is being sold (picked up some pretty nice tools thus).

Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.

That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

BeOS was also hampered by promising more than they delivered --- I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS user's group meeting when I asked how the presenter's slides were printed (at that time, BeOS didn't have printer drivers, a marked contrast to NeXT's use of PostScript for both display and printing and even having a rasterizer which had them adding a clause in later OS versions limiting the DPI for output --- folks were buying NeXT computers and using them to drive imagesetters, bypassing the normal PS license expense).

Yeah, that said, it's just magical for me to (sometimes) lay out all of my devices and work from a sketched note on my phone (Note 10+), refer to a reference book on my Kindle Scribe, and work on a project on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360.

Some folks claimed that one of the reasons the Newton got axed was that it was the subject of a highly successful battlefield test by the Marine Corps and that doing that was a way to not be a Defense Contractor.

Two notable instances:

- first iPod prototype --- Steve Jobs dropped it into an aquarium and when bubbles rose up noted, "there's space inside, it can be smaller". https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-threw-ipod-protot...

- iDVD --- he drew a button on a whiteboard and announced, "Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make." https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/how-steve-jobs-1-design-...

I'd like to think that the current behaviour of the Apple Font pallet where when collapsed into a single bar grew out of a suggestion made after discussions on comp.sys.mac.advocacy --- but he was justifiably proud when he showed it off to one visitor (per a link I can no longer find, or which is no longer up, or behind a paywall)

One will still be missing:

- pop-up/vertical main menu

- PANTONE colour library

- Display PostScript

I actually used similar machines running NeXT/OPENSTEP, Mac OS, and Windows shortly after graduation and the performance was smoother and more consistent in NeXTstep 3.3, though I will admit OPENSTEP 4.2 felt just a tad more sluggish, but it was far and away the more useful and capable machine, even when running the same software (e.g., Altsys Virtuoso vice Aldus Freehand, or FrameMaker or WordPerfect).

Probably helped that the Cube had 52MB RAM, the Mac 8MB, and the Windows 12MB.

I'm a corporate shill these days, so it's mostly on our official file-sharing site:

https://cutrocket.com/u/WillAdams

(and mostly wood/bamboo)

A bit stalled because I've been working on:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

Though I will note that I got into small-scale and inexpensive CNC because I couldn't figure out how to fit a Bridgeport that was being sold locally for less than scrap value in working condition into my basement.

I've been debating getting a lathe or making a Gingery Lathe or going the 3D print route:

https://www.printables.com/model/1048400-open-lathe-v1

I should have remembered to note that I am _not_ that Will Adams.

This was clear on usenet con comp.sys.next.* since I had an aol.com address.

That said, Millenium Notebook was one of my favourite apps.

The high water mark of my computer usage was my final year of college when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable note-taking/sketching device and connected it to a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet.

I was very hopeful when Rhapsody was announced, but quite disappointed by Mac OS X Public Beta managed to slow my PowerMac G4/400MHz at my day job down to almost the same speed as my 25MHz NeXT Cube (always was bummed I couldn't manage to justify a Turbo 33MHz machine). It took the better part of a decade for things to catch up, though my favourite version was Snow Leopard.

Still quite disappointed that MacWorld couldn't be bothered to print my letter calling out David Pogue for claiming that Steve Jobs was using an IBM ThinkPad running Windows (it of course had OPENSTEP installed, being one of the few models on the supported hardware list).

Really enjoyed using Altsys Virtuoso 2.0 and programming in Display PostScript and seeing the results on-screen in real-time --- it was more-or-less ported to Windows and Mac OS as FreeHand v4 (and a version of it was announced/advertised for Windows NT, not sure if it ever shipped) --- still resort to Macromedia Freehand when I have something which warrants having a nice pen tool/complex Bézier curve manipulation.

Glenn Reid's TouchType.app was just magical for textual logo design, and was a great example of how tightly focused small apps could be on that platform --- poste.app was simultaneously an app and a service and worth looking up for folks interested in such. Mac users should be sure to check out Services such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordservice/id899972312?mt=12

And of course, Doom was fun even in 2-bit greyscale --- that's where it was originally developed and what the map editor ran on: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Lots of information at:

https://nextworldarchive.com/

but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/

I think we're looking at two different sides of the same coin.

The thing is, increased efficiency doesn't always yield a larger market in the short term.

There are only so many copies of a book listing television stations and demographics for marketing purposes which the market will bear as in this specific instance.

It takes a while for the displaced workers to get retrained and find other jobs which allows them to produce/consume more.

On the flip side, Nintendo hiring a couple hundred folks to make a game such as _Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword_ suddenly created $50 x 600,000 in value on the day it was released.

I drew up the markings in Macromedia Freehand MX, exported as an EPS, opened that in Fontforge, made it into a font, then used F-Engrave to V-carve them.

The fasteners were sourced from a local hardware store and modified w/ a hacksaw, a wire crimping tool which was just the right size to hold them, and a file.

The holes and outline were cut using a CNC following G-code output by MakerCAM (a fork of the Flash file PartKam).

That was a _long_ time ago, and the free software has gotten much better/easier, and these days I work for a company which makes integrated software for the CNC machines which we sell.