「 The 32-bit programming model was quite different from what DOS and OS/2 1.x programmers were used to, but it was simple. For the most part, paging was entirely transparent and programmers didn’t have to worry about it.
Just as importantly, the flat memory model made porting from other platforms much easier, because it was similar to the programming model used by 32-bit UNIX platforms 」
「 Multics was experimental and therefore ambitious, complex, and designed by trial and error. It was delivered late, early on had performance problems, and in 1969 Bell Labs withrew from the project 」
Mural by Julian Nowicki in Bydgoszcz (Poland) dedicated to Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen Nazi German military Enigma cipher machine
„Odszyfrowany Rejewski“, czyli #mural upamiętniający Mariana Rejewskiego, matematyka i kryptologa, który w 1932 r. złamał szyfr Enigmy, najważniejszej maszyny szyfrującej używanej przez hitlerowskie Niemcy. Wielkoformatowy portret zdobi ścianę kamienicy przy ul. Gdańskiej 10 w Bydgoszczy. Powstał w 2017 r., a zaprojektował go i wykonał Julian Nowicki. Fot. @xlenka
📑 The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Survival of dBase | Another Boring Topic
「 Esber then moved on to attacking a new front, stating that the dBase programming language, the language that dBase developers used to create dBase database, was proprietary, and required Ashton-Tate’s permission to use. He was then quoted as referring to the third party companies in the dBase ecosystem as “parasites” 」
「 Chaosnet was developed in the 1970s by researchers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. It was created as a part of a larger effort to design and build a machine that could run the Lisp programming language more efficiently than a general-purpose computer 」
A good book and accompanying DVD is Designing Interactions / Bill Moggridge. They covers some of the earlier days of computing. On them it shows a few other Xerox mouse designs that are totally different from what is used today. Also shows the first laptop. The book and DVD also cover up-to mid-2000s interviews looking back. Also has more than one interview / perspectives more than one for the mouse and palm pilot.
🌊 The Land Before Linux: The Unix desktops
— The Register
"You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems."
Wow I forgot I had ordered this! Two volumes (plus extras) of Shift Happens including slip case. Having just flipped through this book already makes me unreasonably happy! #keyboards#ComputingHistory#ShiftHappens
⌛ After 34 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down
— Ars Technica
"New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows."
📰 CP/M: An Unsung Architect of Micro-Computing
ᐅ @itsfoss
「 The era of CP/M, in my opinion, represents the beginnings of microcomputer history. It was a time of rapid innovation, community building, and exploration as enthusiasts, developers, and entrepreneurs were beginning to shape what would become our current, modern digital world 」
I had absolutely no idea that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward did advertisements for Prime Computer in the #1980s! Also, I have never, ever heard of Prime Computer. What's even more astounding is that they were based in my home state of Massachusetts! Why have I never heard of them?
It makes sense that Doctor Who would be a "hot property" in Massachusetts at that time. #WGBH in #Boston aired the Baker years frequently.
The day after finishing the second programming languages history post - https://retrofun.pl/2024/01/03/70s-and-80s-forget-basic-we-had-pascal-and-c/ focusing on Pascal... I've just learn that Niklaus Wirth has died 😢
Nevertheless, please visit, share, comment - and learn about how things we have today have started.
🦾 Bill Lamie: Story of a man and his real-time operating systems
ᐅ embedded.com
「 His RTOSes now run in more than 2.5 billion embedded devices, including market-leading consumer products such as the Apple iPhone and Hewlett Packard's ink-jet printers. Bill also invented and implemented preemption-threshold, a new approach to eliminate unnecessary context switches while managing critical sections 」