1/ The computer partly dismantled here was likely the highest-performance 8-bit machine of the early 80s. Very few were ever made. It's an EXQUISITE design that, however, disregarded manufacturability and serviceability. A treasure regrettably lost to time. Guess its name!
For a more reasoned and thoughtful opinion, see this DemocracyNow interview with Greg Mitchell, who actually understood the topic in further depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKEtLdfPQLk
Gosh, corporate Democrats will just cheer for anything that chants USA! USA!. Never mind that dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one massive war crime, mass murder of ~200,000 innocent people when most were waking from their sleep, and doomed thousands more to lives of pain and horrifying disease.
What a bunch of stupid and awful American idiots just like the other ones.
I just thought I'd give an example of a computer that was assigned to me at my first computing "job". It was an EPSON Equity+ PC-XT compatible computer. It was nice and fast at the time, with a clock speed about twice of the original IBM PC and a 20 Mb hard disk drive. At first I was allowed to write simple inventory applications in GW BASIC when I wasn't doing something useful.
Then they saw that I had mastered that language very quickly because I already knew some basic from my Atari 800XL and ZX Spectrum experience. So after a month or two of doing that they gave me simple database programming tasks using dBASE III+ for MS-DOS. Up to this point it was all just programming to me, there was no notion in my mind about the commercial value of the real estate software I was helping to develop. After getting acquainted with dBASE III+, dBASE IV, FoxBase were released.
I kept learning all those dialects of the then-called "XBase" family of languages, and I became acquainted with Clipper, a compiler and Xbase dialect created in the mid 1980s by the long-deceased company Nantucket Software. Clipper was able to do a lot of the things that dBase and Foxplus could do, but faster, and it felt for the first time like something closer to a real programming language, not a scripting toy.
All of which I promptly did profit from extensively, writing low-level interfaces to connect database software with the outside world. And these new fancy devices whimsicaly called "mice". This is all pre-Macintosh, pre-Amiga, pre-Windows world.
It didn't feel to fast to me at the time because I had no parameters of comparison, but I can now see on hindsight that I had done quite an astonishing lot in just a couple of years.
And then I very rapidly became bored with real estate and accounting software. And I found myself more and more often using the exact same tools that were my bread and butter (for a young kid who still was in high school at the same time, it wasn't really my bread and butter, it was more like marmelade on top of)
And what else could I use that extensive tooling for?
Games. Obviously. Text adventure games.
Which didn't have to deal with the memory constraints of the ZX Spectrum or the Atari 800. I could use databases of tens of megabytes, which was unimaginable for regular Spectrum users in 1989.
And they could be written using Clipper, which was efficient enough and good enough of a language not to leave dangling pointers without much hassle, and serious enough that I could do anything with it.
Is all that retro computing? Sure as hell it is... the labour of love side of it.
The text adventure engine that could feature unlimited rooms, and rudiments of a scripting language that looked a bit like LISP.
No one at that company ever knew it existed at all. All they cared for was that the accounting software kept clients happy. And happy they were. That bought me freedom to keep doing what I actually loved to do, which was to engage with other more intellectually interesting projects.
If you think x.com evokes NSFW, you may not know the highly popular and respected arXiv preprint archive was called xxx.lanl.gov up to the early 2000s.
Work on a video board is ongoing, based on the Lattice ECP5. It looks like a good idea as other projects could reuse the video module. https://youtu.be/ThKnth5Y2UE?t=274
Disk image archive and info resource for the Sanyo MBC-550 PC "compatible" from 1982. It's an interesting clone that features better-than-CGA 640x200 resolution 8-color graphics, ending up with a few unique titles, as such.
