I wrote bankruptcy filing software for my own use in the late 80s on hypercard. Some things it generated itself, and some it sent a mail merge file to word 5.1 (the last version that could simply use a text file as input rather than those bizarre inserts). In fairly short order, it ended up transferred to supercars, which could have multiple stacks open (but I never transitioned back when hypercard 2.0 came out. I suppose I could have scripted that, but . . .).

I thought about making a commercial project of it, but then in '92 (?) new forms were coming out, and the court clerk told me that anything submitted would have to be pixel perfect when they got their new scanners in the coming months. Add that to Macs only having 1% market penetration in law offices at the time, and I ended up simply buy-in another program (to my secretaries' dismay!)

The next year, supercard shipped a PC version. Oh, well.

And more than 30 years later, no such scanners (nor will they ever be; we electronically submit pdfs these days).

Had I known *either* of those*, I could have been the biggest player in the field.

After being away for more than a decade and a half, I trie what was then the biggest player--and it *still* didn't do stuff that I easily did with hypercard in the 80s!

I ended up implementing it, largely from scratch, using LiveCode.

Initially metacard on the NeXT, then runner on several platforms, and now LiveCode, it's basically HyperCard on steroids able to use databases and so much more. Now they're pushing AI, and I'm retired, so not my problem any more.

>The QWERTY and PC-based layout (especially for some non-EN
>layouts) are simply not suited for the prolonged use of the SHIFT-
>pinky and stretching the hand to the control characters on the
>numeric row,

Nor is EMACS, at least on a CKIE (control key in exile) keyboard.

I actually had to get medical treatment in grad school after days of heavy editing, requiring me to twist my wrist and fully extend my pinky to reach the key. He said that they could send me to physical therapy, but I could do just as well myself with rubber bands on my last two fingers, stretching against them for some amount of time a couple of times a day.

Now, I surely wouldn't be one to tamper with university equipment, but a couple of days later, there was a little piece of plastic on my desk next to the keyboard. It apparently somehow escaped from the toggle mechanism on the capslock key, allowing me to remap control to it!
 

>I was the only male in my high school typing class.

gosh, that alone would have been enough reason to take it! :_)

mine was all male, for the simple reason that it was an all boys school.

It was also a mandatory class for freshmen.

>Nothing of this comes natural.

some does, actually, under the right circumstances.

wordstar (and I mean the original eight bit stuff, not the later extensions) was laid out rather logically and consistently with its diamonds and prefixes.

To the point that a couple of times, I instinctively used combinations that I hadn't consciously realized existed--and then sat back amazed as I realized what I'd done!

hawk, who used to type over 100wpm on a manual

the 6 in 7 don't die simultaneously.

Some keep growing before dying, etc.

The unicorns don't start as such, but have already survived most of their contemporaries. Having survived that long, it appears that only another 20% die.

"call me Zilog" . . .

perhaps they could call this processor the "Z80,000" :)

is it even *possible* for an item that much smaller to generate audio waves in the needed frequency?

It would seem to me that that function is a prerequisite to using the name.

This, rather, seems to be a curiosity in the general shape of a violin.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Natural Graft & Swindling!

>Top gears usually are,

usually. But not always.

My '06 Miata GT has six speeds, but it's a close ratio without overdrive. (kind of annoying; it's at nearly 4krpm on the freeway. I toy with the idea of a 50% inline overdrive, which would need to downshift simultaneously to engaging).

And in the 80s, VW shipped both a 4speed and a 5speed on rabies and such--but the 4 speed had an overdrive, while the 5 didn't! [so the 4 if you mostly drove freeway, and the 5 for city ]

hawk

This is amazing. They are claiming that keeping the logs is a privacy risk to customers?

Is their security *that* bad???

If so, the order should include taking all of their systems and backups *completely* offline!

more importantly, would any of these have a chance in Robot Wars or Battle Bots?

In a different era, junkbuster was sufficient for trackers and such. It was most known for letting you keep a domain blocklist.

One of the lesser used features, though, was a provision for a "cookie jar", with the noted possibility that users could trade cookies to throw off (or just annoy!) those who tracked us.

I first put it on after loading a couple of large (for the time) pages full of animated gifs on a 486. It brought the system to its knees! (X on Linux did *not* react well to high loads in those days!)

And cookies are the reason my uid here is so high.

Originally, there was no login; you just pasted your name in to make a comment (I *said* that it was a different era!).

One morning I came in, and it had an announcement that cookies would now be used, and it was no longer possible to post without them.

As I was one of the many at the time who made a folder with the name of the cookie file, blocking their storage, I refused for quite a while. Eventually, though, I registered.

I would like to see a modern project to catch and exchange tracking cookies. Just for the fun of it.

hawk

>which was Microsoft's second stage to orbit after providing Level II Basic for the TRS-80.

But that was just BASIC 80, rev 2, which was also found on most other micros of the day and shortly thereafter, Apple's base Integer BASIC and Atari's initial cartridge BASIC being the most notable exceptions. (for that matter, Level I basic on the TRS-80, too). [yes, there were other tiny basic machines, but they were in the toy to hobby range].

BASIC 80 came in three levels, with "Extended" and "Disk Basic" being the upper tiers. Generally, a high level could be loaded into RAM to supplement what came in ROM.

while it had single (6 digit) and double (12 digit) floating point, the non-8080 ports (Apple, commodore, etc.) tended to have a single 9 (?) digit float.

And they were all bad at math; the rounding to base 2 meant that a loop from -1 to 1 step .1 would miss zero by its calculations . . .

Version 4.51 was common on CP/M, as was the later 5. I think 4.51 was the first that built an address table, rather than scanning memory for line numbers on every branch. [the workaround for large programs was to put common subroutines in low line numbers, setup in high numbers, and to jump to setup and then jump to mid numbers for main execution. {my large BASIC programs looked suspiciously like well-structured FORTRAN}]

for all practical purposes, the PC's BASICA and MS-DOS' GWBASIC were 8088 ports of MBASIC5.

>Real geeks wire-wrapped their systems.

I made my first computer, with an 1802, with wire wrap.

But it had its limits as frequency went up.

I heard multiple reports of attempting to clone Apple ][ with wire wrap, all of which failed, as their RF emissions interfered with themselves (in fact, this was the *only* reason I didn't try one myself!)

no VGA?

What's next? removing the RS-232 and Centronics ports? Or (*shudder*) the floppy drive itself?