The Jackintosh: A Real GEM – Remembering the Atari ST
paleotronic.com
paleotronic.com
I absolutely miss those days, but only a little :) I just shrug and use Qt and be happy that at the very least, after I've fought the framework for a couple hours, an incredible amount of engineering is done on such difficult problems without me needing to try to solve them on my own in each project.
The note i mentioned above and a small exception is unicode support, but that is externally imposed: sometimes i download files (like an album i bought on bandcamp) that use unicode characters which display weirdly if the program you use cannot handle them. But beyond that, no real need for it and this is only in a few types of programs.
Of course my needs are not the same as others' needs, but i am "paying" for stuff i do not use nor need, both in terms of complexity and actual resources.
The benefit though is interoperability and economies of scale. And besides, another way of saying ‘not disabled’ is ‘temporarily abled’. Who knows when you’ll need assistive tech (if ever), but you’ll appreciate the effort that’s been put into the ecosystem when you do.
Yes, i do not see the issue with it though - remember that i talked about the case where i explicitly do not care about interoperability, which is pretty much all the time. I do not see the problem to use specialized software in the rare cases where i'd need such interoperability (and again, i'm talking about myself here, not about everyone, although i suspect a lot of people rarely care about more than a single language - and note that i'm not a native English speaker).
> . If you use a screen reader then there’s an immediate extraneous cost to your laptop or mobile phone in the form of a screen and a GPU.
I'm not sure i follow, what sort of cost are you talking about?
> The benefit though is interoperability and economies of scale.
Similarly, i do not follow. I am talking about the complexity and resources needed by a GUI system.
> And besides, another way of saying ‘not disabled’ is ‘temporarily abled’. Who knows when you’ll need assistive tech (if ever)
I may also need better interoperability or any of the other features mentioned above, it isn't like my current needs are written in stone, but that is an issue to be solved when needed, if needed.
My post was an example of someone who doesn't need any of the stuff you mentioned and from my perspective these are just adding bloat since i wont use them. This isn't a recommendation or anything like that.
If you consider people being able to use your programs in their language and consider it a good thing to do, a toolkit that provides that feature will do fine for your case.
Seriously? I can't work out what possible advantage you might think this has. There is no situation where a lower DPI monitor is better than a higher DPI one, as far as I can work out, so I'm guessing you've probably never used a high resolution screen and just don't know what you're missing? Or are there many people out there who think like this?
My primary reason is that i just like the way it looks. However it has a few practical advantages, one being that it is very fast when it comes to 3D games (which i play a lot) and while i could lower the resolution, that would end up creating ugly image quality from the upscaling. Also i do graphics myself and being able to clearly see the pixels (note that i do not just have a low DPI monitor, i have a 27" 1080p monitor where you can clearly see the pixels) has helped me many times spot tiny issues i'd miss at a higher dpi. I also use a lot of programs that are not DPI aware (especially older programs, but several new programs do that too) and in any hidpi monitor they look either blurry (from compositor scaling - i should also add that i dislike compositors here and disable them/do not run them when i can, but that is another topic) or everything is tiny.
> so I'm guessing you've probably never used a high resolution screen and just don't know what you're missing
I have used a high resolution screen at my previous work, specifically a 4K monitor which was around 30". It wasn't on my own computer but i got to use it a bit and wasn't a bit fan of it - yes, the image was crisp when it was running in full resolution but that was the only positive you could say. Every 3D program was very slow and most GUI programs had issues and glitches, so we almost always ran it at half resolution (which made everything blurry).
> Or are there many people out there who think like this?
I don't really know, i do not tend to act out of what everyone else is doing - at least not intentionally :-P. A friend of mine also has a 27" 1080p monitor and he has told me that the two main reasons are that he likes "looking at the pixels" and that he gets better performance in games with it.
FWIW i also have a 1440p 27" monitor (and supposedly a good one, Dell U2713HM), but it sits in the corner collecting dust (until the end of the month when i'll send it to a relative who wanted it) for a couple of years now, so it isn't like i do not have the option for higher resolution - i just do not like it.
Commodore owned the market for home computers. Commodore's customers would have stayed loyal to the company if they could have gotten a product that moved the Commodore technology forward but they could not advance the technology. They saw sales decline and decided to find another hit rather than to advance the technology.
When he moved on to Atari he developed a great machine but he just did not know how to move forward the same way he did not know with Commodore.
Plus the ST and C64 were largely sold as games machines (yes, I'm aware of the popularity of using the ST as a MIDI sequencer etc) and consoles of that era didn't follow an upgrade path either (baring the Atari 7800 being largely hardware compatible with the 2600 but the 7800 wasn't exactly a success because of that).
Many accounts of history actually look more favourably on Jack Tramiel as they argue that had the American Commedore offices taken his lead (like the European division did) and sold the Amiga in toy stores as well as the usual places - as the Atari ST was sold in Toys R Us across Europe - then the Amiga might not have flopped in the US. And there is good reason to believe Tramiel's strategy worked as the ST was a massive hit and the Amiga had a lot more success in Europe and America after the European division of Commedore started copying Tramiel's business strategy.
Ultimately though, few hardware manufacturers from that era survived. Even Apple nearly went under (several times in fact, Microsoft had to bail them out on one occasion just to avoid a desktop monopoly). And IBM didn't exactly do well out of upgradeable machines as the market just got flooded with cheap clones which IBM got no cut from. So it's very easy to blame Tramiel with hindsight but in reality he was one of the few which had multiple successes.
Current OEMs seem to be quite willing to return to those days, as solution to their thin razor margins now with the rise of mobile computing.
I can still remember the reaction you would get when you told people whose Ataris had gone haywire that the quick fix for units whose chips were coming unseated from the motherboard was to pick the computer up, hold it level, and then drop it from about a four inch height.
I remember people were horrified when the IBM PC came out with soldered-in chips, but IBM published a solid report showing that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.
Solution - don't put the monitor upon the PC case was not a happy solution for many, but was the solution.
Apparently, after several months of no use, the hard drive bearings had a tendency to stick, and the temporary solution that often worked was to have the client lift the front of the box a few inches off the desk and let it drop, unseizing the bearing.
A lot of reactions along the lines of "I can't believe that worked!"
>In the early 1980s, Jay, along with other Atari staffers, had become fed up with management and decamped. They set up another chipset project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have creative freedom.
Later on it was quietly changed to "Commodore: A Tradition Of Excellence" or something along those lines.
Also, home to one of the first multiplayer networked first person shooters ever:
Did you ever tried Arabesque for vector graphics?
What specific features are you talking about?
For the life of me I still can't get two lines of text to line up in almost every other package, it is most frustrating. Present day DTP/Layout software makes me long for either ATEX or typewriters.
https://medium.com/s/story/ataris-hard-partying-origin-story...
I missed out. I totally did not get it, or the zeitgeist. The road not taken. Damn.
CGA was awful for many reasons, one of which was that all colours were fixed.