The story of X-Copy on the Amiga | Hacker News Reader

The story of X-Copy on the Amiga

spillhistorie.no

64 pointsonename12 comments

An interesting feature of getting old is when you see something you haven't in 30+ years and it suddenly snaps into focus. X-Copy was invaluable.

I had the same feeling when I read the interview along with the attached screenshots. A nice way to start a Sunday morning.

The Amiga was so, so cool. So sad it couldn't keep up.

Yup. Literally the only tech that I have genuine nostalgia for. I really miss it and the community

Ah, the famous tool everyone used to share their "acquisitions" back in Portugal.

Back in the 1980's even regular computer stores used to sell pirated software.

Is this sentence true, or should just sound important?

"Cachet created the word «usability» for that, meaning «start it and be able to use it right away.»"

Sadly, it isn't strictly true. maybe the article should have said "applied" not "created".

Even the wikipedia page for "Usability" points to a 1982 BYTE article advocating "Usable" for software tools.

The existing word "usability" was being applied in human computer interface texts/papers around the time (1987, 1988) as computer UIs made advances.

The best summary of history I could find was in this article (section 5.1), claiming the first usage was in 1971, or 1979, or perhaps 1981, depending on interpretation.

https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-journal-applied-research-...

If you want a single example it is untrue, a good example is "IBM makes usability as important as functionality" from 1986. I found a copy online but hate deeplinking to such things.

It's possible that Cachet was unaware of all that academia and independently "created" the term.

Of course the actual word is much, much older in the world of meatspace.

I was using xcopy at the time as a kid and still play with a physical Amiga. Nostalgia.

Albeit it sort of worked for the kidlets on their lo-rez screens, demoscene- and/or game-style visual aesthetics were (and often still are) a bad choice for good application UI design. But that's of course mostly just preference talking.

Back then (no Internet for most and scarce documentation) learning proper coding wasn't easy; I recall when a good number of games, demos and some utilities too stopped working because programmers ignored or simply didn't know the guidelines (RKM books were costly for demoscene kids) and used address registers to store data. The plain 68000 CPU had internal 32 bit address registers, but physical address bus was 24 bit only, so one could use the most significant 8 bits to store data that wouldn't affect at all the working on a 24 bit bus, but when CPUs with full physical addressing came out, any program using that trick would point to other locations than those intended and thus would fail.

Even AmigaBasic (by Microsoft) did this, so it also broke on 68020+.

In the 80's and 90's, I learned on the evil cousin, the PC, by spending all of my money on overpriced hardware reference books at Computer Literacy Bookshop of Santa Clara. Being a broke, car-less high school student, it was perhaps the only time I ever used VTA light rail from Blossom Valley.

Examples:

- The Programmer's PC Sourcebook 155615321X

- The Undocumented PC 0201622777

- PC Intern: The Encyclopedia of System Programming 1557553041

Coupled with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, until I could afford Borland C++ 3.1 by virtue of getting a job at Egghead Software. :D "Stack Overflow" was the 4 other people in the under-resourced, purposefully (un)managed high school computer lab run by the wisdom of one Dr. Richard Thaw. It had awful PS/2 model 25's and 30's that were an upgrade from discarded PCjr's. It did, however, have 10BASE2 thin-net and a nominal Novell 2.x or 3.x file server.

One thing to remember is that these pixels looked a lot different when rendered on a typical CRT of the time.

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