SteveMoody73

I've been watching those videos after seeing this, it's interesting to see such an obscure system these days, most of the hardware from that era is usually well documented but I've never heard of this system before now

My initial thought is why query 1TB of data in a browser, maybe I'm the wrong target audience for this but it seems that it's pushing that everything has to be in a browser rather than using appropriate tools

Not a museum or archive as such but in the UK there is this https://www.rmcretro.com/

Has a large collection of old systems and games, magazines and anything else they can get hold of. It's also open to visitors.

It's probably more nostalga than anythng but I do sometimes miss the sound of floppy drives and hard drives. With modern computers there is usually no disk activity indicators and silent drives.

I was working on restoring an old Amiga 500 recenty and the sound of a game booting off disk is so satisfying.

I don't play many modern games. Not really interested in the latest consoles and my graphics card in the PC is around 8 years old. It seems a lot of games now require a large time investment and not for causal gamers.

If I want to play a games these days I normally go to emulators and back to old games. Old arcade games and computer games from the 80s and 90s era may look dated but some of them are more fun.

Another one for the UK as well https://www.rmcretro.com/visit-the-cave

I use Teams on my phone regularly and have never seen this happen. Clicking on a link takes me to the web page without any problems, even in my default browser which is Firefox.

Can't say that outside of HN i've come across a link to anything about Mastodon so not sure it's won much.

Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the searchability of the old forums. I can't imagine how much useful information has been lost when some of these sites have shut down.

Discussions on a well run forum would be on topic with various people adding to a conversaion, discussions on a single topic seems to get lost on these chat apps

I've released software which has been pirated, i'm sure that's a common thing that many on this site have experienced.

Photography is a hobby of mine. I don't watermark any photos I post online but this is essentially piracy for photos.

Tools like this are heading down a dark path.

SUBQ also seems to be missing.

Interesting project and it may be a useful tool for learning M68K assembler for a beginner, but as an editor or simulator it seems very limited at the moment. Always nice to see some new M68K tools though

Anecdotal for me, before the pandemic I was working in an open office and there was times that it was not a good environment when you need to focus, working from home work a bit improvement for me and still enjoying it now.

My case may be limited to a small group but I'm sure I’m not alone here. Productivity wasn't an issue working from home, I was designing electronics to completely revamp our product range in work. While everything up until this was focused on backwards compatibility, this was a clean slate project and give us chance to explore new tech.

Sue to the nature of our systems, there's many PCBs involved but the designs were going well and even had a few prototype boards built just before the Electronics shortages hit.

For most of the new designs we used the STM32 range as there were a lot available and plenty of options available. They seemed amongst the early ones that went out of stock. After that even just basic components just seemed to have dried up.

For almost 2 years now, most of my time has been spent keeping existing systems up and running, finding alternative parts or where that's not possible, redesigning boards just to keep production running. Some of these changes have been minor but had to change a Microcontroller on a couple of boards which also requires re-writing firmware for those boards.

It’s been a demoralising couple of years and while there's a thought that things should get better, there's no end in sight yet. When you get to the point that you're no longer enjoying the work, that's when productivity falls.

I design the majority of the electronics for my company and pretty much all the firmware as well.

Wages are not bad for the area i'm in, which is fairly rural, but could be a lot better for the work involved. Move to a big city would probably help but I like the quieter lifestyle.

I've not done any web development full time for close 20 years, first started writing JSP code. Dabbled with a few personal website designs since then. I'm sure if I went back to web development, it may pay more but I don't think it would have the same level of job satisfaction for me. I try to keep up to date on some of the technologies used but it seems overwhelming from the outside.

Part is resistence to change, but I do find the work for the most part enjoyable so it's a risk to change jobs as well.

I started working around 29 years ago, pay was not great as it was a very small company and my first job out of University.

I was writing assembly code for a fire alarm interface system. Code was assembled using a DOS based system, flashed onto an EPROM for testing on the boards. Debugging consisted of tracing signals through the system, or if lucky, the boards had a spare serial port we could use to print messages.

I don't know if it's a common feature or just part of the Samsung Keyboard app, but when the phone is rotated it does seperate they keyboard quite nicely so you can access each half with your thumbs. Space in the middle is a little wasted though.

My partner bought an old Brother knitting machine and ribber attachment during the lockdown. I think it was the KH820 if my memory serves me correct, one with a punch card reader.

When she bought it, the machine had been sitting in an attic for a couple of years so by the time she had it it wasn't in the best working condition. Took a little while for me to learn how to strip it apart and clean it, but one done it was back in perfect working condition. It's amazing how well some of these machines were designed. Easy to see why they can still fetch such an expensive price tag.

I've run a forum and worked on a couple of others. First one was for lactose intolerance when there was very little information available. Others were technical sites. In that case more information became easily available and in others, it's moved to platforms like facebook and twitter.

I do mourn the loss of these forums as there was a lot of good information, and more importantly some first hand experience in some of the posts. A lot of these things now are view or click driven so they lose the personality. While there are still a lot of good forum sites around and do well, I think the rise of spam posts and increasing work of moderating the smaller sights was too high and eventually killed them off.

There are still many micro controllers, especially memory constrained or less common devices, that there isn't an option beyond C for them. C++ is sometimes an option but even then it can sometimes be a cut-down version of C++.

I have a MSDN subscription and one of my colleges wanted a Japanese Windows 10 ISO to track down a particular bug.

While I had to login to get the link to the ISO, once I had that link there doesn't seem to be any requirements to log in again. All the installs are in trial mode unless you get a key, which does require MSDN, but it would be nice if MS just had a convenient place to find these other than people using some 3rd party service. At least it would give people confidence that it's a genuine download and not been tampered with at all.

There's also this one: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFhc0MFC8MiCDOh3cGFji...

I think I designed my first website using HoTMetaL. The WYSIWYG interface was basic but worked but once you hit the limitations of it then at least you could edit the HTML directly.

The Last Starfighter game from the movie, always remember watching that movie and wishing it was possible to play the game. Basic by any 3d space game standard now but had a nice style and looked fun.

On an old TV I have it can take at least 5 seconds before it starts counting down. I've just assumed it was a badly maintained app. Have 3 smart Tvs and YouTube seems to behave different on all of them. May have to look into it.

Most business software can be installed by the network admins, software that can't doesn't matter for a lot of these companies and just won't be used. Even in my smaller but rapidly growing company they are doing more to restrict what software can be installed. Easy install of packages isn't what a large company wants

wordI think it can be hard to recommend a particular codebase, well written code can be good to read but if you want to become better at a language or problem domain then sometimes reading badly written code may be a better way to learn.

Working through some badly written code that actually performs well can be a real eye opener. I mainly work in C and reading some legacy code (sometimes even my own) can be a challenge to work out exactly what's going on.

If you want to learn how an algorithm works, then a good clean codebase with lots of comments is a good way to go. If you want to learn the details of a particular language, then just read a lot of code in that language whether it’s good or bad.

In the embedded world where there are a lot of C compilers, it's not so much the language you keep in your head but the compiler implementation of the language.

I'm in the process of moving an old codebase from a compiler with a very loose adherence to an old specification to an ARM chip that is using GCC for the compiler. Enabling -Wall to catch all issues that the compiler highlighted, 16-bit ints to 32-bit ints, and quite a few ternary operator issues.

None of these were issues on a system that's been running in production for many years but porting to a new architecture will mean there’s a lot of extra testing to be done just to make sure we catch all the edge cases in the code.

I like the C language and have been using it for close to 30 years now. The main part of the language can be kept in your head but there is so much more to working with it than just the base language.

I've always worked in small companies and been responsible for getting the work done, as a solo developer in a lot of cases here was nobody to blame if things went wrong. In a larger company now but it's still a smaller place, have the same attitude to work even now.

Maybe it's this environment has made me a more serious person than some of the other developers I know. Don't use memes in conversations with collegues and certainly have no interest in toys and games in the office.

Would love to not be responsible and not treat work as a fun place but don't see how that's possible if you care about your job and the work that you produce.

You could do that but if you want to support a lot of different microcontrollers which may all have different implementations, separating the code into a different file makes more sense. Even if you add ifdef statements for every supported controller in there and the file becomes a mess of conditional code, you still have a clean implementation of the file system.

I've never had an issue getting in touch with a human on Amazon. On the contact us page there's even an option for them to call you. Enter your phone number and they usually call in under a minute. This option is available in the UK at least.

In the late 90s I was involved in replacing a software for a financial system for a company that was written in a basic of all languages. It was complex and had almost no documentation. All knowledge of the system was in the head of the programmer of that system and he wasn't happy that his code was being replaced so he was reluctant to help.

The little document that did exist was hopelessly out of date. A lot of business was done on that software