ajxs

You're right. NED's Synclavier I (1977) was on the market before the Yamaha GS1, but unfortunately for them, Yamaha had already licensed the patent four years earlier (1973).

Check out how complex the design of the Synclavier is: http://www.studiorepair.com/gallery/misc/NED_Synclavier_II/ (and this is the more modern Synclavier II!) It's huge, and cost a fortune. I'd totally understand a company not wanting to manufacture and market it.

> Is this really the "official" reason, or your interpretation?

Stanford did reach out to the American synth manufacturers looking for a company to license the patent. If I recall correctly, the problem wasn't that they didn't get it, the problem was that they weren't interested in, or capable of, building digital synths^1. At that time manufacturing LSI chips for synthesisers was absolutely cutting edge, and Yamaha had taken a major gamble in developing their in-house semiconductor manufacturing capability. Because of that, Yamaha were pretty much the only synth company capable of doing it.

1: The prototypes for the first-generation Yamaha FM synths were built with discrete components, and were enormous. It's understandable that it wouldn't be economical unless you could manufacture your own LSI chips.

Pardon me. I actually pronounce it heitsh, but I don't think there's a concensus among Australians about that.

I'm Australian, and I say 'A Hotel', and 'A Herb'. Until very recently, I'd never heard anyone ever say it differently.

If you think that's surprising, what about the fact that they're still maintaining ColdFusion? https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

Around the time this page was written I was still building enormously graphic-rich websites in Adobe Flash, which was my first introduction to real programming. For whatever reason, despite most of Flash's functionality being incorporated into (and deployment issues being resolved by) modern Javascript, I've done a complete 180 and gone in the other direction. All of my hobby web-design is completely Spartan in comparison. Almost as a rebellion against the excesses of the modern web, so many developers now pride themselves on how minimal we can make our sites!

It's a really good question why Casio didn't continue making synths after the 80s. It's possible that the entire CZ-line was intended to be a one-off response to Yamaha's breakaway success with the DX7. After the CZ-line, it looks like Casio tried to keep up with Yamaha for a few years, but exited the market after Yamaha launched the SY-line. From what I understand, the CZ-series were great sellers then, but even with all of the nostalgia they'd never move large numbers now.

For what it's worth, Yamaha aren't particularly nostalgic about their cult-classic synths either. I guess that from their perspective, the DX7 and CZ-101 were already obsolete within a few short years. By 1990 the sound had already become quite dated, and technology had moved on. Now that they've become popular again as a cult-classic, the margin just isn't there anymore because of the market share of software, or cheap independent FM/PD synths.

Shameless plug, in case anyone is interested, I've done some work reverse-engineering some of these synths:

- https://github.com/ajxs/casio_cz101_rom_disassembly

- https://ajxs.me/blog/uCOM-87_The_Strangest_Architecture_Youv...

Here's an article about this: https://www.michaelgale.dev/blog/releasing-an-album-on-flopp...

In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/

Thanks for sharing! What was your role at Hyde Field?

The Sequential Prophet X is another modern synth with a full-blown x86 PC running inside it. You can see the mainboard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8QDCocnt0M

Really awesome work! A simple OS for retro x86 hardware is a really cool project! I wish I still had some era-appropriate hardware I could test-drive it on.

When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.

One of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Amazing work! In case anyone missed the write-up^1, it's very well-written. I really enjoyed the chapter about designing the instruction set.

1: https://baltazarstudios.com/calculator-introduction/

A lot of effort goes into accurately emulating historic processors in the MAME project, as well as other vintage hardware. It's generally accurate enough that MAME is regularly used to emulate vintage hardware when reverse-engineering devices.

Very cool! Would you believe I was actually just listening to some of the old Ultima game soundtracks when I saw this?

I wonder if they considered writing their disassembly in the 'pre-C++98 dialect of C++' used in the original, and targeting the original compiler. I've done some disassembly of binaries which ran on vintage systems, and I would've targeted the original toolchain if I could have. It's an interesting philosophical question.

Thinking about what would be going through Bill Kerman's little head as he approaches the rocket having just seen poor Jebediah Kerman vaporised on the launch pad was pretty funny. I don't think this same gallows humour extends to kittens.

If I set a folder colour in Finder on my work MacBook, and then plug that USB drive into my personal computer which uses Thunar as a file browser on Debian, nothing would happen.

To me it seems more sensible to store information relevant only to this OS in a specific cache somewhere within that OS. It would even make cache-like functionality such as evicting old entries super easy.

In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.

This isn't the kind of music I'd normally listen to, but I'm enjoying your album! Very well produced. I bought a copy. Thanks for sharing!

The SPARK subset of Ada^1 has a similar kind of move semantics for pointer types^2.

1: SPARK is a formally verifiable subset of Ada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.05576

> Its unlikely that another platform would be able to reach this state...

Is this really true? The computer ecosystem is more open now than ever. The original PC BIOS (which PC-compatible manufacturers needed to implement) was never an open, documented standard. It was a proprietary, closed system made by IBM. It's pretty fair to say that IBM didn't anticipate a PC/x86 ecosystem developing around their product. They even sued companies who made their own compatible BIOSes (like Corona). Intel didn't really have much to do with the success of the product at that point in time either, much less Microsoft.

In contrast, every widely-used modern system for hardware abstraction (UEFI/ACPI/DeviceTree/OpenSBI/etc) are open, royalty-free standards that anyone can use. Their implementation in ARM is newer, and inconsistent, but that's only because of how hugely diverse the ARM ecosystem is.

Some of my first experiments with Ada were based on this tutorial series! Great to see it on the front-page of HN.

Since this was published, it's become a lot easier to set up an ARM toolchain using Alire, Ada's package manager. AdaCore have also created some new tools for auto-generating the startup code for ARM systems: https://www.adacore.com/blog/ada-on-any-arm-cortex-m-device-...

Somewhat related: https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles/b...

Hello! I don't have a website for your webring, but I do run the webri.ng service (https://webri.ng), where you can host your webring! Just thought I'd mention it in case it's useful to you.

Speaking as an Australian that works on React CRUD applications because there's nothing else in the market, I've been reading through this thread thinking the exact same thing.

Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed: They don't archive well.

Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.

At the risk of sounding like a language zealot, have you ever looked at Ada? It was explicitly designed to be very readable, and for use in safety-critical systems. Ada isn't perfect in all the ways Rust isn't, and it might not be the right choice for your system, but if you're writing systems software it's worth a look. If you're writing a web backend on the other hand, it's not worth a look at all.

Unfortunately the missing ingredient to recreating UO is a playerbase that can see the virtual world with innocent eyes. This HN post[1] always comes to mind.

By complete coincidence, yesterday I was just looking at the website for a guild I was in 25 years ago on Oceania [2], which is somehow still online! I had a great time playing UO back then, but I don't think the experience can be recreated today. The people have changed.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33189823 2: http://tdr.iwarp.com/main_nfl.html