I liked his frequently contrarian views. Pre-internet his Cringely column (which he took over from someone else) was a great source of information for those of us living far away from Silicon Valley. RIP.
I've been working on a web based UML modelling tool for a while now. It's gone through a few technical iterations before this version really progressed well. It does live updates between two browser windows, and supports iPad pen input. I know UML is not all that popular with many people, but I use it all the time and most of the other tools were not very good, so it's kind of yak-shaving too, I use it every day myself. It's got ArchiMate support but I've disabled that until I can pay the license fee.
I started out with a wasm version, which worked ok, but needed a lot of work, then moved to SwiftUI which got me further, then ported that to HTML/JavaScript, so it's been a bit of a journey exploring what can be achieved with web technology, I'm more of a backend developer, so this has been interesting.
I'm at the stage where I could do with some feedback from other users. It's much more fun programming, and using it myself, but have to move on eventually.
A cautionary note. Your Claude account is tied to your email address, and it cannot be changed. If you lose access to your email address (I sold the domain), you cannot access your Claude account any more, you cannot change the email address, you can't cancel it, and the billing continues.
This happened to me, so far two months without any progress with Claude support trying to resolve it. Chatbot support got no response, email support got a single response after a month saying it had been passed on to another team to resolve. Mostly just silence.
I too have an M1 Pro and it does everything I need to do. I bought it in 2023, so it's 'only' 3.5 years old now.
Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.
While I'm sure this was built for fun, you have to wonder if maybe some of these tools could be useful again. With the increased power of modern computers, and some additions of modern technology like a web UI, HTTP support for data access, and the not-needed-in-the-past-but-essential-now security.
We could be entering a new age of building our own tools, llm assisted of course, but still a lot of fun.
I've been through similar, don't give up trying to find a solution. I've recently found what mine is, and am doing much better now. Everyone is different, be careful with advice on the internet, but at the least it gives you ideas for further investigation. For me it was elevated homocysteine, with a genetic origin. I could get an analysis by uploading my genome to Genetic Genie, but ultimately the homocysteine test was the proof.
I tried clover. Eventually it just got replaced more and more with grass, now there's not much there. It was meant to be more drought tolerant than grass, but it didn't work out that way. I probably need to do more research.
I'd like to see the same thing applied to desktop computers, a Mac Neo maybe. The Mac mini has moved up the cost/performance ladder, there's room at the bottom for a simple, low cost desktop, maybe with Neo colours too.
In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.
Preview.app in NeXTstep used to have a postscript window where you could type in postscript (or paste it in) and interactively work with it. It was an essential development tool to help write postscript before including it in a source code file as a pswrap.
Yes, very similar to what you did with the script, but I’d guess you could enter a small routine into memory with the monitor then jump to it to execute. This would be faster than serial port speed, but really not that different. In the end anything that works would be good enough.
Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).
It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.
Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.
Which is somewhat akin to downloading one today. If, however, that same kid started small, with a data model, then added calculation, and UI and stepped through everything designing, reviewing, and testing as they went, they would learn a lot, and at a faster pace than if they wrote it character by character.
Our Graphics Lab at University used to be in an old house opposite a fish and chip shop. The people at the fish and chip shop were suspicious of our lab as all they saw was young men (mostly) entering and leaving at all hours of the night. We really missed an opportunity to name it "Hoare House" after one of our favourite computer scientists.
The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.
There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.
I treat code quality, and readability, as one of the goals. The LLM can help with this and refactor code much quicker than a human. If I think the code is getting too complex I change over to architecture review and refactoring until I am happy with it.
There's a selfish case for the wealthy to care about this: rising tides lift all boats, including theirs. When the bottom 80% are struggling with housing insecurity and desperation, the consequences don't stay contained to poor neighbourhoods. San Francisco seems like a good example—the visible decline in public spaces, safety concerns, and urban decay affect everyone who lives there, regardless of income. The wealthy can insulate themselves to a degree, but they can't fully escape a deteriorating society. They'd be better off in a city where everyone has a baseline of stability.
Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.
An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.
Commissions were different back then. I worked part time selling computers around 1990 and a little earlier, margin on computers was moving down, but was as high as 50%, I recall it moving down to 30% and stabilising there for a while. I don't remember software margins, but it could have been about the same. I used to get 50% of the margin as commission.
What sort of systems do you work on to require this kind of traffic volume? I've worked on one project that I'd consider relatively high volume (UK Post Office Horizon Online) and we were only targeting 500 TPS.
It's the misuse of OO constructs that gives it a bad name, almost always that is inheritance being overused/misused. Encapsulation and modularity are important for larger code bases, and polymorphism is useful for making code simpler, smaller and more understandable.
Maybe the extra long names in java also don't help too, along with the overuse/forced use of patterns? At least it's not Hungarian notation.
It's likely that is is mostly just the standard Microsoft Basic with some modified I/O routines. Since Microsoft Basic is now under the MIT license you are free to modify the code, it may be relatively easy to re-implement the I/O routines and have a legal 'recreation' of the P2305 cartridge.