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1500 questions
22
votes
7 answers
Disk compression risks in MS-DOS
Continuing my nostalgia reading of Dan Gookin's DOS For Dummies, there is a section that literally advises against compression programs like DriveSpace and calls it a solution to a problem not some glorious road that one must take.
On more recent…
user10191234
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4 answers
How did programs/patches stopping Amiga idle floppy drive noise work?
The Amiga computers would by default automatically detect a disk being inserted and respond by reading from it and displaying its icon.
Polling the drive(s) for a new disk would produce a clicking sound every 1-2s.
If one had more than one drive or…
nsandersen
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22
votes
6 answers
Did home computers have mechanical interfaces to typewriters?
In the April 1985 issue of Ahoy!, a reader asks whether it is possible to hook a conventional typewriter up to his Commodore 64. Surprisingly to me, columnist David Barron answers that such interfaces did exist in the recent past:
Years ago I…
Psychonaut
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1 answer
Where is Mike Lesk's (circa 1973) "portable I/O package" for C?
According to Dennis Ritchie's 1993 paper The Development of the C Language:
Also during this period, the compiler was retargeted to other nearby machines, particularly the Honeywell 635 and IBM 360/370; because the language could not live in…
Simon Kissane
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22
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Was it possible to cause persistent changes to a mid-1980s IBM-PC using POKE in GWBASIC?
TL;DR: Using the DEF SEG and POKE commands in GWBASIC, was there any way to make changes to an IBM-PC compatible computer that would (a) persist even after a reboot and (b) cause an increase in crash frequency, thus effectively damaging the…
Schmuddi
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4 answers
What was the first programming language with generics?
To belatedly celebrate the release of Go 1.18, I ask the question: what was the first programming language with support for generics?
For concreteness (to prevent anyone trying to weasel out with ‘what is generics anyway’), the central examples…
user3840170
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22
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3 answers
Why are these DOS console drivers wasting precious bytes?
While doing some research on DOS device drivers, I took a peek at the console drivers DISPLAY.SYS and ANSI.SYS that are part of the DOS 6.20 installation. Both have "Microsoft" stamped on, and so I'm not surprised to see that one copied some code…
Sep Roland
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22
votes
3 answers
Where did the term ‘blue screen of death’ come from?
Did somebody famous coin the term? Where does it originate from? I have it heard many times over the years. I wonder if there is a neat bit of trivia associated with the term?
Neil Meyer
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5 answers
How did old computers address far more than 64K of memory despite only having a 16 bit address bus?
I have an old Sharp PC-G830 pocket computer from the '80s that has 32K of RAM and 256K of ROM. I also have a simple single board computer I built with 128K of RAM and a few megabytes of ROM from a MicroSD card. Both of these computers, however, use…
Shades
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22
votes
4 answers
Why did the TRS-80 CPU have priority over the display?
The original TRS-80 had a separate bank of static RAM for video memory, so that there would be no interference between display and CPU when the CPU was just doing calculations in main memory.
When it was updating the display, there was going to be a…
rwallace
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22
votes
2 answers
How are Amiga libraries structured?
In this Crash course to Amiga assembly programming, the author loads A6 with a constant, and then regularly jumps to offsets from that constant. He explains: All functions within that library can be accessed by jumping to addresses relative to the…
Omar and Lorraine
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22
votes
6 answers
Why did some video games apparently use "interlaced" video modes?
I was under the impression that "interlaced" video modes was only a thing for remote television content because it saved bandwidth to only send 50% of the data to the homes, so you could fit more TV channels in the same bandwidth (air or cable).
I…
Bucky o'Hare
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votes
10 answers
Why did BASIC programs tend to READ a redundant copy of DATA?
Take for example this BASIC version of ELIZA which starts out (in lines 50–170) by a number of READ loops which copy DATA (lines 1340 and following) into a handful of arrays.
Isn't this rather wasteful on an 8-bit computer with perhaps anywhere from…
natevw
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votes
2 answers
Did the Super Game Boy (1) run 2.5% or 4% faster than a Game Boy?
For years, I've heard "4%", repeated over and over. But then I read this today:
The original release of the Super Game Boy runs about 2.5% faster than an original Game Boy.
And the source is the people who made the hardware modification fix thing,…
Rogar E.
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3 answers
Did any processor have opposite endianness for instructions and data?
The question "Which endian was the Intel 4004?" generated some discussion about the distinction between the endianness of instructions versus data. In the case of the 4004, the code space had 12 bit addresses, and addresses which were encoded…
DrSheldon
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