RIP Steve Jobs

[Churchill]

I used to work with a lady who would always have the contrast & brightness whacked up to the maximum.

It was the only way to make a mono screen go fuzzy.

Doesn't do much for the poor old phosphors!!!

[Churchill]

Nah.

All the menus were burned in.

You could fill in the stuff with the monitor turned off.

Ah, nice little "║" "╗" "╝" "└" characters for drawing yer windows and menus!!!

I wrote a windowing system for a PC based manufacturing system in "Modula 2" using those chaps and others like 'em...

Those were the days.

Had to watch out for "snow" when updating the display on some PCs...

[d000hg]

Are there VMs available that virtualize/emulate mobile devices (if that's feasible) such as the iPhone/iPad, Android etc, allowing you to test local websites (during development) on the devices without having to buy them all or pay a 3rd party to use theirs?

Yes, you can use things like iPhone simulator for testing your apps, not just websites. But other than telling you they exist, I don't know any specifics.

[Sysman]

Thanks. I might do that.

I'm not sure when I decided I should be paying for software. Never used to be like that.

If you really want free, try VirtualBox.

I haven't tried the Mac incarnation of it, but it runs fine on Windows and Linux.

[Sysman]

Very interesting Nick. Back in day the Nice office of ClientCo had a NeXT box, not sure which hardware but they let me loose on it as they didn't actually know what to do with it after purchasing. I didn't know what to do with it either but was fun to play around with whenever I was down their way.

I heard about a young permie who still lived with his parents and sunk his savings into a NeXT box. Had to feel sorry for him really, 'cos they weren't cheap.

[Sysman]

Amstrad 8256 (or 8512) and Amstrad PC1512 (or PC1640) by any chance?

I had a PC 1512 which worked fine, once they got one to me that the contrast and brightness knobs didn't fall off at the first touch.

I sold it to a lass for the book keeping she did for hubby's business, and it soldiered on for several years.

It also had a keyboard key for [sic], which I haven't seen on any other word processor, but it was very useful for documents full of technical jargon.

The only drawback with it was the Extremely Loud Daisy Wheel Printer. I bought some continuous A4 and went for a walk when that was printing.

[Sysman]

To be fair, in the 80's I saw a lot more amstrads than Apples

I read that Sage did all their initial development on Amstrads.

[Sysman]

Obj-C is correct; the "optical disk" was actually a magneto-optical device which was the Next Big Thing but never became cheap enough. According to the review, it could store 256MB on a disk cartridge costing $50, so it was unlikely to survive into the era of cheap CD-Rs

I remember those disks. We used them for a COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) solution. The £4K scanner was fun, but the disk writing software was pretty unreliable.

[Sysman]

I still remember the joy of 8086 assembler after years of 8085 programming.

And it wasn't altogether easy getting books about it in those days, the company I worked for seemed to think that £30 was too much to spend on such things.

I recall ordering K&R's C book from a bookselling neighbour. He was astounded that it was thirty quid, and rather embarrassed about charging me so much "for a paperback".

[Sysman]

There was the option of CGA or mono (the amstrad version of mono of course which would naturally be slightly different to any other version of the mono adaptor) IIRC.

We bought the CGA version.

The 1640 had a version of the EGA (again slightly different to anything else with EGA on it).

And the PCW floppy disks were unlike any other.

They were also hard to come by if you wanted them the same day.