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16-bit Intel 8088 chip (c. 1985)

135 points · 23 comments · rbanffy

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PaulHoule · 1790093888 · focus · HN ↗
Everyone should own at least one book of Bukowski poetry: in addition to computers he wrote about cats, going to the track, drinking and other things his life. I remember riding the train from Dresden to Prague and the person next to us was reading his novel Post Office which is a wonderful story of irresponsibility.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)
1. deepspace · 1790094078 · focus · HN ↗
  Reading Bukowski often makes me yearn for a life that could have been. An often miserable, always irresponsible, but often wonderful life. Of course, his real life was probably far less glamorous than he makes it sound, but, man, did he have a way with words.
2. ggerules · 1790098632 · focus · HN ↗
  My favorite Bukowski book of poetry "Love is a Dog from Hell". Very Bukowski.
  Shout out to City Lights Bookstore in San Fancisco. I bought a lot of poetry books there in the late 80s and early 90s.
3. brudgers · 1790141754 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
dhosek · 1790096761 · focus · HN ↗
I was curious about what was happening with the domain name here (after all, shkspr.mobi has nothing to do with Shakespeare) so imagine my delight at discovering it was an actual poem and my vague notion that I’ve been to the site for poetry in the past was, in fact, correct.
badc0ffee · 1790097578 · focus · HN ↗
I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
1. bitwize · 1790101966 · focus · HN ↗
  I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.
  1. badc0ffee · 1790112356 · focus · HN ↗
    What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later!)
    bitwize · 1790127825 · focus · HN ↗
    The Tandy 2000 had four custom slots that only accepted their own card format. Here again it was doomed to failure and it's kind if a shame because the cards were easy as balls to install: the cards were mounted on metal trays and slid in horizontally, guided by rails in the chassis, and did not require the cover of the machine to be removed for insertion or removal.
    Only a few expansion options were available, all from Radio Shack: a color graphics option (640x400x8 colors in 1983!) for which you had to procure the matching monitor, a memory expansion (up to two could be installed for a total of 768k, by stacking RAM chips some aftermarket vendors got this to 896k), a bus mouse adapter/real-time clock combo board, and I believe an external hard disk controller. One expansion, the "TV/Joystick expansion" which would give the 2000 composite out and access to joysticks for gaming, was planned but (to my knowledge) never released. As far as I know only one graphical game saw commercial release for the 2000: a special build of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
    LeFantome · 1790179998 · focus · HN ↗
    Those graphics sound amazing. But I guess EGA could do 640x350 in 16 colours by 1984.
    badc0ffee · 1790188972 · focus · HN ↗
    That same year, IBM released the 3-board PGA which did 640x480x256.
    bitwize · 1790263306 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, but it cost as much as a whole Tandy 2000 with the color graphics option!
    The PGC was perhaps the first GPU for PC systems. It had its own 8086 processor on board, which would accept graphics commands through a ring buffer shared with the host system, and the 8086 would translate those into frame buffer operations it needed to perform. A few years back some clever git found an exploit to allow arbitrary code to be run on the PGC's 8086.
2. ErroneousBosh · 1790102345 · focus · HN ↗
  It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.
  I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
3. em3rgent0rdr · 1790106669 · focus · HN ↗
  Still is just a bit true to today with all the walled gardens.
4. rbanffy · 1790233241 · focus · HN ↗
  Same here. And I wouldn’t pass anything weird.
  Currently I’m looking for a VT-330 or some other terminal with Tektronix graphics. These seem like unobtanium this side of the Atlantic.
  So, if someone has a Rainbow, Z-100, AT&T Unix PC, 3278 terminal, or anything like that, I’m rescue stray computers.
jojocool0501 · 1790097708 · focus · HN ↗
"My favorite Bukowski quote is: 'To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.'
You can read the full letter from which this quote was taken, along with a short bio, here: <a href="https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-john-martin-letter/" rel="nofollow">https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-j..."
runjake · 1790098382 · focus · HN ↗
I used to read a lot of Bukowski. I still have a very large number of his books, rare and out of print, stored in boxes.
At first, I thought this was a well-written parody. I never had one inkling about this poem or his technical knowledge.
1. rbanffy · 1790233447 · focus · HN ↗
  > understand and suffered from these gotchas.
  Compatibility was their greatest weakness and, at the same time, their greatest strength. It allowed the Cambrian explosion of the 70s and 80s personal computers, each with their own superpowers.
rzzzt · 1790101843 · focus · HN ↗
The 1581 had some amount of MFM diskette compatibility.
Luc · 1790106214 · focus · HN ↗
"nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created on an IBM Personal Computer."
Well I guess, the 1571 drive was released that summer, with the hardware capable of reading IBM PC floppies, but I think it took some years for the software to be developed (Big Blue Reader).
jazzprogramming · 1790153967 · focus · HN ↗
DON'T TRY
- Bukowski
I've loved that from the moment I stumbled upon it.
Both funny and serious at the same time.
alberto-m · 1790155580 · focus · HN ↗
> but the wind still blows over / Savannah
Is this a citation of a former work? There's a famous Italian song titled “And yet the wind still blows” (1978), built in the same format of this poem.
snozolli · 1790641553 · focus · HN ↗
This revived a memory of my homework, saved from GW-BASIC on a Leading Edge Model D, being unreadable on the school's IBM PCs. I always thought it was something like line-ending encoding, but current Google results indicate that it should have worked. Maybe our disk drive was miscalibrated... I'm glad to now be living in the era of USB thumb drives and Dropbox.

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