Why "cool" websites and apps are hard to read

[jcuknz]

To the thread title I blame it on idiots trying to be 'different' instead of sticking to tried and true methods .... this is epidemic in photography too

[Richard Lundberg]

Yeah, winchesters that's what they were. I had a DEC PDP 11-34 in the early 70s with a 10 MB hard drive. It was almost five feet tall and had four or five platters in it. Now I have 7.25 terabytes in .375 cu ft.

[Saorsa]

I recall the first macintosh and how excited folks were to use as many fonts as possible in creating a notice for the bulletin board. I am truly grateful that it was not a color system or my eyes would have been destroyed forever.

[Saorsa]

Yeah, winchesters that's what they were. I had a DEC PDP 11-34 in the early 70s with a 10 MB hard drive. It was almost five feet tall and had four or five platters in it. Now I have 7.25 terabytes in .375 cu ft.

How's this for 99 megabytes



All yours in the 70s for a mere $135,000

[ajohnw]

I recall the first macintosh and how excited folks were to use as many fonts as possible in creating a notice for the bulletin board. I am truly grateful that it was not a color system or my eyes would have been destroyed forever.

For those that know about these things the rise of the IBM PC against others with a flat memory model is absolutely incredible. I suppose that some don't know that IBM designed the PC and then simply released it for any one to make FOC. They of course were used to paged memory systems and probably couldn't imagine anything else. It gets worse. It seems Gates and his small crew at that time couldn't design a re enterent disk operating system DOS that's why it had MS in front of it. Many could, many were available. His claim to fame which turned out to be false is that it would emulate CP/M so some software was available relatively easily. The really crazy thing is that I was talking to DEC at the time and they reckoned PC's would never really catch on - what the hell would people do with them! Silly thing is if they had ported one of their own OS's and sold it cheap I doubt if microsoft would even exist now. IBM tried to do something about MsDOS at one point but too late especially as MS had a cute way of making sure that their products finished up on new machines - very cheap if you agree to always use it.

No mention of where the basic idea behind windows actually came from as people for some reason think it came from some where else. IBM again actually.

I would say in rough terms all of this held PC's back one way or another for 4 to 5 years at the very least.

John
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[Saorsa]

For those that know about these things the rise of the IBM PC against others with a flat memory model is absolutely incredible. I suppose that some don't know that IBM designed the PC and then simply released it for any one to make FOC. They of course were used to paged memory systems and probably couldn't imagine anything else. It gets worse. It seems Gates and his small crew at that time couldn't design a re enterent disk operating system DOS that's why it had MS in front of it. Many could, many were available. His claim to fame which turned out to be false is that it would emulate CP/M so some software was available relatively easily. The really crazy thing is that I was talking to DEC at the time and they reckoned PC's would never really catch on - what the hell would people do with them! Silly thing is if they had ported one of their own OS's and sold it cheap I doubt if microsoft would even exist now. IBM tried to do something about MsDOS at one point but too late especially as MS had a cute way of making sure that their products finished up on new machines - very cheap if you agree to always use it.

No mention of where the basic idea behind windows actually came from as people for some reason think it came from some where else. IBM again actually.

I would say in rough terms all of this held PC's back one way or another for 4 to 5 years at the very least.

John
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Actually, CP/M was an emulation of DEC DOS and didn't compare to RSX. But, it was good enough for microprocessors. I remember going to a training course on the Intel 8085 and another programmer and I looked at it over a couple of beers and said "HOLY S**T, this is a PDP-11/70 on a chip"

This stuff was actually a bit later in my career. My first program was written in Bi-quinary machine code.

[Saorsa]

No mention of where the basic idea behind windows actually came from as people for some reason think it came from some where else. IBM again actually.

The Xerox STAR workstation had windows and a trashcan icon.


AT&T Bell Labs had a patent on overlapping windows in a terminal environment before the GUI became prominent.

[dabhand]

To the thread title I blame it on idiots trying to be 'different' instead of sticking to tried and true methods .... this is epidemic in photography too

Tend to disagree in part there - whilst some of the 'different' methods my be less valuable than others, were it not for some of those 'idiots' there would never have been photography, let alone the massive strides in technology that have taken place over the past few decades - in fact it would probably be more true to say that it is the 'tried and trusted' which has held the practical side of photography back rather than allowed it to develop to its full potential.

steve

[ajohnw]

Actually, CP/M was an emulation of DEC DOS and didn't compare to RSX. But, it was good enough for microprocessors. I remember going to a training course on the Intel 8085 and another programmer and I looked at it over a couple of beers and said "HOLY S**T, this is a PDP-11/70 on a chip"

This stuff was actually a bit later in my career. My first program was written in Bi-quinary machine code.

CP/M was a part rip off of DEC's RT11 in as much as some of the commands ideas were very similar. RT for real time which sounds odd as the other PDP OS RSX11M would do more but as a result was rather ponderous. RT11 would run 6 tasks if I remember correctly and designed for that. For data entry type office work at the time it could run 5 terminal plus printing on a more or less bottom end at the time PDP 11/23. That was reckoned to be the max but it could take another terminal. RT11 could be bought with nearly 6ft of manuals explaining how and why in some detail. Compiled code usually ran a shared run time so memory usage was very low.

The 8086 was a load of junk compared with the other main possibility the 68000 but the idea of huge flat memory spaces probably didn't seem to be needed at the time.

I often wonder if Gates was being cute by producing a DOS that wasn't re entrant. After all most people realised that manipulating a stack pointer was a cardinal sin. Rumour had it that IBM wanted it to be capable of printing while people carried on working but they couldn't do it. That sort of problem makes it more difficult for other people to write software for the system as they have to re create some of the functionality. Later on windows the first time some one wrote an application there was a huge initial tedious programming task that the compiler could easily have done. Later still I watched a visual studio training video. It used parts of MS Word as an example and pointed out that they hadn't used C to produce it. The compiler did help a little. Much more recently I sat next to a windows programmer writing an application that used an explorer window. I was some what gob smacked by the amount of time he spent closing un used entries into it. The compiler could just open the ones he used and leave the others closed by default. Not been near it for years but this sort of thing seems to be inherent in windows application writing. I gave up hacking PC's in C and assembler to do small jobs for me as soon as windows was really entrenched. It just took too much time. Now there's a conspiracy theory for you. They most certainly have changed things at times to make things difficult for the competition even when their products were better than their own.

John
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[loosecanon]

I started with an Apricot running MSDOS with a 9 inch green screen, but it could handle Word as WYSIWYG, printing out on a dot matrix printer. Last year I booted it up from its 3½inch floppy disks to make sure it still worked - 30 years on.

[Macmahon]

To the thread title I blame it on idiots trying to be 'different' instead of sticking to tried and true methods .... this is epidemic in photography too

Henry Ford, John Logie Baird, and the Wright brothers tried to be different too. Silly idiots.

[Colin Southern]

Henry Ford, John Logie Baird, and the Wright brothers tried to be different too. Silly idiots.

Meh - those Wright brothers just copied our Richard Pearse

I told him not to Tweet about it!

[Macmahon]

I told him not to Tweet about it!

You're older than I guessed. We must all have been at flying school together

[Colin Southern]

You're older than I guessed. We must all have been at flying school together

They say "you're as old as you feel" - so that makes me about the same age as Richard Pearse!

[jcuknz]

Henry Ford, John Logie Baird, and the Wright brothers tried to be different too. Silly idiots.

And look at the problems they hav caused us