That was a super interesting read, thanks for posting

Yes. COBOL instructions map nearly directly (something like 1:4) to machine language instructions on the mainframe chipsets it was built for. It strongly encourages stateless procedures with its design, and has some other benefits that align closely with the financial sector. You can drop down to assembly as a hot spot optimization if you really need to.

The industry could replace COBOL, but its replacement would wind up looking a lot like COBOL at the code structure level, or a slightly nicer language would have an intermediate transpile step into COBOL or something similar. Probably no performance gains. Perhaps some usability gains. Not enough to sell it as a rewrite.

Reality is its use will probably outlive us all.

This is it. Democrats will continue to talk about how they failed at execution so they don’t have to talk about the real problem: their platform. At least with Trump some folks think there’s a chance he shakes apart the whole system.

I voted for Harris, but I knew it was a lost cause from the moment she became the de facto nominee. She was a status quo candidate in a change election.

It’s the most evenly divided district in Oregon in partisan terms and she ran on a “bipartisan” theme. She’d be pretty hard-pressed to make her case.

The Republicans were absolutely inundating the district with the most vile stuff, like how she “voted in favor of rapists.” They dramatically outspent her campaign.

I’m really happy she won.

That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and maybe Poland doesn’t want to yolo World War 3.

To make this a black and white issue is kinda weird when the severity of being wrong is so high. Just because Poland is being a considerate partner to other NATO member states doesn’t mean it’s required to act that way.

Well, they had a single case of attempted voter fraud, so now I guess it’s only fair we award Trump the presidency here and now. I believe those are the rules.

Because if Russia retaliates it means all of NATO goes to war with Russia. Kind of a big deal that you maybe don’t want to just decide on your own.

Seems like several compromises in v1: incorrect resolution and no audio. Mac 128K is the easiest Mac to run via emulation if you want accuracy.

If you’re interested in Mac OS 7, 8, and 9, you can put those on a regular Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/jaromaz/MacintoshPi

There are so many things like this. Billionaires (or even multimillionaires) could create an endowment to fund operations for museums like this until the end of time. It was already running on a smaller budget, perhaps $1M or so per year. Even a $20M endowment would probably be enough to sustain it forever. With $30M they could probably afford to expand it a bit. One wonders why Allen didn’t set up a trust to do exactly that while he was alive.

I visited the LCM multiple times, and was amazed at how everything was working and interactive. I think it would have been a natural evolution to split the space for early video game consoles as well, perhaps up through the PS1. That might have brought in more (and younger) visitors.

Once you realize that all this stuff is written by either young Gen Z copywriters or AI, everything begins to make more sense.

C

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {

printf(“Hello, world”);

return 0;

}

C++

#include <iostream>

int main() {

std::cout << “Hello, world” << std::endl;

return 0;

}

According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.

tl;dr for article and comments:

Microsoft mangled arrays and code comments with ASCII extended characters into UTF-8 encoding, which makes building many of these files impossible without a lot of extra work. This was mistakenly attributed to Git.

The timestamps for each file are also not preserved, which is debatably a valid criticism of Git (original file timestamps can technically be preserved on an archive like this, but it requires a large amount of work to line up those times and the correct commit times programmatically).

Several Microsoft employees involved in this project appeared in the comments and offered to work directly with the author to correct the character encoding issues. One Microsoft employee indicated that historical timestamps could likely not be included due to Microsoft corporate policy around personally identifiable information.

It was Compaq. Incidentally, that story was the basis for the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone…

Not following the logic here. Why does Microsoft’s choice in 32-bit OS kill Apple?

My old homepage from nearly 10 years ago was a page that looked like it was straight out of the late '90s but was entirely valid HTML5 and CSS 3. That included an applet-like rippling water reflection effect beneath a photo of my city at the time, MIDI audio, JavaScript emulating the blink tag, and right-click “image save protection.”

It was a total blast to make and people loved it, but being in the tech industry it kind of gave the wrong impression to hiring managers, so I swapped it for a much more boring page.

If you click the link…

As someone who’s also invested a considerable amount of my finite life into thoroughly understanding the inner workings of archaic technologies, the level of passion on display here is really motivating me to wrap up one of those projects and release it into the wild (for absolutely no one to use).

This is cool! I did run into a bug, though: the filter list is too tall for mobile and you can’t scroll it.

It’s also missing quite a few retro game shops in the Portland, OR area. However, it seems like arcades are pretty well covered; it’s just missing a couple in Tigard.

Right now Yelp is still more useful for finding shops in my area, but I really like the idea behind this and I’ll keep it in mind.