Make sure you look after your own health too, if you lose that it’ll be a lot harder to help those around you.

I'd like to see the same thing applied to desktop computers, a Mac Neo maybe. The Mac mini has moved up the cost/performance ladder, there's room at the bottom for a simple, low cost desktop, maybe with Neo colours too.

The Mac Mini's price is already quite low while its performance keeps getting stronger.

In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.

Switch to iWork and get a copy of LibreOffice whenever an old docx document looks funky in Pages.

Buy yourself something nice every month with the money you save.

The only reason I pay for M365 family is for the 1 TB per member storage. Excel is a bonus, and Word and Powerpoint are basically not needed any more.

If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.

I agree the 1TB is a good deal. But our phones are Apple and our email is Google, so it’s all wonky sync via OneDrive (and when you have a lot of OneDrive the forced syncs to your windows login takes a lot of cache space).

Wish there was an open interface to use cloud storage, like a mount point, so Gmail or iPhotos could just write there rather than the hand carrying of data. But probably vendor lock-in is too compelling

Preview.app in NeXTstep used to have a postscript window where you could type in postscript (or paste it in) and interactively work with it. It was an essential development tool to help write postscript before including it in a source code file as a pswrap.

Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).

It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.

Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.

But how would you place this Z8000 assembly in the memory to be executed? Most likely via some script that used the terminal too, so simply calling the routines via the terminal was easier, though slower (IIRC formatting the drive took over 2 hours).

Yes, very similar to what you did with the script, but I’d guess you could enter a small routine into memory with the monitor then jump to it to execute. This would be faster than serial port speed, but really not that different. In the end anything that works would be good enough.

> (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).

I think that was my mistake, when I posted this to Lobsters. Sorry about that.

I did. The only Playboy magazine I ever bought contained an interview with Steve Jobs. Unfortunately I lent it to a friend and never got it back.

I had something similar. A friend of mine gave me an issue because it had a Borges story in it. I mean, I looked at the centerfold, but mostly paid attention to the story.

Which is somewhat akin to downloading one today. If, however, that same kid started small, with a data model, then added calculation, and UI and stepped through everything designing, reviewing, and testing as they went, they would learn a lot, and at a faster pace than if they wrote it character by character.

Our Graphics Lab at University used to be in an old house opposite a fish and chip shop. The people at the fish and chip shop were suspicious of our lab as all they saw was young men (mostly) entering and leaving at all hours of the night. We really missed an opportunity to name it "Hoare House" after one of our favourite computer scientists.

The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.

Exactly. Windows Cairo was planned to be a competitor to NeXTSTEP, and later, parts of it made it to Windows 95 and NT.

There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.