Members of Long Now
With thousands of members from across the globe, the Long Now community has a wide range of perspectives, stories, and experiences to share. We're delighted to showcase this curated set of Ignite Talks, created and given by the Long Now members themselves. Presenting on the subjects of their choice, our speakers have precisely 5 minutes to amuse, educate, enlighten, or inspire the audience!We're opening talk submissions to all members in early April and will send via email; we can accept both in
Building a "hello, world!" program using MPW
I've been setting up a Basilisk II emulator to try my hand at developing apps for 68k System 7 systems, and have set up the Macintosh Programmer's Workstation. I wrote up a standard hello.c program:
#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
printf("hello, world!\n");
return 0;
}
After compiling with SC hello.c, I got a file hello.c.o, but when I tried executing the program, it tells me that "file hello.c.o is not executable".
I figured to try linking it with link, but am still getting
What was the title of this IBM PC software compendium book circa mid 80s?
Sometime in the mid 90s I stopped by a library that used to sell off their old stock and bought a copy of an IBM PC software compendium that I am now struggling to remember the name of or find anywhere. This book was basically a listing of PC titles available at the time (including screenshots) and covered games, productivity software, etc.
The distinguishing features of this book were that it was a paperback with a black cover, approximately 8x11 inches in size, a fairly high page count with ti
use 386SWAT from real mode to trace in protected mode
<div><p>The 386SWAT debugger seems to be able to continue tracing a real-mode (not V86) program that goes into protected mode, but I don't quite understand how to configure 386SWAT, and I can't find any example in assembly language.
Please does anyone know how to do this ?
Or know of another debugger that knows how to change mode (RM -> PM) while tracing ?
Thanks.</p></div>
Was MS-DOS window in Windows 95 something like current DosBox?
Windows 1.x, 2.x and 3.x required a DOS to be loaded before running them. Later Windows 9.x and ME had similar (?) way of working, but DOS was included with them, 32-bit multitasking and other stuff added.
I would like to ask about MS-DOS window in Windows 95/98/Me. Correct me if I am wrong, but it was not calling a Ms DOS behind the scene, but rather provided some emulation of Ms DOS. That's the reason why running DOS application in Windows 95/98/Me was much slower than running them directly in
Minimum game cartridge manufacturing time
I saw a remark in a documentary on the 1990s game console industry, that a key point that swayed third-party developers from Nintendo to Sony was the time taken to manufacture games. Specifically, not in the sense of throughput but latency: the time elapsed from getting the news that your game is selling well, and getting on the phone to Nintendo/Sony to order a new batch, to having it manufactured. With Nintendo cartridges, it was months; with Sony CDs, it was days.
Some of that difference is o
What's the most bizarro bug you've seen? [closed]
<div><p>I was a systems programmer. I have 2.</p>
<p>1: a pill bug crawled out of the listings file cabinet. We stared at it.</p>
<p>Oh, not bizarro-world enough?</p>
<p>2: The "hyperbolic tangent" system function gave the right answer monday, wednesday, and friday but was wrong on tuesdays and thursdays.</p>
<p>The math library was improperly sharing local storage with the date function, and the low bit of the date was being used as a logical variable.</p>
<p>CAN YOU BEAT THAT?</p></div>
Little-known history [closed]
<div><p>I worked with an old guy who worked with Univac 1 at Census. They attached an oscillator to the instruction decode unit and played a different tone for each op. It was a crude debugging tool, like, you could notice infinite loops.</p>
<p><strong>Question 1:</strong> did you know:</p>
<p><em>This was the origin of TV computers going "boop, beep" until the 80's, when everybody had one and it sounded ridiculous?</em></p>
<p><strong>Question 2:</strong> Isn't hat just so cool??</p></div>
Did the UNIVAC I really have a 2.25 MHz clock speed?
Wikipedia states that UNIVAC I "could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock." (link) This claim is repeated basically all over the Internet.
I find this clock speed pretty fast compared to the stated number of operations per second. It also doesn't match with the clock speed of its contemporaries (e.g. 125 kHz for IBM 650, 100 kHz for ENIAC)
How should I interpret these UNIVAC specs?
A kind of modem that let you make voice calls with a simultaneous data connection: what was it called?
<div><p>I recall in the early 90s a type of modem (for analog phone lines) that let you conduct a voice call while maintaining a data connection. It sent bursts of data during the natural silences in conversation. What was this called? I thought it was a "data over voice modem" or "voice over data modem", but Internet searches didn't help me find examples of what I'm thinking of (possibly because the term now means something else).</p></div>
What was this kind of modem called?
<div><p>I recall in the early 90s a type of modem (for analog phone lines) that let you conduct a voice call while maintaining a data connection. It sent bursts of data during the natural silences in conversation. What was this called? I thought it was a "data over voice modem" or "voice over data modem", but Internet searches didn't help me find examples of what I'm thinking of (possibly because the term now means something else).</p></div>
New to DIY computer hardware projects [closed]
<div><p>I have a 2009 MacBook and a custom built desktop pc with likely a third generation Intel CPU, a Samsung SSD, two seagate hard disks, and some other stuff.</p>
<p>How should I begin to assess what I can do with all the components? Take them apart, list them, and research them online first?</p></div>
How to use external asm function in "vscode-amiga-debug' cross compiler?
<div><p>I would like to write functions in assembly along with the c source code, but somehow I can't find the syntax.
I tried e.g. in the fname.asm file (simplified):</p>
<p>fill_bmap:
rts</p>
<p>In the fname.c source:</p>
<p>extern void fill_bmap();</p>
<p>But the compiler gives this error message:
undefined reference to `fill_bmap'</p></div>
Late 80s/early 90s matrix printer with a solid, curved front cover
<div><p>I am trying to remember the exact year but I am drawing a blank. We had this matrix printer sometime between 1989 and 1994 in Hungary. What I distinctly remember is the front cover: it was solid, not opaque and it was not flat, it was a curved shape. I think there were noise dampening inserts inside it, just pieces of foam glued in. Most certainly it was parallel, Centronics, likely 9 pins.</p></div>
Help me find a late 80s/early 90s matrix printer
<div><p>I am trying to remember the exact year but I am drawing a blank. We had this matrix printer sometime between 1989-1994 in Hungary. What I distinctly remember is the front cover: it was solid, not opaque and it was not flat, it was a curved shape. I think there were noise dampening inserts inside it, just pieces of foam glued in. Most certainly it was parallel, Centronics, likely 9 pins.</p></div>
help me find an arcade spaceship game from late 80s to early 90s
what I remember of this game is that it had some very particular mechanics. For example, in some levels, your ship had wings, and you would fly across the screen (though I can’t recall whether it was a horizontal or vertical view). In the next level, your vehicle changed and had wheels, and you advanced through the level, having to jump at certain points. Another mechanic of the game was that you collected power-ups (similar to Darius games) and ended up with extra things to shoot on either side
Futuristic arcade spaceship game where your ship gains wings and wheels, collecting power-ups—from the late 80s/early 90s
Can anyone identify this game from the late 80s to the early 90s?
What I remember about this game is that it had some very particular mechanics. For example, in some levels, your ship had wings, and you would fly across the screen (though I can’t recall whether it was a horizontal or vertical view). In the next level, your vehicle changed and had wheels, and you advanced through the level, having to jump at certain points.
Another mechanic of the game was that you collected power-ups (similar to
Stumbling Towards First Light
A satellite capturing high-resolution images of Chile on the afternoon of October 18, 02019, would have detected at least two signs of unusual human activity.Pictures taken over Santiago, Chile’s capital city, would have shown numerous plumes of smoke slanting away from buses, subway stations and commercial buildings that had been torched by rioters. October 18 marked the start of the Estallido Social (Social Explosion), a months-long series of violent protests that pitched this South American c
Historically speaking, why is man-db a separate package that is not part of the GNU project?
As far as I understand, GNU had a goal to create a completely free (libre) operating system, and to that end, created FOSS replacements for many UNIX programs. It puzzles me why they didn't try to create a replacement for man, as it was a standard program in UNIX ever since V2, and pretty important. I am not sure when man-db was created (the package which provides man on modern distributions), but the release notes give the earliest release in 1995, although that had a version number of 2.3.6. D
I want to use the line jack of a dial-up modem
Typically, an ISA dial-up modem card has two RJ11 jacks: one labeled Telco and the other labeled Line or Phone, intended to be connected to a telephone. Normally, when issuing commands to the modem to dial out to an ISP, the dial tone is heard only from the Telco jack while the Line jack's dial tone is blocked.
However, I am seeking a method to dial out to the ISP using the Line jack. Is there a way to achieve this?
The reason I want to do this is because of my Amstrad PPC640 computer. The loc