Igor Delovski Board

[Greg]

CyberDays: IBM NORC Supercomputer

"After a little research I found IBM’s Naval Ordnance Research
Calculator (NORC) to be considered the first supercomputer. Of course, I
am a little partial to considering the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) to
be the first supercomputer because I am an Iowa State University
student, which is where that was built."

[delovski]

Digg: History of the Mac Startup Sound

"The startup sound was done in my home studio on a Korg Wavestation.
It's a C Major chord, played with both hands stretched out as wide as
possible (with 3rd at the top, if I recall). This just sounded right to me."

[Ike]

Peter Coffee's Dirty Dozen IT Embarrassments

"There are technology issues, and then there are TECHNOLOGY
ISSUES. Peter Coffee looks back at almost 25 years of IT screwups, and
provides some lessons that can be learned from them."

[delovski]

Slashdot: The Story of PNG

"First of all, PNG is certainly not dead, although it obviously has not taken
the Widely Webbed World completely by storm (which, in the eyes of the
esteemed Mr. Veen, amounts to the same thing). For better or for worse,
Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer pretty much define what
counts as acceptable Web technology, and they only began supporting PNG
natively in the autumn of 1997."

[XNote]

Slashdot: The Rise and Fall of Commodore

"On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore by Brian
Bagnall is fodder for anyone interested in the buried history of the
personal computer. Whether you owned a Commodore computer or want
to hear a new angle on the early stages of computer development, you'll
find this book easy to pick up and almost impossible to put down. Bagnall
has gone to a massive amount of effort in telling this tale, researching
and interviewing the real personalities involved. It takes readers on an
important and often emotional ride that will many times leave you
shaking your head at how painfully it all went wrong."

[delovski]

Here's a few pictures I took recently at some fair here in Zagreb. Some of
them belong to Radoslav Dejanovic, but most are from others which names
I don't know.




1) I am not sure, but I think this is an IBM AT. I had one XT and its keyboard
was different: function keys were on the left side and there was no middle
part with separate cursor keys. But, then again, I may be wrong.



2) Sinclair QL was my first computer. It was in 1985 I think. I wanted
Atari ST, but I got QL. There were no games for it so I had to learn how
to program from the start.



3) Atari 1040ST I think. First I wanted Atari 520 and got QL. In 1987 I wanted
1040 model, but ended instead with some clone of IBM XT.



4) Commodore 64 and 128. These things outsold everything at the time.
Texas Instruments on the upper shelf was a major disappointment.



5) These notebooks? They look like some Compaqs or Toshibas!?!



6) Schneider CPC 464, but what is this central box? My cousin Leo had original
Amstrad I think. I still remember its 3 by 3,5" disks.



7) "I am adding and subtracting, I'm controlling and composing, I'm the operator with my pocket calculator"



8) Attack of the Clones?



9) A Classic, a Twin Peaks model and //c or //e



10) I don't think I ever touched NeXT computer before.



11) Oric 'something' and a modem from the era of the 'War Games' movie!



12) Jasna was my neighbour and one day in late '81 or early '82 she told me her father
went to London on a business trip and he bought her a REAL computer: Sinclair ZX 81.



13) I had a Newton, but I managed to trade it for a LaserWriter printer.

I made attributions as well as I could, but if anyone sees a mistake I'd like
you to post a note here on the board.

[delovski]

I knew I had it somewhere!

At home I found this box of four Sinclair tape cartridges I somehow forgot
to give when I sold my Sinclair QL. Now I decided to put them on my iBook
and take a picture of these funny little devices.



It says "Metacomco QL BCPL Development kit" - Tenchstar Limited 1984. Just
when I started to like BCPL I had to move to PC and (Turbo) C.

Wiki: BCPL: "Although not widely used now, it was very influential, because it was
highly portable, and because it inspired and influenced Dennis Ritchie's widely-used
C programming language. BCPL is reputedly the language in which the original hello
world program was written."

Wiki: Sinclair QL "was a personal computer launched by Sinclair Research in 1984,
as the successor to the ZX Spectrum. The QL was aimed at the hobbyist and small
business markets, but failed to achieve commercial success. Linus Torvalds, creator
of Linux, owned a Sinclair QL in his youth, and used it to learn programming."

comp.sys.sinclair - Folklore FAQ

"... a jargon FAQ to ease people into the weirdness inherent in the c.s.s group."

[Ike]

Mike-O-Matic: The Forgotten MS-DOS Compatibles

"The same thing applies to the smaller opportunities many companies
and entrepreneurs have before them now; it is too easy to get carried
away with where they are and where they want to be, and they lose site
of the important parts. Staying alive and solvent, for instance. Trying
different things. Exploring new partnership opportunities."

[XNote]

5MB Hard Disk in 1956



"5MB Hard Disk in 1956 - Its a hard disk in 1956.... The Volume and Size
of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the
305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD
weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. Let us start appreciating your
4 GB jump drive!"

[delovski]

Review of Book on Robert Noyce

Book by Leslie Berlin & Review by Bruce B. Reynolds

"Berlin attempts to portray Robert Noyce through elaborating upon a
complex tapestry of anecdotes and primary recollections of actors of
the period. The argument that emerges from her assembly of
information is that Noyce is "one the most important innovators and
entrepreneurs" of the high technology sector in contemporary times.
The story that is therefore presented is actually three tales, which
combine into an elegant single narrative."

[Ike]

Sensational new “fact-power” unleashed by Remington Rand UNIVAC

"Now, for the first time, a commercial or industrial firm can have — first
thing any morning — complete facts and figures, analyzed and summarized,
on its previous day’s performance … in production, in sales, in procurement
or any other major or minor activity."

[delovski]

Coding Horror: Microsoft 1978



"Of course we recognize Bill Gates in that famous photo, but I was curious
about the other people in the photo. What happened to them? When did they
leave Microsoft, and why? What are they doing now?"

[delovski]

JoS: Productivity improvements (back in the day)

"Woe to those who dropped a box of cards and got them out of order. If
they didn't have sequence numbers, they couldn't be properly sorted
mechanically and you'd have to spend hours putting them back together.
Sometimes there was paper tape but that was a bit too advanced for most
of our remote entry terminals."

[Ike]

Larry Osterman: Why is the DOS path character backslash?

"... on most DEC operating systems (including VMS, the DECSystem-20 and
DECSystem-10), it's the '/' character. Note: I'm grey on whether the '/' character
came from IBM or from Microsoft - several of the original MS-DOS developers
were old-hand DEC-20 developers, so it's possible that they carried it forward
from their DEC background."

[delovski]

Slashdot: How MP3 Was Born

"Actual Reality points us to an interview in BusinessWeek.com with the man most
often cited as the inventor of the MP3 format — though Karlheinz Brandenburg
credits many for the development, including in particular Suzanne Vega."

[Ike]

LowEndMac: Lisa Emulator Released, Allows OS X and Windows Users
to Experience Apple's Lisa, by Ted Hodges

"Eight years ago, when I was 11, I came across the Lisa Emulator Project.
I had heard about the Lisa, but I had never had a chance to use the Lisa
Office System (LOS). The reason was that the emulator project didn't have
a working Lisa emulator, and neither did anyone else - until now."

LowEndMac: The State of Mac OS 9 Compatibility, Upgrades, Resources
and Hacks in 2007, by Charles W Moore

"This article updates Mac OS 9 Compatibility, Upgrades, and Resources,
which was published in May 2003 and was the most popular individual
column in the history of Miscellaneous Ramblings at over 79,000 page
views. The December 2004 revision was viewed over 44,000 times, and
the 2006 edition was read over 22,000 times prior to this update, bringing
the total to over 145,000. This is the most widely read article in our 10
year history."

[Ike]

Digg: April 7, 1969: Birth of That Thing We Call the Internet

"April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC
memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to
internet technology."

[delovski]

Digg: Watch 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' (full)

"The TV movie on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 1hr 36 mins"

[delovski]

Slashdot: 25th Anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

"Twenty five years ago today, Sinclair Research launched Britain's most popular
home computer of the 1980s — the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Costing about one
third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster
CPU and a better BASIC interpreter, the machine sold well in many guises
throughout the 1980s and had more than a staggering 9,000 software titles."

[delovski]

The Story of the PING Program, as written by Mike Muuss

"Yes, it's true! I'm the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line
hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know
about. :-)"

[delovski]

Joint interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher

Bill Gates & Steve Jobs

[Ike]

Slashdot: The History of Photoshop

"For the past fifteen plus years, Photoshop has turned into the killer app for
graphics designers on the Mac. It was originally written as a support app for
a grad student's thesis and struggled to find wide commercial release. Eventually,
Adobe licensed the app and has sold millions of copies."

[delovski]

Slashdot: ATM Turns 40

The world's first ATM was installed in a branch of Barclays in Enfield, north
London, 40 years ago this week. Inspiration had struck Mr Shepherd-Barron,
now 82, while he was in the bath. The machine paid out a maximum of £10
a time. "It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere
in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but
replacing chocolate with cash."

[delovski]

Another history of Photoshop

"While you won’t find it printed on any calendar, 2005 marks a quiet anniversary
for the program that you, and many other graphic designers, probably use the most."

[Maja]

Early Windows: How Windows was Born

"I joined Microsoft straight out of college. Although I’d had several
summer jobs doing programming since high school, this was my first
permanent job in the software industry. Here's my version of the
Windows 1.0 story."

[delovski]

Slashdot: The History of the CD-ROM

"The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for
playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not
invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James
Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched
on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records;
Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without
any physical contact between parts."

[XNote]

Unix History

"This is a simplified diagram of unix history. There are numerous derivative
systems not listed in this chart, maybe 10 times more! In the recent past,
many electronic companies had their own unix releases. This diagram is only
the tip of an iceberg, with a penguin on it ."

[delovski]

Slashdot: How Computers Transformed Baby Boomers

"Newsweek's Steven Levy takes a look at how the baby boomer generation
formed our tech landscape. Many of the realities boomers grew up with are
today's metaphors, including cut-and-paste, the origin of which the 56-year-
old Levy had to explain to 20-something Google employees.

Levy cites two texts as crucial in pushing the boomers' vision toward power-
to-the-people computing — Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which
inspired Mitch Kapor, and the January 1975 Popular Electronics, which got
Bill Gates jazzed. You kids might want to check out Dad's bookshelf — used
copies of Computer Lib are going for $130-$225 at Amazon."

[delovski]

Slashdot: From Sputnik to the WWW, a History of ARPA

"Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, but it's not just
the start of mankind's exploration of space that should be observed. The
'October surprise' also changed computing forever, thanks to the subsequent
creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. J.C.R. Licklider, the first
director of IT research at ARPA, catalyzed the invention of an astonishing
array of IT, from computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet ...
and even an early 'electronic office.'

However, the long-range vision that Licklider promoted at the agency is
allegedly in danger, according to some observers quoted in the article..."

[Ike]

A Brief History of Slashdot Part 1, Chips & Dips

"As part of our 10 year anniversary celebration, I've decided to post a story
here telling the tale of the transition from Chips & Dips to Slashdot back in 1997."

[delovski]

More Slashdot history:

* A Brief History of Slashdot Part 2 - Explosions

* History of Slashdot Part 3 - Going Corporate

* The History of Slashdot Part 4 - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

[delovski]

computerworld - Vintage computers

"We offer to you a very interesting selection of computers, what they were before."

[Ike]

funtasticus.com - Dawn of the Computer Era

"Do you have any nostalgia about the days when computers were big and
slow? Now the size, appearance and speed of first computers seem to be
lame but it was not always the case!"

[delovski]

E-mail inventor: I didn't foresee spam

"One problem he had with the first e-mail program was finding a way
to separate the person to whom one was addressing a message from
the computer or network they were using – which he solved with the
symbol @.

It could just as easily have been a square bracket or even a comma
that would come to be typed in every e-mail address, 'but they were
already being used, and of the characters that were left, @ was best.

Plus it conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit.' "

[delovski]

DadHacker: Super Pac-Man

"The reason that Super Pac-Man is the best arcade conversion that I ever did
is that nobody really cared about it. I knew from the very first that it was a
'loser' title, an oddball member of the Pac-Man pantheon that no one really
understood, and the likelyhood of the cartridge actually shipping was pretty
low."

[Ike]

GT!Blog - Why Japan didn’t create the iPod

"One of the most important factors at this time was the complexity of the
Japanese language. Put simply, an 8-bit computer with only 64k of memory
simply does not have the capacity to edit Japanese."

[Ike]

Jeff Atwood - Meet The Inventor of the Mouse Wheel

"Matt Young was kind enough to forward me a link finally revealing who
invented the mouse wheel: Microsoft's Eric Michelman, as described in his
article The History of the Scroll Wheel"

[delovski]

jsonline.com - The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz

"Then he was found dead April 14, Phil Katz was slumped against a nightstand
in a south side hotel, cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.

The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide
for its pioneering 'ZIP' files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by
chronic alcoholism."

reddit - Phil Katz author of PKZIP

[Ike]

ars - The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review

"Don't look now, but the iPod—yes, the original, less-space-than-a-Nomad
iPod—just turned 10 years old. That makes the device older than Facebo-
ok, YouTube, Crocs, Vibram FiveFingers, and the Motorola RAZR, to name
a few brands and devices that have penetrated general culture over the
last decade."

[Ike]

time.com - Who Really Invented the Computer?

"If someone up and asked you “who invented the computer,” how would
you respond? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Al Gore? Or say you’re more histo-
rically savvy, might you venture Alan Turing? Perhaps Konrad Zuse?"

[Ike]

Slashdot - The Sketchbook of Susan Kare

"The Mac wasn't the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop
of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor, but it
was the sketchbook of Susan Kare that gave computing a human face to the
masses. After graduating from NYU with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare was
working on a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback
hog out of steel when she got a call from high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld
offering her a job to work on the Mac. The rest, as they say, is UI history.
Armed with a $2.50 sketchbook, Kare crafted the casual prototypes of a new,
radically user-friendly face of computing. BTW, just in time for holiday gift-
giving, Kare has self-published her first book, Susan Kare Icons. So, could
computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?"

[delovski]

slashdot - Inside the Death of Palm and WebOS

"Thirty-one. That's the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the
darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly ano-
nymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and
without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer
than a typical American mobile phone contract. Understanding exactly how
Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will
forever be a subject of Valley lore."

[XNote]

donmelton.com - When I first heard the name “Safari”

"Ten years ago this month, my secret Web browser team at Apple became
the “Safari” team — less than 30 days before we debuted the product on
January 7, 2003."

[delovski]

github.com - Photoshop 1.0

This is a public mirror of the source code for the original Photoshop
for Mac, taken from the following link:

Photoshop 1.0 Source Code

Ref: reddit

[delovski]

bgr - How Apple's legal fight with Samsung revealed a gold mine of top-secret information

"In the build up to and throughout trial, Apple executives provided us
with incredibly detailed information surrounding the early days of iPhone
development.

... the trial also gave us an unprecedented look at the industrial design
team tasked with housing Apple's software in innovative and sleek hard-
ware. While testifying at trial, long time Apple industrial designer Chris-
topher Stringer relayed a number of interesting nuggets of information."

[delovski]

bgr - Apple's secrets: How Apple's legal fight with Samsung revealed a gold mine of top-secret information

"Following a contentious patent battle that raged on for nearly five years,
Samsung last week finally agreed to pay Apple $548 million in damages for
infringing upon a number of iPhone and iPad patents. While Samsung may
still be holding out hope that it may someday recover those millions, it seems
that we can finally start closing the book on the most widely publicized patent
dispute in recent memory, one which saw Apple and Samsung battle it out in
courtrooms across all corners of the globe."

[delovski]

nyt - And Then Steve Said, 'Let There Be an iPhone'

"Grignon knew the iPhone unveiling was not an ordinary product announce-
ment, but no one could have anticipated what a seminal moment it would
become. In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have
become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley's history."

[Ike]

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15782200/one-device-secret-history-iphone-brian-merchant-book-excerpt

THE SECRET ORIGIN STORY OF THE IPHONE
An exclusive excerpt from The One Device

[Ike]

v - Scott Forstall breaks silence to talk about the iPhone's creation

"Former Apple SVP Scott Forstall has just given a rare interview in which he
discussed the birth of the iPhone. Forstall is the man credited with leading
Apple's efforts to create iOS, and was talking to journalist John Markoff tonight
at an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California."

[delovski]

MacPaint Interview and Demonstration, with Bill Atkinson and Andy Herzfeld