@keyboards On the "what the 1982 market demanded, only in 1984" note, Amstrad was a consumer electronics firm and Alan Sugar was not a computer guy—he hired the design talent in and bought the components obsolescent hence cheap (eg. his giant bulk buy of Sony's also-ran 3" floppy disks and drives—he bought their entire manufacturing run when it failed to out-compete the rival 3.5" standard). I think he lacked a feel for the pace of change in computing, which was much faster than in TV/audio.
I remember when I first saw a CPC464 in a shop I was working in, in 1984.
It was a very neat answer to what the market needed in 1982. But by 1984, cassette storage and Z80s were clearly long in the tooth—it came out the same year as the Macintosh, and 12 months late Atari STs and Amigas were showing up. https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/112351091848131466
@electropict@sdarlington@keyboards I bought an original 8256 the month it came out. By the time I sold it and switched to a PC it had 512Kb of RAM,a second (720K) 3" floppy drive, an external 10Mb hard disk, and was spending all its time running CP/M.
@electropict@sdarlington@keyboards Yup, the PCW left me in ZERO doubt that Van Eck phreaking was possible! (Get a B&W TV set with a portable antenna and point it at the PCW at short range and you could—very fuzzily—pick up the screen!)
@katzenberger@juglugs Please bear in mind that the "drama queen" behaviour is the Conservative Party and the extreme right: ascribing their idiocy to the UK as a whole is like looking at the AfD as if they represent Germany.
@mcnees Have you tried BBEdit? It's only been around since 1990 or thereabouts, so predates textmate by a *long* time, but has been actively ported to macOS and upgraded regularly …
@mcnees So pleased we're probably not going to spontaneously vanish in a puff of exotic radiation due to a random quantum fluctuation erasing the universe we exist in and overwriting it with a simpler version ... at least, not any time soon!
"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft."
They forgot to continue: "… the warmth and humanity of the Emperor Dalek, Donald Trump's humility, Elon Musk's quiet egalitarianism, and ChatGPT's searing truthfulness and insight."
@daviddlevine You haven't watched a lot of SpaceX launch livestreams, I take it? Just the big explodey test flights.
(A normal Falcon 9 launch, at this point, is basically boring. "Landing leg 3 came down just outside the middle of the bullseye, Elon. Again. And you lost video as it touched down on the drone ship because the sea is choppy. Again. IS SPACEX FAILING?")
@Oggie@jhpot I knew Iain and I am *ABSOLUTELY* certain that if he was alive today he would have some EXTREMELY trenchant (and rude) things to say about Dilbert Stark.
(Iain was more left wing in real life than he made visible in his fiction. And if you're unsure what I mean, ask yourself how many of his fictional villains were capitalists or imperialists.)
@bloor Coming next: SunCoin, a cryptocurrency where the proof of work is provided by confirmed solar PV production—the more PV panels you install and keep operational, the more currency you earn.
Addendum: this is draft 2 of the space opera that, well, my elevator pitch was "Iain isn't writing any more, alas, so let's see if I can do something that makes readers feel the same way as his Culture novels without in any way being derivative of the Culture".
It's probably a failure on those terms, but I had to try, right?
If you can see this tweet, Dilbert Stark hasn't banned me yet.
(Note that I'm running a Firefox plugin that auto-blocks blue tick accounts. I assume @elonmusk is un-blockable—it's the sort of dick move he'd pull, he doesn't like being ignored—but I called him an ass, accused him of being cisgendered, and told him to fuck off. So we'll see!