Posts by strayling

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Comfort food for bean counters

Excel does one thing well (spreadsheeting), and a host of other things badly.

Its real strength is flattering middle management drones by turning their numbers into pretty charts.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Level 9

Level 9 did a similar thing for the 8-bit British micros; even the neglected ones like my Oric could run all their adventures. Snowball was particularly good.

Cyborg dreams move closer to reality with low-power artificial neuron

Sounds promising

But when do I get my maths co-processor?

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

The Orange Wall

... of DEC manuals, later to become the Grey Wall.

The ritual of updating the manuals with new pages every month or so was a rite of passage for many a PFY just starting out.

It also gave me I mean them a tour around the documentation.

Trump teases ‘approximately’ 100 percent tariff for imported semiconductors

ASML

Has he mentioned this to ASML? It's all very well to say, "Make the chips in America", but the machines that make them come from the Netherlands.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

I guess Someday is now

(Hopefully not obscure, but just in case: "Someday" is an old Asimov story - one of his better ones.)

How long until an AI panel of judges awards the Hugo to an AI-written novel? Will anyone notice the difference?

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: VMS was where I started

High five! I was at Warley too, only we were more interested in getting the VAX network to talk to our Computervision kit. CSMA/CD <-> DECNet. Good times :\

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Single Input Queue

That was what did it for OS/2. One bad app and the whole system ignores all input.

MS obsessed over making sure the mouse pointer never froze (even if the rest of the system had), so the user always felt like the system was responding.

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Arch tried ...

... but Gentoo emerges the winner.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

DIP-Switch Dipshi...

"The new client's printer doesn't work! Drop everything and go fix it."

A four-hour drive from Manchester to Boston, a flip of a DIP switch to disable parity, a drive back.

Some days, being the PFY was a sweet gig.