Posts by David

Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why?

Win Server 2008 + Desktop Experience

As CTO & professional developer for a software company I ran Win 2003 Server for years as it gave me access to all the server features such as IIS6 that our software runs on.

I moved to Longhorn and to Visual Studio 2008 as my dev platform which was a bit unstable and seemed quite sluggish sometimes - WiFi regularly crashed the machine for example so I only used it when I had to. Aero was pretty cool.

I've recently rebuilt the machine with the release version of Server 2008 and VS08 and have to say that its brilliant. Its faster than Win2k3 and the Aero UI is great to work with. WiFi works now and its faster than Longhorn.

All in all - its by far the best working environment I've ever used (I use a Dell M6300 laptop which is also pretty good).

Big thumbs up from me!!

Remembering the Commodore SX-64

Good memories...

I worked for Commodore in the UK when the C64 was being developed - I brought the first one back into the UK in a shoebox - it was a mess of PC boards and spaghetti wiring that the engineering team finished a couple of days before I flew home.

The C64 was a great machine because of its 6502 processor – I wrote a stack of commercial software for it in assembler (including the assembler itself). I also wrote a version of Forth, which compiled down to machine code and then, when V isiCalc came on the scene I wrote a spreadsheet called Swift which did pretty well.

Great times and it only now with these retro pieces that I can see how amazing it was to be involved in the start of the personal computing revolution.

I never had a portable C64 – though I did do some development on the C128 which was a pretty nice machine before moving onto machine code with the first IBM PC’s.