Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

jmfbahciv wrote

call...usually.

Depends on the capabilitys of the individuals involved.

What I said in more words.

Sometimes. At other times a more direct approach was more effective: "Do you want this fix or not?"

--
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[...] [...]

It was probably the other way around. We computer geeks needed 13X column width for our silly source code, etc., but the real/business world was happily printing documents for their customers, and that was US-letter/A4.

Anyway, all the 13X column line printers I remember, could also do 80 column by just moving the right-hand sprocket.

80 column is 8.5 inch wide US letter format. A4 is a little bit less wide, so no problem. For US-only line/sprocket-feed printers, where the right-hand sprocket could not be moved far enough left to accomodate normal A4 (with tear-offs) paper, there was paper where the left or right tear-off was a little wider, resulting in A4 width between tear-offs.

To those trying to remember names of printers, IIRC one popular brand was Data Products. IIRC my (ex) employer - HP - sold rebadged Data Products printers.

I had a Seikosha 9-pin dot-matrix printer (ca. 1990) that worked this way. If your fanfold was 8.5 inches wide, you would set it left; if it was 11 inches wide, set it right. You could set it anywhere in between but there would be no reason to.

After a few false starts I developed the habit of rough-aligning by hand, threading the paper onto the sprocket, then using the holes themselves as a guide for proper alignment.

I remember one of the ads for that printer in _Computer Shopper_ showed a sheet of aluminum with the logo printed on it, allegedly by the bare pins of the printer in question (the idea was to show that the printer was tough). -- Joe

--
Joe Thompson - 
E-mail addresses in headers are valid. | http://www.orion-com.com/
"...the FDA takes a dim view of exploding pharmaceuticals..." -- Derek Lowe

I guess Data Products was a common third-party printer that was "re-badged" by different companies. At a PPoE, I worked in a lab with a Harris 800 (later a Harris 1200 with ECL) that had a Data Products line printer re-badged as a Harris. I do *not* remember us ever having any trouble with our Data Products printer.

You *could* buy the same printer from Data Products directly for

*less* money, but then you could *not* get Harris to cover the thing on their service agreement. So you were constrained to buy the higher priced re-badged model.

Later, Harris started re-badging those cheap Wyse terminals. One of the labs at my PPoE just bought *twice* as many of the cheapest Wyse terminals directly from Wyse. (I think they were about $50 each.) Harris would *not* cover these under their service agreement, but if one broke... the lab just threw it away and got another one out of storage. Cheaper to replace than pay the service agreement for the re-badged version.

--
+----------------------------------------+
|     Charles and Francis Richmond       |
|                                        |
|  plano dot net at aquaporin4 dot com   |
+----------------------------------------+

Yeah... You could say: "Okay, I don't really need to put in this software fix. Only 40% of the paychecks will come out wrong, and we can fix all that later..." :-)

--
+----------------------------------------+
|     Charles and Francis Richmond       |
|                                        |
|  plano dot net at aquaporin4 dot com   |
+----------------------------------------+

Barb, really -- he just isn't worth the effort.

--
As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should
be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours;
and this we should do freely and generously. (Benjamin Franklin)

It's sad commentary (and probably warped my mind) that I would welcome emergencies because it was the one time when I could demand - and get - as much machine time as I needed.

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/~\  cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
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My old Star (which I still use) works that way. Does 132 cols too with a compressed font. The problem with using A4 paper is that some progams insist on doing a FF by outputting a number of LFs to get to the bottom of the page instead of issuing a FF, which the Star could handle correctly for A4. The print would soon get out of alignment with the perfs. I gave up on A4 fanfold for that reason.

--
Cheers,
Stan Barr     plan.b .at. dsl .dot. pipex .dot. com

The future was never like this!

*frown*

Ah. Not one of these;

--
Today is Setting Orange, the 48th day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3176
      I'd rather have a free press than a football tournament.

The plain truth, Charlie, is that you the programmer get *no* respect:

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;"

--
+----------------------------------------+
|     Charles and Francis Richmond       |
|                                        |
|  plano dot net at aquaporin4 dot com   |
+----------------------------------------+

Bert Shaw was the old blacksmith -- about the age then that I am now

-- who got me hooked on beating hot iron. He'd retired, saying he was too old to do "real blacksmithing" but was offered a position as resident artist at an art and craft center. He took this up with glee as he got to forge "little stuff" -- perfect reproductions of colonial hardware -- and tell yarns and lies to the visitors.

In the course of time, one of the center honchos arranged for U. Mass. to award Bert an honorary doctorate. Instead of framing the document, he spiked it to a post in the shop with a 16 penny nail.

People such as I, ignorant as I was then of smithing or of art, he treated with good humor and kindness. But occasionally, academics, high-art types, biz dudes and the like would come in and show Bert no respect, with "Say, Bert " and "Oh, Bert, ". Then he would take his horrible wrinkly cigar out of his mouth, spit on the flood in a disgustingly drooly sort of way, then point to the now sooty parchment and say, "That will be 'Doctor Shaw", if you don't mind."

I'm not sure how a programmer could turn this yarn to advantage, what with lacking a handy wooden post, smoking rules and so on. Maybe Scott Adams could work on it.

--
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada

Yea, I know. Yesterday was my last attempt. :-(

/BAH

Great, there is only so much of your puerile shit anyone should have to put up with.

On Sun, 28 Nov 2010 04:50:58 +1100, "Rod Speed" sprachen:

with the hardware

Don't see why, AIUI since the 386 all IO and memory access has been virtualisable (there's some points in Scrabble!).

You don't need to really give them access, just let them try then interrupt away to a handling / emulating routine. Tho I suppose that routines need writing, and cycles to run in.

Then again AGAIN, if IBM hadn't done such a crappy job with their BIOS, nobody would have needed to write straight to hardware. What did DOS apps need anyway? A couple of K of text-mode screen RAM and maybe a keyboard handler? Even VGA graphics is maybe 128K of RAM to store in a buffer somewhere, and write to the screen using the appropriate mechanisms the OS uses.

How much business software really needed low-level stuff? I suppose some industrial control apps might have been delay-sensitive if they were realtime. Still...

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"hey let's educate the brutes, we know we are superior to them anyway, just through genetics, we are gentically superior to the working class. They are a shaved monkey. If we educate them, they will be able to read instructions, turn up on time and man the conveyor belts, sorted." #

On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:30:56 -0700, Joe Pfeiffer sprachen:

that.

[I realise this is a bit of an old thread, but... it's not like Usenet's been busy. Hey, the old days are returning, but in the opposite direction!].

As far as I know, from various sources including that famous one based on the book in the late 90s, about the rise of Microsoft. That I can't remember the name of...

What MS basically did, was give discounts to manufacturers and retailers. You could have Windows at a significant discount, as long as your business sells NO PCs with any alternative OS. For most sellers, that's a fair percentage of a big amount of money.

So they stitched up the market and "leveraged", I believe it's called, their small market advantage into a vast one. A company offering alternative OSes would have this disadvantage against it's rivals, and all other things being equal, go under. Thousands of businesses and millions of customers manipulated.

This was (AFAIK IIRC ETC) the cause of one of the legal suits against them. I remember at the time, Gates's moaning to the press about how he was being picked on... "If the Federal Government demands I give away 95% of my money to charity, I'll do it". As if that was one of the government's powers, or a likely outcome to the case. He didn't offer to run his business in a less predatory and monopolistic way, or to stop buying up any company that looks like it might compete with him, and either absorb or neglect it to death.

[All that money, and he STILL dresses like he ran through a charity shop with a strong static charge].

The free market doesn't cope well with monopolies, and in the modern age, businesses aren't happy with expansion any more. It's more profitable to crush your rivals to cultivate as much as one can of a monopoly, then charge what you like (or alternatively form a cartel and price-fix everything), than it is to make a better mousetrap, and rely on the consumer's own innate cannyness and wisdom to choose your product above others, and.... all that other 1950s pipe dreaming nonsense.

We're in the age of monopolies and megalopolies (whatever they are!). Many corporations tower over governments in terms of cash and power, and the simple blessing that is corruption, means politicians have to compete for bribes with their fellows. Bribery's a seller's market now. So you don't actually need to compete with a government, just to fix it's minions.

As far as the 21st Century goes, I think it's probably a battle over control of Google, with "Don't be evil" on the one side, and the entirety of modern investment capitalism on the other. I dunno how much control Larry and Sergey have retained thus far. Although legally, being publically traded, they've an obligation to only do things that make more money. It's illegal to be ethical if it costs a stockholder a penny. An under-used defense in tax-fraud cases I feel.

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"hey let's educate the brutes, we know we are superior to them anyway, just through genetics, we are gentically superior to the working class. They are a shaved monkey. If we educate them, they will be able to read instructions, turn up on time and man the conveyor belts, sorted." #

with the hardware

Even more points for USAans.

Intercepts aren't free, even using SVM/VT-X. Then there is the cost for nested paging (22 memory references per TLB fill instead of 4).

Most quality EGA/HGA/VGA graphics couldn't be done with BIOS calls.

scott

greenaum wrote

Basically because you cant trap illegal behaviour if apps can do anything they like with the hardware.

The OS doing hardware access that way is an entirely separate issue.

Not enough to matter, its not that uncommon a word in english.

Not all direct hardware access involves interrupts.

And is a lot harder to do when interrupts arent involved.

Win stopped using the bios LONG ago. Its basically just used in the boot phase now.

Hell of a lot more than that with comms apps alone.

Yes, but some hardware needs more than that.

Depends on what you call business software.

Yep.

There is no still with computer control of fancy equipment.

#

You should preceed that sort of thing with just -- on a line by itself, then the better usenet clients can strip it auto when replying.

#

should be "-- " on a line by itself, the space is important.

--
tagline flames are always a waste of bandwidth.

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