Conversation

@tschak

OH RIGHT!! Now I remember it! It's weird how walled off and closed and self-contained departments can get. Sounds like Boeing got like that.

I'm not exaggerating at all the horrible meetings, refusal to provide basic technical information for a project they commissioned, the lawsuit involving Microsoft somehow....

I did MSDOS in the Displaywriter, for IBM. They were like that too, these ponderous closed fiefdoms ... And I was such a huge weirdo. Don't know how we got in the door. I don't or didn't pass for a normal nerd then.

Nicest keyboard I ever used though, hands down. I had to do a complex keyboard driver with lots of deadkeys and loadable code tables, big recursive tables. Kinda fun.

The 5218 printer, a horrid bureaucracy internally, everything was multi byte sequences, you could get it out of sync.... They were severely reluctant to document for me all the control codes (it had a fancy front panel) and I had to reverse engineer some of it.

Big slow 8 inch floppy drives looked just like toasters. Portrait mode screen, and a 66 line wordstar. Sloow...