Notices by Isaac Ji Kuo (isaackuo@mastodon.social)

@fluidlogic To clarify, my answer was tongue-in-cheek -- something that would only be obvious to someone already familiar with the C128.

To call the C128 a "Z80" computer is silly, but I couldn't resist making the joke when you defined your criteria as offloading graphics, sound and _other stuff_ to custom chips.

In terms of how much work the computer does per Z80 cycle, the C128 does indeed win. But at what cost?

@fluidlogic Best was the Commodore 128. Not only did it offload video, sound, and I/O to custom chips, it also offloaded CPU tasks to a custom chip. Typically, the Z80 only needed to work for a few cycles per power up.

@clacke I have a field of dreams

@MnemosyneSinger

"We keep tying people to trolley tracks ... instead of investing in public transportation ... This may sound weird, but ... I think we're in the Bad Place."

Michael: "Okay, that one's on me." SNAP

Sorry, @nyrath ... toppling over on the side is now the official way landers land. Rotate all relevant Atomic Rocket images 90 degrees as appropriate.

@thomasfuchs In 1987, most business computers were text based and monochrome, and the Mac wouldn't be taken seriously by most business users until ... I dunno ... mid 2000s?

There was just a really big resistance to switching everything over to Macs, but in the mid 2000s many IT departments grudgingly allowed one or two Macs in order to do iOS app development.

Before Windows 95, there really was no telling if/when business computing would join the whole "GUI" thing.

@thomasfuchs Yeah, I remember early visual programming on NeXT, hypercard, FoxPro, etc ... ugh, clicking around hunting for code snippets!

At least with FoxPro I could put all of the code in a separate text document, so all of the visual "snippets" would just be simplistic calls to procedures in the text document.

Not that I ever got around to refactoring the older lava layer to the same standard...

@thomasfuchs I just assumed the software would have to be rewritten before long because, looking at the source code, the quality of the code was so bad. Besides, there's this hot new programming language/paradigm/tool/whatever, and we should rewrite everything with THAT!

I was young and naive, and did not realize it was ALL bad code, including the hot new thing.

Still, enough people make the same mistake that we end up with partially rewritten Lava Layer code all over the place.

@thomasfuchs Still far more elegant than the Amiga Sidecar.

Anyway, the obsession with stacking is more understandable after you look at an expanded TI-99/4A system ... it just goes off to the right and keeps going and going and going and going ...

@hatter @thomasfuchs Take a look at the Amiga Sidecar, though. It's outrageously inelegant and impractical, and it gets worse and worse the closer you look. The way the Amiga was designed, the expansion slot floats up in the air, requiring really ugly stuff to get something like the Sidecar to work. And also, the mouse and keyboard ports are on the same side as the expansion slot which is ... ugh ... quite lamentable.

@hatter @thomasfuchs LOL, yeah I think they were generally called "sidecar" expansions, which makes the name of the Amiga Sidecar extremely funny. The MacCharlie was a brilliant name that told you what it was without outright saying "IBM" or "PC" or "MSDOS".

(At the time, IBM's PC advertising featured a Charlie Chaplin knock-off.)

The Amiga "Sidecar"? What the heck were they thinking even? Ah, it's a total mystery how Commodore went bankrupt...

@clacke In the world of The Flintstones, it could be both.

It's a living