Notices by Martin Atkins (apparentlymart@mastodon.online)

@alcinnz Hello again!

I came across the following today and remembered this old thread:
https://github.com/PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv

It's a shared-source Windows 3.1 display driver targeting VESA BIOS extensions. My x86 asm is too rusty to get into the weeds of it, but seems to confirm the earlier article's claim of needing to reimplement the entire graphics stack in each driver!

(I'm not entirely sure what its license is since several parts of it are listed as copyright Microsoft)

@alcinnz @alilly
If memory serves, the adventure game Grim Fandango shipped with a bunch of precompiled bytecode for the older version of Lua they compiled into it.

That meant that when folks wanted to reverse-engineer it later they had to find the right version of Lua to use as a reference.😀

Of course if you are building your own interpreter then you can presumably design your own bytecode format rather than the one in current upstream Lua, so you aren't chasing upstream changes.

@alcinnz
I have no direct experience with classic Windows display driver development, but I found this article interesting:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/display-drivers-os2-and-16-bit-windows/

Three exact details are glossed over a little but I found it interesting that at this point it wasn't clear what different display hardware might have in common yet, and so essentially the entire graphics stack was reinvented for each driver.

@alcinnz
When you ask about Windows, are you asking from the perspective of someone writing an application for the platform, or someone implementing that platform?

For the former, the original graphics API is called "Graphics Device Interface" (GDI) and provides a number of 2D drawing operations that can be implemented either in software or in hardware, depending on the driver.

I believe modern Windows still supports this, so the API docs are still out there.

@kariboka
I cannot comment on ActivityPub in particular because I wasn't involved in that, but the Activity Streams model it builds on started its life as some optional extra metadata for Atom and RSS feeds, designed with the assumption that it was "best effort" and software consuming it could just fall back on plain Atom/RSS if they find something they can't understand.

That turned into a JSON thing and then into a JSON-LD thing, but still has the essence of "do your best, ignore weird stuff".

@kariboka
Unfortunately when it's used as the primary API rather than as a sidecar thing to drive a feed reader -- particularly when trying to encode important functional information like exactly who an item is intended to be sent to -- this "just display the thing as best you can and let the human make sense of it" idea doesn't really work anymore.

That is, assuming it ever did. I gave feed readers a lot of grace for making best effort back in the day, but the results were often suboptimal!

@kariboka
All of that said, I have a lot of respect both for those who worked through the messy specification process and those who made working software from it despite the gaps.

I burned out from all the conflicting requirements we were trying to meet in the early work, and I'm glad that others had more stamina to make the compromises needed to get something published. Now we get to learn from it and improve. 😀

@feb @reiver @evan

It's funny that when I was originally thinking about Activity Streams, around 2008 or so, it seemed very clear to me that the application for "reading your friends" and the application(s) for creating content would be two different things, with the former being a largely-read-only (aside from likes/comments, perhaps) generic thing that supported many object types.

Of course, that's because I was still "RSS/Atom-brained" at that time, thinking of enriching feeds.

@MudMan @youronlyone @atomicpoet @pablowapsi I think you are right that "federation" might not be the best word for what I think this thread is discussing.

What I remember is an Internet built from protocols... NNTP, IRC, Gopher, HTTP, etc. Anyone could implement those protocols. Some of them had s2s links and others were just c2s.

The newer model differs in that it's proprietary services and apps and brands all coupled together.

@bradenslen it'll be cool and interesting if so, given that the tech behind fediverse arguably inherits from a 2000s effort to federate blogs... RSS/Atom with what's now called WebSub, Activity Streams originally building on that to accommodate non-blog use-cases (new verbs) and then eventually dropping Atom in favor of JSON, and ActivityPub instead of WebSub.

I'm curious and excited to see what a fresh take on the original problem will look like!