The article mentions they’ll continue making the eZ80. If you’re in the middle of making a PCB around the Z80, you’ll just have to change the pins, I guess.

You just don’t appreciate how prestigious it is to get a degree from Example U.

It is, but it probably shouldn’t be any more. WebP has good support everywhere now and is slightly better than JPEG and PNG combined. (Better lossy compression than JPEG, plus transparency support, and better lossless compression than PNG). But even WebP is considered lame these days compared to the new crop.

E.g., JXL (JPEG XL) is much better WebP and is supported by everyone except Google (which is ironic since Google helped create it). Google seems to want AVIF to be the winner for the new image format, but not many others do.

Anyway, until the Google JXL AVIF hissy fit is dealt with, at least we’ve still got WebP. It’s not super great, but it’s at least better than JPEG and PNG. A lot of web developers are stuck in their old JPEG PNG mindset and are being slow to adapt, so JPEG is still hanging around.

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

It’s in Proverbs 11:20

The C++ developers are an abomination to the Lord,
But the Rustaceans in their Rust-based OSes are His delight.

Out of curiosity, did you use it as a daily driver? A friend of mine tried it out briefly, and it was pretty cool, but the lack of applications meant we couldn’t really do anything with it (other than marvel at how cool it was). Did it eventually get applications developed for them? Like did they have an office suite?

won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.

Not even that. For most basic users, web browsing is by far the most resource-intensive thing they’ll ever do, and it’ll only get moreso. If it weren’t for modern web design, most users could honestly probably be okay with 4GB or 8GB of RAM today. For a laugh, I tried using a 512MB Raspberry Pi 1B for all my work for a few days. I could do absolutely everything (mostly developing code and editing office documents) without any problems at all except I couldn’t open a single modern web page and was limited to the “retro” web. One web page used up more resources than all of my work combined. I’m guessing it won’t be too many years before web design has evolved to the point where basic webpages will require several GB of RAM per tab.

(I agree with your overall point, by the way. Soldering in 8GB of RAM these days is criminal just based on its effects on the environment)

I used to run a TFTP server on my router that held the decryption keys. As soon as a machine got far enough in the boot sequence to get network access, it would pull the decryption keys from the router. That way a thief would have to steal the router along with the computer, and have the router running when booting up the computer. It works wirelessly, too!

Whenever I’m started anything new, I just go AGPL without even thinking about it. If I later change my mind and think GPL or LGPL or BSD or something would be more appropriate later, I can always change it (though I’ve never found a need to), but you can’t really go the other way. If you start permissive, that’s just out there, forever.

To the best of my knowledge, this “drives from the same batch fail at around the same time” folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm.

The scary thing? Define “new”. This judgment is from a lawsuit in 2014. So any car made in at least the last 9 years is doing this. Maybe newer cars are doing even worse things.

Yup, mine, too. I don’t remember which version it was, but I’m pretty sure it was still “Turbo” (not “Borland”) Pascal, in the late 1990s. Grade 10 computer science was taught on Macintosh QuickBasic and then grades 11 and 12 were “real” programming in Turbo Pascal.

If you want a good CPU design with a 16-bit address space, take a look at the PDP-11.

Which was used in home computers, just not in the west

I agree with you, though. I’m kind of the prime market for this from an educational standpoint. My oldest kid has just learned to read and write (kind of). She’s fascinated by computers. She’s only played retrogames (happily) thus far, so she wouldn’t be put off by the 8-bit era’s graphics or sound.

But even so…what would I be hoping to teach her with this? How to work around the quirks of the 6502 that are not applicable to literally anything else? That life is full of unnecessary obstacles and frustration? That she could have learned more interesting programming in an easier way if I’d got her a computer with a flat memory model? I’m kind of meh on it.

Not all of these issues have disappeared, either. Anyone remember this headline from a couple years ago? The bottom 1MiB of memory space on x86 is just a minefield. It’s impossible (like literally impossible) in general to know if certain parts of the address space are actual memory or are some weird part of your motherboard chipset or some other hardware. Windows I think still goes through the “wankery” of depending on chipset drivers to (accurately) know which parts of memory are actual memory.

Thankfully the 16-bit (though actually 20-bit but actually kind of more sometimes kind of but not totally) pains have all gone away. The move to flat 32-bit address spaces was a godsend.

RIP Bette Stephenson. In the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet, Bette Stephenson invented the ICON. She was a very stubborn politician who would not tolerate anything other than complete success from the project. Passed away 3 years ago.

I always coveted the Tandy 1000, but I never got one. Which one did you have?

The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like “ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of”.

these games are guaranteed to not have any in-app purchases or ads

That’s a big plus. I also like that they have to use the keyboard, since the mouse can be a bit tricky when you’re young.

I had no idea there was a Richard Scarry game! They love the books, so maybe I should give it a shot. (Though it does look pretty mouse-heavy)

Another Oregan Trail generation here.

I’m curious about what’s going to happen with Gen Alpha. Any other moms and dads here exposing their kids to retrotech? I have two little ones that I’ve made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck’s Playground are their favourites). I do wonder how they’re going to think about old tech when they’re older. I haven’t told them that it’s “old” or “retro” yet, so they just think they’re normal fun games.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Windows 95 used MSDOS to boot, but once it was booted, it completely removed any trace of MSDOS and replaced it with its own MSDOS subsystem. It’s more like MSDOS was a shell on top of Win95, but MSDOS was required to get the kernel loaded.