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I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.

Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.


I always thought that the floating point routines were the big feature that made Microsoft BASIC a thing (compared with both Radio Shack and Apple integer BASIC). It's interesting reading about Monte Davidoff and also that Gates knew they needed a specialist for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff


The reason i believe Microsoft Basic became popular across multiple platforms is because nobody else sold their BASIC to other hardware vendors.

In those days the money was in hardware which cost a lot, and software was thrown in. It wouldnt make sense for IBM to sell their BASIC to another hardware vendor.

Microsoft was different, they would sell their languages to anyone and they did. Can anyone actually name a competitor in those early days ?

Even Apple didnt sell their own Woz written basic to other 6502 vendors, C= had to buy Microsoft Basic.


MicroFORTH would have been the nearest thing to it - but FORTH was sufficiently easy to implement that most vendors decided to make their own rather than pay FORTH Inc.

SofTech Pascal could have been there, too, if they hadn't priced it way out of the reach of hobbyists.

In many ways, that was Microsoft's real genius - charging just a few dollars per user to the manufacturers. Even the Professional Development System was only low hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. They were the first tech company to use the "make it up on volume" strategy.


It is right there in the name.

Software had always been one big project with a dedicated team to build something one off, like building a hospital. Every customer commissioned their own software.

Microsoft recognized that the future was writing smaller software that was meant to be sold to many, many people for less money each.


Me too. The 4K basic was quite limited in other functionalities (in order to fit into the memory). But that floating point module made it very competitive, although also made the execution slower. IMO Monte Davidoff is underappreciated.

>an original 7104

I've got one, they are very cool. I also have a 7834 (storage tube), cool in a different way. On the other hand, they are taking up a lot of space... I also have two 485s, one with a broken trigger.


Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things.

Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..


As I wrote: the TDS7104 is now sitting on a shelf in the garage, next to an Agilent 54831 and some other boat anchors. My daily drivers are a Siglent scope and a puny TDS220, which is about to be replaced by a TDS3052 that I'm bringing back to life. Hobbyists rarely need more than 100 MHz BW.

I hope you're able to thoroughly test that DSA91304a before dropping $44k on it!


I hope you're aware of the TekWiki:

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Main_Page

Mine is a TDS224. Cheap, but I only use it for keeping my Eurorack synth going. 100MHz is overkill for audio. Although some modules use STM32 microcontrollers, so maybe the speed will come in handy.


TekWiki is great!

100MHz is overkill for most hobbyists use cases, and definitely repairing test equipment: it's always the power supply.


TDS220

Cute little thing. The reality is you hope that's all you need.


200 MHz is good enough for most things. And for modern computing electronics even 1GHz is too slow, e.g. monitoring USB3 or high speed PCIE data lanes.

Did you get a price quote for that keysight oscilloscope? I see that you can also rent them for $2000 a month.


We've rented them in the past- always we're not quite sure we're done so keep them much longer than necessary. They're kind of a pain to pack and ship.

I have a 1.5GHz TDS7154B in addition to my 200MHz SDS1204 specifically to measure power rail noise with a low noise probe.

You just can’t characterise power rail noise well with less than 500MHz of bandwidth.


My goto has been Shotcut, it's main advantage is high resolution support without having to pay extra compared to something like Lightworks (which has a better UI for sure, but I'm not paying...).

1/f noise means that if you wait long enough an asteroid will hit the earth or the sun will go nova, etc.

Surely there is some connection to entropy.


Never mind washing machine, how about a missile or a drone?

Or a bomb.. "let there be light"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck


I worked at a place that evaluated bubble memory, but didn't use it (they had the bubble memory dev. boards). But they did use CCD memory. I remember it was prone to bit errors, which would have been OK if there had been any error correction, but there was not.

https://deramp.com/downloads/mfe_archive/050-Component%20Spe...


What this doesn't include: not all people are equal. Do you want the CEO of your new office building to have to wait behind a bunch of plebeians? At least one car is going to have to be reserved for the better people.


This does happen. I also once worked on a destination-dispatch elevator system installed in a high-end condo building (high-end, as in concierge and parking valet for residents). Anyway... the resident's key card would of course automatically call a cab to take them to their unit's floor, but also the security system had entries for things like "dog owner" and "allergic to dogs" so that the DD system would never schedule them together for the same cab.


I think "solid-state" is a marketing term which means you need to use Fermi-Dirac statistics to model your device, vs. vacuum tubes where you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. I think you can use Maxwell-Boltzmann at least for the ions in the electrolyte.. but maybe have to use for Fermi-Dirac for all conductors in a solid-state battery.


I thought it meant your database was singly responsible, open for extension but closed for modification, Liskov substitutable, interface segregated, and dependency inverted.


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