All Questions

I learned from the history of Multics in early days if Computers, Time Sharing System had used at MIT and later on Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) had developed in 1961 and used at MIT. In July ...

I haven't gotten around to making/sourcing a cable for ADTPro, but I was thinking perhaps I can just write a few disks with a 7100 I have sitting around since those drives can read/write GS and PC ...

Is it possible to view games made for Tandy Graphics (TGA, etc) on an IBM 5153 color display connected to an original Tandy 1000 (or 1000/A) in 16 colors?

There is a paradox about floating point that I'm trying to understand. Floating point is an eternal struggle with the problem that real numbers are both essential and incomputable. It's the best ...

In the version of command.com included with MS-DOS, DIR seems to print files in a random order, but if one runs multiple DIR commands, they all print the files in the same order. This order does not ...

The easily readable structure of having an if keyword which controls execution of a following block of code is so prevalent in programming that it seems to just be part of it. However, programming ...

Please don't point out APUs with x86_64 cores used in current generation game consoles, these are not part of the question I cannot recall a single arcade system or game console that ever used x86 ...

In the same vein as this question about conditionals, I am interested in the first time a language provided functionality we assume as a given for modern programming languages. The question is when a ...

The if keyword is so prevalent in programming that it seems to just be part of it. However, with an integer value and a goto statement, one cansimulate the functionality of an if. Which means it's ...

How can I input a string in ZX Spectrum BASIC and not show the quotation marks on input? I've written a program for my 3-year old daughter to type in some letters, but she keeps deleting the ...

I know that it was possible to create blinking text, but did the operating system itself (I mean, in output from functions of command.com and similar executables) ever make use of blink formatting? ...

I'm trying to understand the history of Dependency Injection in compiled languages, as an intentional feature of the language. The Wikipedia article on the subject is decidedly Java focused, but I ...

Why did Microsoft make DOSKEY a separate command, instead of integrating it with COMMAND.COM? I don't think DOSKEY uses a lot of RAM or was useless in the '80s... Maybe there was another reason not ...

I realized that make was "only" invented in 1976 and seems to be one of the first build automation tools (at least it's probably the oldest still in use). Make with its shell focus seems like a total ...

The first five generations of game consoles typically had no backward compatibility. New console, new hardware design, new games. (An exception was the Atari 7800, which as far as I know was the first ...

I remember one of the features I admired on the Macintosh in the late 80s was support for multiple displays. First time I saw this was on an SE/30, using the internal display along with a big external ...

Though I had several friends back in the day with a Commodore 64, I only recently acquired one after a friend gave me his old one before he moved house. As such, I'm diving in to learning about the ...

There's an application that's been on my mind on and off for months now, I want to find clarity. Once upon a time, when MacOS was in black and white, there was a neat music composer/player ...

Is the maximum voltage of high voltage differential SCSI documented somewhere? All I can find in various source like Wikipedia is that it is "greater than 5 volts" ... but how high can it actually be? ...

How many logic gates did the IBM 650 have? I'm used to measuring the complexity of a CPU by transistor count, but the 650 was a vacuum tube machine; the number of tubes would also be an interesting ...

I have read the following in the x86 Wikipedia page: The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 ...

Did the computer scientist at Xerox really develop the first LAN, but had no backing from the company to further develop these technologies, later showing this to both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Just ...

Did the computer scientist at Xerox really develop the first graphical user interface, later showing this to both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Just for reference, it is in reference to this story.

I whipped together a quick answer to this question and then realised, that I have no idea how these tubes manipulate the numbers. A binary adder is easy to understand to the modern mind; for each bit ...

The IBM 650, announced in 1953, was the world's first mass-produced computer. It represented numbers in decimal, which is understandable, both because it needed to work with exact money amounts, and ...

The title says it all: How to En-/Decode Z22/Z23 Instructions? (History and Linkage: The question was raised by Wilson in a comment on my answer to his question "Why are PDP-7-style microprogrammed ...

DEC, and at least some of their computers, especially those in the 18-bit family and 12-bit family, had these opr instructions, which contained many bitfields which encoded something like "...

It is a well-known fact that AmigaOS is a single address space, totally unprotected memory operating system. The original implementation ran on a Motorola 68000, that did not support virtual memory if ...

This Wikipedia page says the following: Most x86 processors since the Intel 80486 have had these x87 instructions implemented in the main CPU So the above quote implies that some CPUs that were ...

As far as I know, old x86 CPUs (for example: the 8086 CPU) couldn't do floating point arithmetic, and in order to be able to do floating-point arithmetic, an x87 floating-point coprocessor should be ...

In the early era of "portable" or luggable computers, such as the mains powered Osborne 1 and the Compaq Portable, 5 1/4 inch floppy drives were the standard storage medium. When battery-powered ...

While cleaning out some old computers owned by my grandfather I came across some files marked with the file format .95END that had creation dates in early 1995 (though they could be from much earlier, ...

The BBC's Computer Literacy Project was launched in 1982, and saw the public service broadcaster seek to raise awareness and educate the general public about the growing field of computing. They ...

Acorn's line of ARM-based Archimedes computers was common in UK schools in the 1990s, and many classrooms had an A3000, A4000, or A5000 computer. The function keys of the A3000 were a distinctive red ...

I had my first programming experience in the late 80s / early 90s on a Schneider (Amstrad) CPC 464 in Basic. I remember that when a program was running, depending on the current workload of the ...

From 1994 to 1996 Apple developed a complete new Mac OS, codenamed Copland, intended to be published as System 8. A first public demo was made at the May 1996 WWDC. Shortly before it was canceled, a ...

For some systems, such as the Super NES (SNES), there existed a development kit, which consisted of specialized hardware. I believe this kit allowed the developer to present recently assembled machine ...

I use a Sinclair ZX Spectrum Issue 2 with a DivMMC EnJOY! Pro One and the boot process shows no error and I'm even able to enter the file browser but if I choose any game/demo/program I get always ...

I have a vivid memory of a guy I knew back in the day who had a custom prompt with a small character animation. The way I remember it there was a sequence like |,/,--,\,| in the prompt. This wasn't ...

I'm working on a retro project and was trying to create a pipe of stdin/out/err in DOS, but I can't find any functions to to this? For instance the pipe() command from unistd.h isn't present in ...

I'm working on a retro project and was trying to create a pipe of stdin/out/err in DOS, but I can't find any functions to to this? For instance the pipe() command from unistd.h isn't present in ...

The bus used for DEC's LSI-11 microcomputer implementation of the PDP-11 was originally and prosaically referred to as the LSI-11 bus, but thereafter it was universally referred to as the Q-bus. Does ...

The 8088 provided an address space of one megabyte. The IBM PC allocated that address space as 640K RAM (not that the 5150 could physically take that much, but the address space was allocated) ...

I am doing a fresh reinstall of Windows 98 SE on a Dell Optiplex GX1 550Mbr+. I previously had this very same version of Windows on this machine. The install works perfectly, but when I get to the ...

TurboVision was a library by Borland for developing TUI's (Text User Interfaces). It was included with their C++ and Pascal compilers. Were there any other TUI libraries that supported multiple ...

Most VGA cards and monitors support additional undocumented resolutions, accessed by changing the VGA registers. Most are just variations on the regular modes (320x100 is the same as 320x200, but with ...

The 1970s saw a big transition from CPUs built from thousands of discrete components, to CPUs implemented on a single chip, with the occasional use of bit-slice components along the way. There were, ...

CGA on the original IBM PC produced sixteen colors, one bit each for red, green, blue and overall intensity modifier. The preferred output device was the later-arriving 5153 color monitor, which ...

When an x86 CPU is running in real mode, can it be considered to be basically an 8086 CPU (or maybe 8088)? Or are there differences between the two?

The IBM 5153 Personal Computer Color Display was a monitor designed to accompany the original IBM PC (albeit released a couple of years later) and provide a color display at sharp enough resolution ...