A Conversation for Unfinished Business of the Century
Are you listening, Bill?
Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Started conversation Sep 23, 1999
How about we make a huge effort to clear up all the bugs in the Microsoft family of Operating Systems...!
I have never forgiven Bill Gates for Microsoft BASIC back in the '80s - he took the original Kemeny and Kurtz implementation, and left out all the bits he didn't understand. This meant that a whole generation of programmers were deprived of BASIC's most powerful feature - the MAT instructions (Matrix manipulation). I therefore blame Bill Gates personally for setting the cause of 3D graphics back by ten years.
The worst feature in Microsoft OS's - the infamous "640K base memory" fiasco - wasn't actually their fault. When IBM was specifying their new PC using the 8088, the engineers said it could address a full one Megabyte of memory. The marketing department came back and said that numbers like "one Megabyte" would be meaningless to consumers, and that they wanted the system to have a fixed limit at 640KB, so they could use the advertising tagline "Ten times the memory of your current system". (CP/M machines of the time were generally limited to 64KB of RAM, without exotic addressing schemes) - There was absolutely no technical reason behind having a "special" area of base memory, outside that marketing line, yet it crippled memory management schemes for over fifteen years...
Are you listening, Bill?
Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Sep 23, 1999
Hmmm. Interesting parser you have... For example, it turned "Falls over in fits of laughter" into "FALLS laughter over of fits in"... I didn't realise Yoda coded for TDV!
I'm sorry I used the triangular braces, but they previewed fine...
Are you listening, Bill?
Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Oct 8, 1999
Depends on the definition of "u", with particular reference to reincarnation...
Key: Complain about this post
Are you listening, Bill?
- 1: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Sep 23, 1999)
- 2: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Sep 23, 1999)
- 3: Dr What (Oct 8, 1999)
- 4: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Oct 8, 1999)
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