Recent content by stepleton

I'm having a hard time finding out for SPARC, but yes, it seems per this old thread that MIPS did have it "from day one". So the GUI performance must have owed to something else. One other possibility is that Archimedes windows were just smaller than the ones found on megapixel displays like the...

Would a multiplier be used all that much to make the RISC OS user interface? I think the ARM probably did have a hardware advantage that most other contemporary processors (besides the 386) lacked: a barrel shifter. I don't know how useful it is for colour graphics, but for bitmaps it can really...

I would really like to see some direct proof of this, considering that the Sapphire window manager on the Accent system essentially had a dock three years prior (see above post). Besides my citation in my previous post about Accent, you can read this article about the Sapphire user interface...

The only thing I know it to support is a manoeuvre where you can grab the NeXT logo and drag the dock downward to slide it away and free up more screen real estate. But I may have missed something, and also you don't have to take my word for it: try it in the browser for yourself!

Possibly the Dock goes all the way back (via NeXTstep) to Accent, a predecessor to Mach that was developed (by Avie Tevanian and others) at Carnegie Mellon in the mid '80s. Here's a graphic (not a screenshot) that portrays what the UX on most Accent installations was like; that icon window at...

Here's a nice adaptor circuit board that allows me to use these Farallon AAUI MAUs with my AUI-having Ethernet card. I'm satisfied with this solution to my problem.

Amazing! Thanks for doing what you can to get your lucky find reverse-engineered. I hope it will be easy to dump the GALs! My 6100 has no cache so I'll be keeping an eye out for a clone of this thing.

My one weird trick for making Apple II DeskTop feel "fast enough" on a regular old Apple IIc is to spend a lot of time using Lisas.

Ha ha --- take that, Lisa! So much for using "spinach dentist beatles michael jackson apple 32 macintosh" as a passphrase...

I don't think this is so. My PJ-1080A still works and the replacement cartridges I have seem to be OK to me. I used mine with my Lisa to print xmas and valentines greetings in recent months (in colour of course). Unlike with most modern inkjets, the ink cartridges and the print head on the...

"Macintosh XL" was a marketing term, basically, and its precise interpretation differs in documentation and differs between different people. In my book, if it is running MacWorks of some version or other, you can call it a MacXL. Otherwise it is a Lisa. It's not the case that all of your...

I'm reminded that a few years ago, people found that Apple's Thunderbolt 4 Pro cables had a couple of Arm chips inside, each likely to be considerably more powerful than many of the systems mentioned in this thread.

OK, yes, on the Lisa this board is called the Video Board... That's a slightly snarky thing for me to say, but it got me wondering, so I went back to Adrian's video series (I've already seen all of it too) and searched through the transcripts. Adrian appears not to call it the Video Board; he...

This isn't a mixup of nomenclature either. It's literally called the Video Board. It has "VIDEO BOARD" written on it.

What a bizarre thing to say. And a substantial part of Adrian's episode 8 (or so) is all about fixing it!