Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).

It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.

Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.

But how would you place this Z8000 assembly in the memory to be executed? Most likely via some script that used the terminal too, so simply calling the routines via the terminal was easier, though slower (IIRC formatting the drive took over 2 hours).

Yes, very similar to what you did with the script, but I’d guess you could enter a small routine into memory with the monitor then jump to it to execute. This would be faster than serial port speed, but really not that different. In the end anything that works would be good enough.

> (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).

I think that was my mistake, when I posted this to Lobsters. Sorry about that.

I did. The only Playboy magazine I ever bought contained an interview with Steve Jobs. Unfortunately I lent it to a friend and never got it back.

I had something similar. A friend of mine gave me an issue because it had a Borges story in it. I mean, I looked at the centerfold, but mostly paid attention to the story.

Which is somewhat akin to downloading one today. If, however, that same kid started small, with a data model, then added calculation, and UI and stepped through everything designing, reviewing, and testing as they went, they would learn a lot, and at a faster pace than if they wrote it character by character.

Our Graphics Lab at University used to be in an old house opposite a fish and chip shop. The people at the fish and chip shop were suspicious of our lab as all they saw was young men (mostly) entering and leaving at all hours of the night. We really missed an opportunity to name it "Hoare House" after one of our favourite computer scientists.

The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.

Exactly. Windows Cairo was planned to be a competitor to NeXTSTEP, and later, parts of it made it to Windows 95 and NT.

There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.

I treat code quality, and readability, as one of the goals. The LLM can help with this and refactor code much quicker than a human. If I think the code is getting too complex I change over to architecture review and refactoring until I am happy with it.

There's a selfish case for the wealthy to care about this: rising tides lift all boats, including theirs. When the bottom 80% are struggling with housing insecurity and desperation, the consequences don't stay contained to poor neighbourhoods. San Francisco seems like a good example—the visible decline in public spaces, safety concerns, and urban decay affect everyone who lives there, regardless of income. The wealthy can insulate themselves to a degree, but they can't fully escape a deteriorating society. They'd be better off in a city where everyone has a baseline of stability.

In the US rich people have been separating themselves from the rest for a while now (gated communities is just the first stage of separation. Rich people would rather take a short flight than be stuck in traffic among the hoi polloi. Rich people are constantly surrounded by bodyguards)

So rich people do not care about the decaying infrastructure around them.

I think the US will end up like Brazil: rich people go from sky scrapers to sky scraper via helicopters, while the favelas surround the skyscrapers. The poor are kept in check in the favelas with the help of a brutal police force. BTW: Brazil is a democracy.

But then _wrong_ people would get a benefit and they’d rather die than have that happen.

Also where Jim Gray was sailing too when he went missing. His yacht has never been found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist)

Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.

An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.