Bringup History of Mac OS X
The heritage of different operating systems has been discussed many times. Mac OS X includes code from Mach and BSD, AmigaOS is based on TRIPOS, MS-DOS is a CP/M-86 clone and Windows NT is modeled after VMS. But what machines and operating systems were used for cross-compilation and bringup of these systems? In order to find this out about Mac OS X, I talked to a few people working at NEXT and Apple, and people that worked on Mach and BSD.
Amiga/Lorraine Mugs
Every touristy place has them: Souvenirs with given names on them. If you have an uncommon name, or a friend with an uncommon name, you might look through the whole collection – and notice that they have generic ones like “#1 FRIEND” (i case you really don’t find your friend’s name), and, sometimes, generic ones in Spanish.
Zuse Z1 at the Deutsches Technikmuseum
My last blog post showed the Zuse Z3 (1939-1941), the world’s first working digital Turing-complete computer. Let’s go back two more steps: The Zuse Z1 (1936-1938) shared its design with the Z3: It read its program from punched film and used floating point as its internal representation of numbers. But since it was all mechanical, it never worked reliably.
Zuse Z3 at the Deutsches Museum
The Z3 by Konrad Zuse was the world’s first working digital Turing-complete computer. It did floating point arithmetic, had two registers accessible to the programmer, was microcoded, and clocked at about 5 Hz.
Archimedes Operating System (PDF)
Amiga & Supergrips
This article is in German, since it is about the German TV show “Supergrips” and how the scoreboard was implemented.
The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk: Pushing Keynote to its Limits
Download the Apple Keynote 08 presentation.
The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk @25C3
Update: Video recording available.
Copland D9 Booting
Click on the image for a video of Copland D9 (the first developer release; the second one being D11E4), booting a bit, then hanging. It is running on a Power Macintosh 6100.
What Operating System Is This?
Unfortunately, I have not been able to successfully boot this up all the way on this machine – it hangs on this screen.
Inside Macintosh Volumes I, II, III (PDF)
Here are all three volumes of the original 1985 edition of Inside Macintosh as a searchable PDF:
Reconstructing the Leftovers on the Amiga Kickstart 1.0 Disk
Update: The source is available at github.com/mist64/extract-adf; more info here.
64'er 04/1984 (PDF)
I converted the first issue of the German Commodore 64 magazine 64’er into a searchable PDF:
Transactor November 1987: Volume 8, Issue 3 (PDF)
The other day, I found this at WeirdStuff:
Create your own Version of Microsoft BASIC for 6502
Update: The source is available at github.com/mist64/msbasic
"ROR" in Microsoft BASIC for 6502
If you disassemble any version of Microsoft BASIC for 6502, you’ll find this code in a function that normalizes the (simulated) floating point accumulator:
Bill Gates' Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC
If you type “WAIT6502,1” into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever tried to claim that the code wasn’t from Microsoft”.
1200 Baud Archeology: Reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a Cassette Tape
The audio file that was posted two weeks ago is indeed a very important artifact of computer history: It is a recording of the “Apple I BASIC” cassette tape that came with the Apple I. It is the first piece of Software ever sold by Apple (not counting computer firmware).
Puzzle: 1200 Baud Archeology
This audio file is an important (previously unreleased) artifact of computer history. The aim of the puzzle is to decode and identify it correctly.