Abort Retry Fail

I can recommend "The Digital Antiquarian" for games (https://www.filfre.net/) and "Abort Retry Fail" for hardware companies (https://www.abortretry.fail/)

If you like computer/software history, I recommend the Abort Retry Fail[1] mailing list. [1] https://www.abortretry.fail/

History Blog: https://abortretry.fail Random: https://www.absurd.wtf

Spookily I was on that site that morning, reading his excellent history of Acorn (and ARM): https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

Also a good read: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-novell

It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different. I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-and-the-canc… 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list

Related/unrelated depending on your view of history: The History of Xerox https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xerox

"Several years"? Try "a decade and a half". AT&T itself ported UNIX™ to the Intel 8086 in 1978: https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/otherports/newp… The 8086 was the first ever microprocessor to run Unix – before 68000 or anything. The first release of MS, later SCO, Xenix was 1981. https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix It was later ported to the 8086 in 1983 and 80286 by 1985. https://landley.net/history/mirror/unix/scohistory.html So Unix was running some 4 years before IBM launched the PC and Xenix was on the market by 2 years after launch. That was a full 8 years before Linus got Linux 0.01 out in 1991. UNIX is a 1970s OS; x86 PC Unix was a commercial 1980s product; Linux is a 1990s thing.

Does anybody else find things like this frustrating? https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1 Well, it's right there in the name: AbortRetryFail

Another article on the same site has a good summary of the history of ARM — there was plenty I wasn't aware of: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

> I can’t ever see a communist system coming up with an iPhone. Soviets invented a lot of things, in terms of aviation, computers, celestial navigation in intercontinental missiles. There was also an article, which I read recently but failed to find it now, about how they revolutionized mechanical watches, and came out with their own quartz movements, without copying anyone. Oh lastly, they did the "iPhone of sea going vehicles", the erkanoplan, and VLIW computing which led us to Itanium at some point [0]. [0]: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-itanic-saga

For Visicalc, Dan Bricklin has a few blog posts: http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm For Aston-Tate's dBase app, there's this blog post about its history: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-tate

Clockwork makes several https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop https://www.abortretry.fail/p/review-of-the-clockwork-pi-devterm R-01 is particular interesting for having a RISC-V processor

A/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the licensing fee was $1,000 per seat. https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was_apples_au… I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like Free/NetBSD did. In the 1980's Microsoft had their own port of Unix named Xenix. Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-DOS? https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix > In March of 1982, Western Electric reduced the royalty fees that it charged for UNIX with the introduction of UNIX System III (a combination of UNIX V7 and PWD). This was done by raising the source license cost, but lowering the royalty per user license to $100 (about $318 in 2023) from $250. This meant that Microsoft’s prepayment of $200000 in 1980 (around $700k in 2023) for a discount in volume was voided if they wished to use the newer system. That same month, on the 10th, Paul Allen held a seminar in NYC where he outlined plans for MS-DOS 2.0.

Does anybody else find things like this frustrating? https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-2 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-3 ← NOPE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-2 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/tandy-corporation-part-3