Everyone should own at least one book of Bukowski poetry: in addition to computers he wrote about cats, going to the track, drinking and other things his life. I remember riding the train from Dresden to Prague and the person next to us was reading his novel Post Office which is a wonderful story of irresponsibility.
Reading Bukowski often makes me yearn for a life that could have been. An often miserable, always irresponsible, but often wonderful life. Of course, his real life was probably far less glamorous than he makes it sound, but, man, did he have a way with words.
"nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created on an IBM Personal Computer."
Well I guess, the 1571 drive was released that summer, with the hardware capable of reading IBM PC floppies, but I think it took some years for the software to be developed (Big Blue Reader).
I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.
What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later! Also 16-bit ISA would have too many address lines for this thing.)
The Tandy 2000 had four custom slots that only accepted their own card format. Here again it was doomed to failure and it's kind if a shame because the cards were easy as balls to install: the cards were mounted on metal trays and slid in horizontally, guided by rails in the chassis, and did not require the cover of the machine to be removed for insertion or removal.
Only a few expansion options were available, all from Radio Shack: a color graphics option (640x400x8 colors in 1983!) for which you had to procure the matching monitor, a memory expansion (up to two could be installed for a total of 768k, by stacking RAM chips some aftermarket vendors got this to 896k), a bus mouse adapter/real-time clock combo board, and I believe an external hard disk controller. One expansion, the "TV/Joystick expansion" which would give the 2000 composite out and access to joysticks for gaming, was planned but (to my knowledge) never released. As far as I know only one graphical game saw commercial release for the 2000: a special build of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Yeah, but it cost as much as a whole Tandy 2000 with the color graphics option!
The PGC was perhaps the first GPU for PC systems. It had its own 8086 processor on board, which would accept graphics commands through a ring buffer shared with the host system, and the 8086 would translate those into frame buffer operations it needed to perform. A few years back some clever git found an exploit to allow arbitrary code to be run on the PGC's 8086.
The Tandy 2000's color graphics was not spectacularly great by any means, nowhere near comparable to high-end solutions like the PGC. It was a 96 KiB framebuffer divided into 3 bitplanes, only one of which was mapped into system memory at any one time. You changed which plane was accessible by poking one of the video registers. There were also some palette registers that let you change which 8 (out of the standard IRGB 16-color set) were visible on the screen at once. Since drawing a full-color display meant 3 plane selects followed by 3 writes to video RAM, it was slow to produce such a display and there were "temporal color fringe" artifacts as the writes to different planes were momentarily visible. But it was still great for CAD and DTP applications, especially for the money, and good enough that Microsoft used it as a development platform to build a color GUI for Windows, while Macintosh was still committed to producing the best looking, black and white display they could for the money.
It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
I used to read a lot of Bukowski. I still have a very large number of his books, rare and out of print, stored in boxes.
At first, I thought this was a well-written parody. I never had one inkling about this poem or his technical knowledge. I understand what he was talking about because I was around back then and understand and suffered from these gotchas.
Compatibility was their greatest weakness and, at the same time, their greatest strength. It allowed the Cambrian explosion of the 70s and 80s personal computers, each with their own superpowers.
I was curious about what was happening with the domain name here (after all, shkspr.mobi has nothing to do with Shakespeare) so imagine my delight at discovering it was an actual poem and my vague notion that I’ve been to the site for poetry in the past was, in fact, correct.
Is this a citation of a former work? There's a famous Italian song titled “And yet the wind still blows” (1978), built in the same format of this poem.
Everyone should own at least one book of Bukowski poetry: in addition to computers he wrote about cats, going to the track, drinking and other things his life. I remember riding the train from Dresden to Prague and the person next to us was reading his novel Post Office which is a wonderful story of irresponsibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)
Reading Bukowski often makes me yearn for a life that could have been. An often miserable, always irresponsible, but often wonderful life. Of course, his real life was probably far less glamorous than he makes it sound, but, man, did he have a way with words.
My favorite Bukowski book of poetry "Love is a Dog from Hell". Very Bukowski.
Shout out to City Lights Bookstore in San Fancisco. I bought a lot of poetry books there in the late 80s and early 90s.
There are books of Bukowski poetry and then there are books of Bukowski poetry.
The stuff published during his lifetime is fabulous. The posthumous books are butchered in a terrible way.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/charles-bukowskis-posthu...
"nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created on an IBM Personal Computer."
Well I guess, the 1571 drive was released that summer, with the hardware capable of reading IBM PC floppies, but I think it took some years for the software to be developed (Big Blue Reader).
I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.
What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later! Also 16-bit ISA would have too many address lines for this thing.)
The Tandy 2000 had four custom slots that only accepted their own card format. Here again it was doomed to failure and it's kind if a shame because the cards were easy as balls to install: the cards were mounted on metal trays and slid in horizontally, guided by rails in the chassis, and did not require the cover of the machine to be removed for insertion or removal.
Only a few expansion options were available, all from Radio Shack: a color graphics option (640x400x8 colors in 1983!) for which you had to procure the matching monitor, a memory expansion (up to two could be installed for a total of 768k, by stacking RAM chips some aftermarket vendors got this to 896k), a bus mouse adapter/real-time clock combo board, and I believe an external hard disk controller. One expansion, the "TV/Joystick expansion" which would give the 2000 composite out and access to joysticks for gaming, was planned but (to my knowledge) never released. As far as I know only one graphical game saw commercial release for the 2000: a special build of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Those graphics sound amazing. But I guess EGA could do 640x350 in 16 colours by 1984.
That same year, IBM released the 3-board PGA which did 640x480x256.
Yeah, but it cost as much as a whole Tandy 2000 with the color graphics option!
The PGC was perhaps the first GPU for PC systems. It had its own 8086 processor on board, which would accept graphics commands through a ring buffer shared with the host system, and the 8086 would translate those into frame buffer operations it needed to perform. A few years back some clever git found an exploit to allow arbitrary code to be run on the PGC's 8086.
The Tandy 2000's color graphics was not spectacularly great by any means, nowhere near comparable to high-end solutions like the PGC. It was a 96 KiB framebuffer divided into 3 bitplanes, only one of which was mapped into system memory at any one time. You changed which plane was accessible by poking one of the video registers. There were also some palette registers that let you change which 8 (out of the standard IRGB 16-color set) were visible on the screen at once. Since drawing a full-color display meant 3 plane selects followed by 3 writes to video RAM, it was slow to produce such a display and there were "temporal color fringe" artifacts as the writes to different planes were momentarily visible. But it was still great for CAD and DTP applications, especially for the money, and good enough that Microsoft used it as a development platform to build a color GUI for Windows, while Macintosh was still committed to producing the best looking, black and white display they could for the money.
It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
Same here. And I wouldn’t pass anything weird.
Currently I’m looking for a VT-330 or some other terminal with Tektronix graphics. These seem like unobtanium this side of the Atlantic.
So, if someone has a Rainbow, Z-100, AT&T Unix PC, 3278 terminal, or anything like that, I’m rescue stray computers.
Still is just a bit true to today with all the walled gardens.
My favorite Bukowski quote is: 'To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.'
You can read the full letter from which this quote was taken, along with a short bio, here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-j...
I used to read a lot of Bukowski. I still have a very large number of his books, rare and out of print, stored in boxes.
At first, I thought this was a well-written parody. I never had one inkling about this poem or his technical knowledge. I understand what he was talking about because I was around back then and understand and suffered from these gotchas.
> understand and suffered from these gotchas.
Compatibility was their greatest weakness and, at the same time, their greatest strength. It allowed the Cambrian explosion of the 70s and 80s personal computers, each with their own superpowers.
DON'T TRY
- Bukowski
I've loved that from the moment I stumbled upon it.
Both funny and serious at the same time.
I was curious about what was happening with the domain name here (after all, shkspr.mobi has nothing to do with Shakespeare) so imagine my delight at discovering it was an actual poem and my vague notion that I’ve been to the site for poetry in the past was, in fact, correct.
> but the wind still blows over / Savannah
Is this a citation of a former work? There's a famous Italian song titled “And yet the wind still blows” (1978), built in the same format of this poem.
The 1581 had some amount of MFM diskette compatibility.