Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM XT's.
While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.
I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.
The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.
So this makes you a candidate for the ultimate retro-computing challenge :
"¹ If you’re one of those retro-computing archivists, I guess this poses an extraordinary challenge even greater than possessing a Tandy Video Information System: Can you track down one of the three remaining copies of OS/2 for Mach 20?"
Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.
There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended up, so I definitely could've won that challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.
More accounting fun! This time around revenue recognition. It used to be that you had to ship a physical item to a customer in order to recognize the revenue from the sale. So the place I worked at back then would send out first-draft manuals to customers who had ordered the not-quite-done software. When we finished it and it passed testing, we'd send them the actual diskettes and an updated manual.
I never heard of any complaints being lodged, so it must have been a standard industry practice of the time. Or the salespeople had already smoothed the waves with the customers.
I miss those days. I worked in the Compute department for the DOT and we were always getting proof of concept hardware and some of it ended up under my desk.
Boss has a Dec laptop that was _thin_ (Digital Hi Note?)
We had a Dec Alpha running an early version of Windows NT
Ahh, thanks for the link. The webcam covers I'd seen in the past were just removable plastic stickers, and I was having a hard time visualizing what counts as "thin".
One of the photos shows them be about as thick as a credit card.
It can, and infinitesimals are a part of so-called nonstandard analysis, but you cannot write an infinitesimal using decimal notation. "0.999…1" is simply meaningless, a contradiction. If you have a "…" it means there's no place where you could put a "last" digit. If "0.999…1" doesn't feel impossible enough, then what would "0.999…9" mean?
People in this thread seem to think that “9 repeating” is not an infinity of nines but is instead “write or think of nines until you get bored and then write something else”
If it's a "correct" maze with exactly one way to get from any one square to any other square (as Eller's mazes are), then it doesn't matter where your entry and exit points are -- there's always one solution for any entry/exit pair you choose.
It was published in 1922, and the author died in 1945. Seems like that book is PD by any measure.
According to the article, it looks like Gutenberg adds a layer of "let a lawyer sign off on it", presumably to keep them from getting sued out of existence. Is that the case for Worm Ouroboros?
Just tried it. Looks like the latest Windows update installs a stub that sends the Windows app-store to the Python installer page if you type "Python" from the command line.
FWIW, the publisher for the MS app-store Python is "Python Software Foundation" and it, far as I can tell, is just ordinary Python and not some MS-only weirdness. It adds start menu links to the Python REPL and the IDLE tool.
Yes I did. I just wanted to relate my personal experience with it. Sometimes I'll see an article about something new just to discover that it's actually for an update that's a couple of weeks away. In this case, I just wanted to verify that it's working as advertised.
Audiobooks are useful for people who are blind, people who are severely dyslexic, or people with NVD (non-verbal learning disorder), who are capable of processing sound fine, but might have difficulty processing text.
I fail to see how it's ironic, given that the original story was about a button-pressing utopia. The utopia wasn't so simplistic and purile as people having things read to them, or watching movies instead of reading, but instead, people refused to do proper research, trusting written accounts from people several times removed from the original texts, like some obscene all-encompassing version of 'telephone'. People who were, ultimately, afraid of curiosity.
While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.
I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.
The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.