Quoting: wvstolzingsadly there's nothing from Sinclair

You can find those at https://worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/technical-docs/ –or could; as of right now, there's just a loading screen, I hope they'll be back soon. I didn't check to see whether archive.org has them, too.

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Now this really is something. I kept my original box for precisely this day.

Quoting: razing32This was also the first FPS i remeber to let you control units in FPS mode
That was mind blowing to me at the time

I think it really was the first, and yes, mind blowing it was.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAlso, when you turned the thing on it was instantly on, like turning on a . . . uh . . . what turns on instantly these days? A light, I guess.

Unless you have to first boot up your PC to access the home automation software that controls the lights... or some neighbour accidentally DDoSes your wireless light bulbs?

:D



...or it is one of those CFLs that must have been made back when humankind first migrated out of Africa; oh how quickly memory fades.

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Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: EikeNothing compared to the "chewing gum" keyboard of the Sinclair (ZX 81 or Spectrum, not sure anymore)...!

The original Spectrum had the “dead flesh” board. Later versions had an improved one with plastic keycaps. I believe Sir Clive actually held patents on rubber-sprung keyboards, and gathered massive licencing fees from the likes of Dell in the '90s. His own company's efforts, being early, were pretty awful though.

The ZX81... oh, dear. It was a keycap-less membrane, marketed as “touch sensitive”. I guess if you “touched” it with a hammer...

Believe it or not, I actually liked both of these–the membrane for its literal flexibility, see post above, and the chiclet for its ergonomic improvement upon the membrane :D

What made them bearable was the way Sinclair implemented their BASIC interpreter to accept single key strokes as keyword tokens, thereby reducing the need for typing every letter in a command, and at the same time reducing the memory requirements for program code too.

Of course people hate that too when they are unfamiliar with how that works, but if you grew up with no preconditioning, it was an awesome system–besides, you had all the BASIC commands printed right there in front of you, so you never had to look up anything in the manuals.

And don't get me started about MANUALS!
They were really well-written, comprehensive, educational text books, not some shoddy three "page" PDF you get these days, IF you are lucky...

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: ValckRegarding desktop cases, it may be a bit of a stretch... but I use a 4U 19" server case as my "desktop", with another 2U fuse-and-switch panel below; gives a nice bit of height to the monitor. Probably not going to win any design awards, but it is functional and definitely not cramped inside the case :)

I don't get why people would want to use the 64's keyboard layout, as well as its form factor which doesn't allow to rest your wrists properly? Unless they intend to use the x86 as an emulator and want it to look the part too.

Yeah, for me if I'm going to emulate, I'm going to want the original keyboard layout and such. Try to make it as accurate as possible. But then the c64 is one of those that I didn't grow up with and wondered why they only have two arrow keys with modifiers to go the opposite direction... it's terrible. I grew up with the Atari 8bit, which had proper arrow keys :P

Heh, I grew up with a ZX81 which didn't even have keys at all :D
But that allowed me to convert it into The World's First Portable Computer™, fit snugly inside my breakfast box with the key membrane on the outside, reducing the case size to half. It was easily powered by a 9V block battery, at least for a few minutes. Of course entirely pointless without a battery powered TV set, which back then were more expensive than gold, and just as rare :)
I wish I had taken pictures, but again, we had to use real photographic film, and everything around that was expensive, too, at least for a twelve-year-old. And of course I wish I had kept it, instead of trading it with a friend for some other junk...

Ah, those were the times, when we had to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow. Every day of the week.

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Regarding desktop cases, it may be a bit of a stretch... but I use a 4U 19" server case as my "desktop", with another 2U fuse-and-switch panel below; gives a nice bit of height to the monitor. Probably not going to win any design awards, but it is functional and definitely not cramped inside the case :)

I don't get why people would want to use the 64's keyboard layout, as well as its form factor which doesn't allow to rest your wrists properly? Unless they intend to use the x86 as an emulator and want it to look the part too.

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I love the technical development that went into X4, but I wish they had kept the art style of X3 instead of going "more realistic" which I think unless you're a triple-triple-A studio with BethesdaMicrosoft's budget, you simply cannot pull off convincingly. And even they can't.
X3's graphic novel-style was perfect in my opinion; with X4 they went straight into uncanny valley.

Plus, the decision to expand Humans instead of the Boron Kingdom feels awkward – I mean there's already the Argon Federation, and why not introduce (ha. ha. he said "introduce" when in fact they were omitted) the original races in chronological order...

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Mildly interesting if there were an 8-core 5700X with 65W TDP... I specifically chose the 3700X for its comparatively low power rating, while still having eight cores.

On the other hand, I'd need a new main board for that, which pushes the price even higher, on top of the inconvenience of having to replace what amounts to every system component, instead of just removing fan, heat sink, and CPU.

Considering the Ryzen 5000 series should really have been the 4000s before the marketing managers came in, I guess I'm simply continuing the pattern of skipping every other generation :)

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What a stupid nonsense. Thankfully we seem to have the option to disable it, which I did as soon as the update hit. Not that I'm a particular proponent of cursing or so, but I like to know that what both ends of a conversation get to see is the same as what both ends wrote, or at least have the illusion of knowing(</sarcasm>).

And yes, I too wish there were the same freedom of choice regarding that idiotic "news" section... if only they'd put the endless hours of interface development crunch work into making that optional instead of a censoring filter that is inevitably going to miss or misidentify words – unless AI got to the point where it is more creative than humans. In which case I guess we don't need to worry about petty chat filtering any more.

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Not in the mood for a constructive comment right now, but since you asked: Over my dead body.

I can agree that MS does appear to be less hostile these days, but what those words mean, if you take a moment to think about them, is: it is hostile, only less so. I mean nobody really buys that "we <3 Linux" crap, right?
I may appear a bit less hostile towards MS, too, these days, or maybe I don't.

That aside, I don't see any reason at all to welcome the choice of another browser built on (quick reminder: Google's, Facebook's, Microsoft's, Opera's, Adobe's, ...) Chromium engine.

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