> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.
Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...
Borland Turbo Pascal for CP/M and MS-DOS was developed by Anders Hejlsberg, who went on to develop All The Languages for Microsoft.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Turbo Modula 2 for CP/M (which was certainly surpassed by Topspeed Modula 2) was developed by Martin Odersky, who created Scala.
Throw in Robert Griesemer and his co-creation of Go, and the Wirth family tree is as influential in modern programming as it possibly could be.
The latter is lifted from “The School of Niklaus Wirth:
The Art of Simplicity,” which is a worthwhile volume for anyone with an interest in this stuff.
Spotting similarities betwen the appearance of the Oberon System and Plan 9, or Oberon syntax bits that were used in later languages, is left as an exercise for the reader.
It really is a pretty exciting project, even if I do have a few more gray hairs now (at least the ones that are left). Thanks for the Byte magazine references; I wasn't aware of these articles; very interesting to read how people experienced this technology in the nineties.
Remember that people who familiarize themselves with computing history are neither "crushing it" nor doing anything else evocative of advertising for energy drinks. Study of computing history is therefore something to be avoided.
> Therefore, here's a feature request: allow per-user killfiles.
That would be lovely. It's also an obvious feature which has existed in other contexts for a very long time, and it would be easy to implement. That means its omission was a deliberate design choice. It'd be interesting to understand why.
The Obama number is also high because the designer combined Obama's first and second terms into one figure, unlike what he did with the other presidents who served two terms.
Stuff like this is very common. For example, at the start of Trump's second term, the whitehouse history page was changed to make democrat presidents look bad -
clinton-1 and clinton-2 are distinct. I think it's more likely collected differently. The people gathering data will change. Someone with different data standards worked there for a while.
Indeed. It took me a bit to remember why. There was a clemency program for nonviolent drug offenders with otherwise clean records who had served at least 10 years in federal prison under out of date sentencing guidelines.
Although in recent years it looks like it turned from a bug about one specific (never resolved) issue to a more general troubleshooting session related to data loss issues.
Not to discount the awesomeness of the others, but that's a real prize. Talk about a strange artifact of its time and place!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster
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