Unanswered Questions
53 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
20
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Is an X Window System older than release 10 available online?
I'm looking for any copy of the X Window System older than release 10.
The oldest on x.org is X10R3.
Bob Scheifler doesn't have anything.
Jim Gettys may have something, but has yet to retrieve it ...
- 3,111
17
votes
1
answer
593
views
When was an image of an apple first used to promote the APL language
The APL community is contemplating the adoption of a common logo but some are worried about trouble from Apple lawyers. Now, IBM and others have been using apple motifs in promoting APL for a long ...
- 668
13
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0
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578
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Who owns the intellectual property of Thinking Machines today?
Who owns the intellectual property regarding the Connection Machine and other products from Thinking Machines? I believe the remnants were bought by Sun, so possibly Oracle, but does anyone know?
12
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1
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1k
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1990s BBS game featuring mining elements from a planet
Sometime in the 90s (sorry, can't be more specific) I used to dial in to a BBS and play a multi-player game that involved manually mining elements from a planet. It was very detailed, you got employed ...
CommunityBot
- 1
11
votes
0
answers
385
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When was the asterisk first used for "unsaved changes" and why?
The asterisk itself has been around as a symbol since literally (pun intended) before the earliest writing systems. Among its many uses, in some user interfaces it denotes unsaved changes to a file or ...
- 211
11
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238
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Anyone know of older mentions of the word "trap" for software interrupts than the IBM 704 manual from 1955?
I've dug into the origin of the word "trap" in computer engineering. The older documented mentions of the term I can find, is the "trapping mode" in the IBM 704, specifically in ...
- 23.2k
10
votes
0
answers
226
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What was IBM's internal Specification Language of the 1980s?
Within IBM's internal Development community, there was a move in the 1980s to bring our skills up to date. As part of this, we were introduced to a specification language, independent of the ...
- 4,564
10
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356
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How much did Atari pay for GEM?
Atari licensed Digital Research's GEM graphic user interface for the ST. As https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-back/ puts it:
And of course in the wake of the Macintosh the ...
- 63.1k
10
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0
answers
426
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What is the timeline of NASA ground control computers?
In the movie "Hidden Figures", NASA receives an IBM 7090 in 1961. What is the subsequent timeline of the primary computing means for flight planning and orbit calculation?
Specifically, what was the ...
9
votes
0
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560
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When did Kay Nishi offer a million dollars for a competing DOS?
The development of Digital Research's fully-compatible MS-DOS competitor, DR DOS, was encouraged when, according to https://retrotechnology.com/dri/dri_wein.html
After DOS Plus for Philips we did a ...
CommunityBot
- 1
9
votes
0
answers
761
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How many Amiga 3000's were produced?
While revisiting this question: Seeking details relating to Amiga 3000 serial numbers I began to wonder how many actual Amiga 3000's were produced by Commodore.
I suspect (like most production ...
- 125k
9
votes
1
answer
534
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Why was the Altair numbered "8800" even though the processor was an 8080?
The Altair 8800 was a computer using the Intel 8080 processor. Why the difference in numbers?
- 247
8
votes
0
answers
507
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How was the Amiga console supposed to work with only 32KB of RAM?
During the development of the Amiga, one of the targets was a game console with 32KB of RAM. How was it supposed to work?
by blitting ahead of the beam with the Copper to avoid double buffering?
was ...
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7
votes
0
answers
229
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The works of Frontier Manufacturing
Having spent the last however many decades believing Commodore Semiconductor Group was a simple rename of MOS Technology, I just watched a video – quite interesting in its own right – which casually ...
- 63.1k
7
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0
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276
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What was this book about floating-point system design/construction?
A comment on the question Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point? says the following (emphasis added):
Re, "Nowadays, floating point is usually either 32 or 64 bits." More ...
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