Crazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.

Go to any Vintage Computer Festival and ask the people exhibiting how clever and witty they think questions about running Crysis are.

Then don’t use AI to contribute.

They mostly relied on OS/Toolbox implementation quirks though, not hardware implementation quirks, because applications that relied on the latter wouldn’t run on the Macintosh XL and that mattered to certain market segments. (Like some people using spreadsheets, who were willing to trade CPU speed for screen size.) Similarly anything that tried to use floppy copy protection tricks wouldn’t work due to the different system design, so that wasn’t common among applications.

So even things that wrote directly to the framebuffer would ask the OS for the address and bounds rather than hardcode them, copy protection would be implemented using license keys (crypto/hashes, not dongles) rather than weird track layouts on floppies, etc. It led to good enough forward compatibility that the substantial architectural changes in the Macintosh II were possible, and things just improved from there.

Eh, there were plenty of games that were coded for a particular clock speed, and then once the SE came out, had an update that included a software version of a turbo button, let you select which of two speeds to run at. They run FAST on an SE/30 or Mac II and unusably fast on anything newer.

I didn’t encounter too many of those back in the day, I think because there was the VBL task mechanism for synchronizing with screen refresh that made it easy to avoid using instruction loops for timing.

Much more common in my experience was the assumption that the framebuffer was 1-bit, but such games would still run on my IIci if I switched to black & white—they’d just use the upper left 3/4 of the screen since they still paid proper attention to the bytes-per-row in its GrafPort.

Could be that by the time I was using a Mac II though that all the games that didn’t meet that minimum bar had already been weeded out.

Yeah, there were a bunch of floppy games which only ran on an original Mac or maybe a Plus. No go with even my Mac SE.

It was actually mostly written in assembly, but used Pascal calling conventions and structure layouts since that was expected to be the primary language for application developers. As it had been for Lisa, as it was for “large” applications on Apple II, and as was the case for much of the rest of the microcomputer and minicomputer industry and even the nascent workstation industry (eg Apollo).

It was the Lisa system software that was mostly implemented in Pascal and some blamed this for its largeness and its performance. Compilers and linkers weren’t great back then; most compiler code generation was pretty rigid, and most linkers didn’t even coalesce identical string literals across compilation unit boundaries!

Lisa Workshop C introduced the “pascal” keyword for function declarations and definitions to indicate they used Pascal calling conventions, and otherwise followed Lisa Pascal structure layout rules, so as to minimize the overhead of interoperating with the OS. (I’m not sure whether it introduced the “\p” Pascal string literal convention too or if that came later with Stanford or THINK Lightspeed C.)

That brings back the memories. I had a copy of Lightspeed C for the Mac in college.

In the workstation world, most companies used C and not Pascal. Apollo was different in that regard as their operating system, Domain, was unique to themselves, while most of the other workstation companies (Sun, HP, DEC, and IBM) were using Unix variants of some time (either BSD-based or System V-based in most cases). Apollo Domain was written in Pascal and was definitely not Unix-based. It had many unique and interesting features. In particular it had very sophisticated authentication and file sharing capabilities. A user could log in on any machine that was part of the domain (hence the name) and the user’s complete file system would be made available over the network on that hardware. Every system on the network shared a domain-level file system which removed the need for many Unix solutions like NFS. I had just accepted a job offer out of college from HP’s workstation division when HP bought Apollo. By the time I started, a couple months later, I was part of the HP side of the Apollo Systems Division.

You’re talking about the workstation world circa 1985 and later, but prior to then the victory of C and UNIX wasn’t a sure thing. Apollo was the big player, but they weren’t the only ones.

In particular, many minicomputer vendors had some type of graphics and engineering workstation system built around their minicomputer product line, whether multi-user (where you’d have one minicomputer or even mainframe serving multiple bitmap or vector graphics terminals) or single-user (whether using a dedicated low-end minicomputer as a single-user system or using a new CPU design).

The Xerox Alto is what everyone cites as the start of the workstation trend, but it didn’t just beget the Xerox Star, the Lisp Machine, and the Lisa, it also led to the Three Rivers PERQ and CAD/CAE environments built on top of modular hardware from Data General and DEC, to the point where eventually DG, DEC, HP, and others released their own graphical workstations based on their minicomputer architectures.

All of these used vendor operating systems, not UNIX, and almost all emphasized the use of Pascal and FORTRAN for high-level application development. (The ones that didn’t had vendor languages too, like InterLISP and Mesa for Xerox.)

A good example of this dichotomy is the Puzzle Desk Accessory --- originally written in Pascal (as an example of making a DA thus), it was too large to include on a 400KB micro-floppy disk, so was re-written in assembly language going from 6K Bytes to 600 Bytes:

https://www.folklore.org/Puzzle.html

This is exactly the sort of project that can serve as the basis for such a system.

What happens when lobbying for a new deal fails? Do the people just shrug and accept the fate their feudal lords have determined for them?

and what happens when people don't want a new deal? Violence is ok then?

Thats what the Pinkertons were for, yes.

Many libraries or library systems actually have something like this. In the Bay Area, the large Santa Clara Library does and at least had regular drop-in hours.

My local library can do vhs and all the various smaller form tapes that came in between like mini dv. They also support cassette tapes and the various consumer projectors people used back when home movies were just becoming a thing. They even have a large bed scanner you can fill with photos and the software will turn them into individual files.

There is a network of Memory Labs (1) and many more that are not part of the network. Check your local libraries to see if they have one. The Kansas City area has one at the Johnson County library.

1) https://memorylabnetwork.github.io

They do if they want me to use it.

You can, in fact, be pursued both civilly and criminally for fraud.

Your admissions here are enough that if you tried to contribute to any of my own Open Source projects, I would reject your contributions, and if I had accepted any prior ones I would pursue legal remedies.