Commissions were different back then. I worked part time selling computers around 1990 and a little earlier, margin on computers was moving down, but was as high as 50%, I recall it moving down to 30% and stabilising there for a while. I don't remember software margins, but it could have been about the same. I used to get 50% of the margin as commission.
When I sold Windows 2.1 at Egghead Software, my spiff was an extra 30% for the first month as a promo. I always assumed that was a loss leader by Microsoft to push extra copies on release.
What sort of systems do you work on to require this kind of traffic volume? I've worked on one project that I'd consider relatively high volume (UK Post Office Horizon Online) and we were only targeting 500 TPS.
It's the misuse of OO constructs that gives it a bad name, almost always that is inheritance being overused/misused. Encapsulation and modularity are important for larger code bases, and polymorphism is useful for making code simpler, smaller and more understandable.
Maybe the extra long names in java also don't help too, along with the overuse/forced use of patterns? At least it's not Hungarian notation.
Heck, I love the long names. I know, I also hate FooBarSpecializedFactory, but that's waaaay better than FBSpecFac.
A sample: pandas loc, iloc etc. Or Haskell scanl1. Or Scheme's cdr and car. (I know - most of the latest examples are common functions that you'll learn after a while, but still, reading it at first is terrible).
My first contact with a modern OO language was C# after years of C++. And I remember how I thought it awkward that the codebase looked like everything was spelled out. Until I realize that it is easier to read, and that's the main quality for a codebase.
It's likely that is is mostly just the standard Microsoft Basic with some modified I/O routines. Since Microsoft Basic is now under the MIT license you are free to modify the code, it may be relatively easy to re-implement the I/O routines and have a legal 'recreation' of the P2305 cartridge.
This particular machine is Z80 based and not 6502, so it's not trivial to port.
I've looked into building my own BASIC implementation and got quite far with that. Unfortunately, most games that were written back then rely on timing that is near impossible to recreate at that level. Emulating cycle exact Z80 behavior and then having the original BASIC routines on top of that is a far easier route.
Well Woz was pretty good at software too. He wrote a lot of the early Apple software, including Integer Basic (to write games) and the low level disk software, called RWTS for Read/Write Track/Sector.
I'm not good at this at all, but if you do want to thank people that helped you, and let them know what it meant to you, don't leave it too late. I've had one regret after another as people who were significant in my early life died and I didn't get the chance to let them know what they meant to me.
It has 32-bit registers, but it has a 16-bit ALU, so it's a matter of opinion if that makes it a 16 or 32-bit processor. I'd go with 32-bit in that it's instruction set gives the impression to the programmer that they are working with a 32-bit system.
And for more evidence, the Z80 is referred to as an 8-bit processor but has a 4-bit ALU.
The 68000 actually had three 16 bit ALUs, so could munch a peak of 48 bits per clock cycle. Only one could do all operations while the other two were basically just add. These days we would say there were part of the AGU (address generator unit) but one of them was shared with the data register operations.
For some of us it brings back bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours and occasionally getting asked to feed another disk into the drive. Office was probably the worst for the number of floppies, but linux was even more, and you had the extra worry of if it would actually boot after the install, or if you got a setting wrong and had to start again.
Soon after all that we got to use CD's, which made life a lot better.
> bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours
Bad? Nah. I would use the words "exciting or "annoying" as it was annoying to wait but exciting as you were edging closer to playing with new software.
HOWEVER: if the act of installing software over and over again all day long was your job, then you have my condolences :-)
The shop I worked for, back in the day, got some of the technicians parallel ZIP drives. It was a godsend to copy the Windows 95 CAB files to the hard disk drive from the ZIP drive and run the upgrade from there, versus feeding the machine floppies.
If you were really luck you were working in a site w/ Novell Netware and you could just copy the CAB files down from the Netware server. >smile<
Not at all the same, but they did have QuickDraw II for the IIgs. This library had the benefit of using the simpler IIgs graphics modes, avoiding all the Apple II weirdness. With a little bit of searching the source can be found online.
