A lot, I think. PA-RISC had a lot going for it, high performance, solid ISA, even some low-end consumer grade parts (not to the same degree as PowerPC but certainly more so than, say, SPARC). It could have gone much farther than it did.
Not that HP was the only one to lose their minds over Itanic (SGI in particular), but I thought they were the ones who walked away from the most.
P.A. Semi contributed greatly to Apple silicon, but the company has nothing to do with PA-RISC. In fact, their most notable chip before Apple bought them was Power ISA.
Acquiring P.A. Semi got them Dan Dobberpuhl and Jim Keller, which laid a good design foundation. However, IMO, I'd lean towards these as the decisive factors today:
1) Apple's financial firepower allowing them to book out SOTA process nodes
2) Apple being less cost-sensitive in their designs vs. Qualcomm or Intel. Since Apple sells devices, they can justify 'expensive' decisions like massive caches that require significantly more die area.
A bit of a sharpshoot here, but Power Mac applications for classic Mac OS, including fat binaries, put the PPC executable code in the data fork. This was also true for CFM-68K binaries. Only old school 68K code went in CODE resources.
(author) At one time I thought of doing a PalmOS port, and even did a little code to draw the tank, but never got farther than that. I'm not even sure where that went.
Would be nice to have the AI visualize all those words to their pre-zodiacal origin on a landscape wireframe diagram with popup points of interest and water surface tension effects showing affinity and uses among various cultures.
Sucked, compared to? If the 6502 sucked on every other metric but cost, while it would have gotten some use I don't think it would have been as heavily used as it was.
“The 6800 was initially sold at $360 in single-unit quantities, but had been lowered to $295. The 6502 was introduced at $25, and Motorola immediately reduced the 6800 to $125. It remained uncompetitive and sales prospects dimmed. The introduction of the Micralign to Motorola's lines allowed further reductions and by 1981 the price of the then-current 6800P was slightly less than the equivalent 6502, at least in single-unit quantities. By that point, however, the 6502 had sold tens of millions of units and the 6800 had been largely forgotten.”
The others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:
"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."
This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.
(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)
Yeah the code was leaked without Activision's permission a few years ago. It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog. The other games haven't been available for sale since the mid 90s when Activision put out a shovelware CD collection containing every Infocom game except Hitchhiker's and Shogun, so it's not like they have much commercial value.
> It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog.
Likely explanation: their lawyers are worried there may be third party rights or agreements limiting their ability to open source a game – even if that isn't true, lawyers want to see paperwork to convince themselves it isn't true. For Zork, that was comparatively easy because the game's history is well-known, and Activision had a history of releasing sequels. For other games, that may be more difficult – so start with the lowest hanging and highest profile fruit.
The BBC probably has a say in if that game will be open source. (Their multi-decade effort at making the game free to play and being open about some of their enhancements to it suggests they may be willing to help with that, and Microsoft making the first move with Zork 1/2/3 may help with any interest there.)
The rights to Hitchhiker's and Shogun reverted to their credited authors (Douglas Adams and James Clavell) after they went out of print. The rest of the Infocom library was created as works for hire entirely by salaried Infocom employees, so the rights went from Infocom to Activision to Microsoft.
Right, which is why I assume the BBC has the entire rights today to Hitchhiker's and was gifted them by Douglas Adams' estate, but my searches didn't turn up enough evidence to back that assumption so I didn't include it, but I feel rather sure of it. (ETA: Related to the chain of how the BBC wound up owning was left of the H2G2 wiki for a time before spinning that back out to different owners.)
I bought a version for the mac (OSX), which I managed to get moved from 800k floppy to my network drive. The games are still on my NAS today and play just fine. Still fun to play, someday I hope to find time to solve them. I keep the originals so should even be legal.
The notable change is that most of those repos have been available not as a open source but "source available" as Fair Use (for Archival Purposes), but the copyright owner (Microsoft today) has now directly applied the MIT License to three of those repos (Zork 1/2/3). Hopefully they will apply it to more of them as Microsoft legal allows, but it's still exciting they've made three repos officially open source under a FLOSS recognized license.
There is a Yugo parked near a brewery in Queens NYC that always blows my mind. It's still in decent shape for its age and must be driven regularly as it's always in a different parking spot.
Not that HP was the only one to lose their minds over Itanic (SGI in particular), but I thought they were the ones who walked away from the most.
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