When I was at Amazon my manager told me that several years earlier he was responsible for updating the 404 page so he scanned a picture of a cat his daughter drew and made that the body of the page. In 2009 when I started, that was still the image, but at some point someone must have noticed and replaced it with a stock photo of a dog. The asset was still called kayli-kitty.jpg, though. It’s since been changed again to rotating pictures and references to the original are gone.
I also found this comment from him on a blog: https://www.davebellous.com/2006/09/25/what-the/#comment-290...
Playfulness isn't the only thing we've lost. Software bloat has reached comedic levels.
void outchar (char c) {
c = c | 0x80;
asm volatile ("jsr $fbfd\n" : : "a" (c): "a");
}
void outstr (char* str) {
while (*str != 0)
outchar(*str++);
}
void main () {
outstr("Hello, world!\n");
}
lda #$c8 ; ASCII H | 0x80
jsr $fbfd
lda #$e5 ; ASCII e | 0x80
jsr $fbfd
...
"An overview of the PL.8 compiler", circa 1976
For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?
People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.
Monthly bills are stopping me. Can I use Apple's MPW C compiler to build for iOS?
You need to search for it on old ftp sites.
> For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?
The compilers have "evolved". Compiling old code is challenging, to say the least. I do compile old programs when the new seem to explode: xpdf, xsnow.
Compiling old compilers is impossible because they rely on ancient kernel headers.
As in megabytes.
Nearly all of clang and LLVM are linked as libraries.
I couldn't find this elusive picture of a cat on archive.org, but I found this dog instead:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030113144310/https://www.amazo...
June 2016 appears to be when Amazon adopted the current error pages with the large dog images.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160612232820/http://www.amazon...
http://telcontar.net/Screenshots/worldwidewonk/Amazon-404-eh...
mastry found a screenshot of the image in his sibling reply.
0 - http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/k...
1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20071030172825/http://www.amazon...
Another anecdote: somewhere in that time period we (Prime) were using comments for various metadata and pre-release and post-deployment checks would verify the comments were in place. The team responsible for the edge proxies decided they were going to rewrite all the HTML going out on the fly to remove extraneous comments and whitespace in an effort to reduce page-size.
In the middle of testing a release all of the tests related to a particular feature started failing and (I believe) different devs were getting different HTML on their systems (the feature wasn't rolled out to every session). Our QA team was extremely pedantic in the best way possible and wouldn't allow the release to continue until testing could complete, so we had to track down the responsible parties and get them to dial down their transformation. They eventually tried again without stripping comments, but I can't imagine much was saved after compression without much of anything removed (they might have been rewriting other tags as well).
Serious question: Is this possible when a guardian gave consent earlier?
AFAICT, kids own the copyright to things they create[0], but guardians are responsible and can use it on the child’s interest. IANAL, consult an attorney, etc., etc.
0 - https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-who.html#:~:text=Can%....
Including EDIED and EIEIO
it's still right here every day when Firefox says "gah this tab crashed".
Ah, the old times when one could purchase a RAM upgrade or upgrade RAM after buying a computer. Now this would be:
"Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a new Mac with more RAM"
Regarding "everything had to fit in RAM": prior to real virtual memory, the Macintosh Resource Manager was capable of loading and unloading resources on the fly. Resources marked purgeable could be discarded when memory was needed. Code segments (another type of resource) could be loaded by automatically by the Segment Manager, but as you said would not unload until the application requested it or exited. INITs (system extensions) unloaded all code after initialisation by default (requiring extra steps to keep anything in RAM).
Virtual memory was built-in by System 7 (and I think available on supported hardware via 3rd party utilities earlier?).
I'm not a Mac fanboy by any means. But SSD write endurance has become ridiculous. Even on a cheap-ish read-intensive server-class 1 TB NVMe SSD (~$300) you get around 1 petabyte total write endurance, meaning you can write essentially the entire contents of the disk every day for 5 years and still be within the warranty. That is orders of magnitude beyond what any consumer is going to subject their disk to.
There is always a possibility that a part of the computer will fail. But if the SSD is less likely to fail than any other random IC on the motherboard, having it soldered on doesn't factor significantly into the failure statistics.
Of course it's super annoying that you can't upgrade the disk size, but that's another point.
This is by no means certain, certainly not enough to SHOUT about.
Modern SSDs have lifetimes that make them impractical to literally wear out, short of some kind of fault.
But you can't do a trade-in, the RAM they sell is extremely overpriced, and as mentioned elsewhere there's no excuse for the SSD.
(Yes, the Intel Mac had memory compression as well. And my Windows 11 PC also has memory compression, but only if you also enable swap because Microsoft says "fuck you".)
"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
"No! But they'll only let me warn you. Danger Will Robinson! Danger!"
"Really! If you are fussing around with void *, just go home or at least back to your editor!"
Dereferencing a void pointer has no meaning. The compiler can do anything it wants because it doesn't know how to interpret the memory. It could give you the correct thing, it could warp a civilization in from a distant planet, or it could open a world-ending black hole. All are equally probable.
...also remember 45 minute builds when a header file changed.
I remember these error messages coming up and laughing out loud when I saw the rare ones. Nice work, whoever did it!
The MPW C compiler code generation was so predictable in part because of the symmetry of the 68k instruction set. They wrote a simple compiler and it worked. For the most part effort was spent elsewhere. Since you could reasonably predict what code would be generated if you were unhappy with the code generation you fixed the source. I like that the javac compiler has a similar ethos, With similar effect. Once you know the patterns to use you can generate fairly close to optimal byte code.
That, Sir, is none of your business.
Idk, maybe that would be a terrible idea in practice. But there are lots of instances where it would have saved me time.
It's super-useful to temporarily comment out a bit of code, and then to comment out a larger block surrounding it. Especially when debugging.
Sadly I've never used a language that supported that.
e.g. '/*' and '*/' would match each other, '/**' and '**/' would match, and so on.
That way, you would have full control of the depth of the comments, removing other comments wouldn't break the inner comments, etc.
I do run into the same issue you're describing, so I think there's value in the idea.
What I'm not sure of is whether there's an edge case I haven't thought of which would make this problematic.
I've seen this list so many times and this one makes me laugh out loud every single time.
To inline my comment in the previous thread:
Just for some context, the MPW C compiler that produced those messages was actually not developed internally at Apple, but was rather done by Green Hills Software [1] under contract as mentioned on the wikipedia page [2] and its source [3] which is funnily enough about this exact same topic.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Hills_Software
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Wor...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140528005901/http://lists.appl...
(dBase code looks like https://github.com/harbour/core/blob/master/tests/ntx.prg , and https://github.com/harbour/core/blob/master/include/std.ch is an open-source reimplementation of Clipper's preprocessor definitions).
also, the note on the copyright is hilarious.
Did it seriously not let you have a goto label inside a switch?! This seems like an odd restriction, as all 3 are the same kind of thing.
Been able to have a worksheet with random shell commands I’d built up, triple-clicking a line and hitting enter to run the selection.
It was quite a thing.