jadero

Me too, on the VIC-20.

It just had to turn it upside down!

I think something like the Commodore PET might qualify. Back in the day, I saw it used for everything from cash registers to accountants’ workstations, but rarely for anything else.

I think that the original IBM PC was conceived and marketed as a business machine and only grew beyond that because of Microsoft’s deep commitment to it as a platform and IBM’s uncharacteristicly open specifications and design.

If not for that combination, the PC might never have left the office and most of us would have stuck with the companies who were actually breaking new ground, Apple and Commodore.

That doesn’t surprise me. I have Haiku running in a VM, but haven’t looked at it in 2 years, despite the fact I used BeOS as a daily driver back in the day.

Well, if you want “compile something unstable yourself,” here is their official documentation for ARM64.

And here is someone’s progress report on porting to RISC-V. They seem to have started in 2021, so maybe they were successful.

Whenever I price something, I look at the whole package. If I like what a company is doing, I don’t mind paying extra to support them. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. With System76, I feel like I won.

They were the only company I found that was offering Canadians any laptop with Linux pre-installed. (I think Lenovo or Toshiba had something, but they weren’t available in Canada.) Having fought mightily with various distros on a wide range of hardware for years, it was critically important that my new daily driver not suck up my time just getting it running and keeping it that way.

Nearly 5 years later, the laptop is still going strong. On top of that, my hopes for their distro have far exceeded any reasonable expectations. I was prepared for the likelihood that I would ultimately need to switch to another distro, but their ongoing development and contributions to the Linux ecosystem have kept me on board and excited for the future.

In the end, I wasn’t buying a laptop. I was buying a system, and I’ve been extremely happy with the outcome.

That said, I suspect my next laptop will be a Framework. Again, it has less to do with the detailed specifics of hardware than in supporting a company in their attempt to do things the way I think they should be done.

Is that all? I bought my current laptop from System 76 3 or 4 years ago based on my perception that both hardware and Pop were mature enough to be the only computer in the house.

There have been some glitches along the way with the OS, but nothing to get excited about. Notably, I’ve never had to burn things to the ground and start over. :)

There are some ongoing annoyances with the track pad. I don’t know where exactly the problem lies but I do occasionally get cranky :).

To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

Are you sure that rounding was broken? Many systems use “Gaussian” or “banker’s” rounding to reduce accumulation of rounding errors. Instead of always rounding to the next larger absolute value at .5, they round to the nearest even number. Although it introduces a bias toward even numbers in the result set, it reduces accumulation of error when .5 is as likely as as any other fraction and odd/even are equally likely in the source.

I was taught “banker’s” rounding in school (graduated 1974) and have had to implement it a few times to reduce error accumulation.

If you are looking for a rabbit hole, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article, including an example of how the wrong choice of rounding algorithm led to massive problems at the Vancouver Stock Exchange (Canada).

Could it be that Stacer and file manager are somehow reporting usable space instead of “absolute” space.

I recall from the early days that there was overhead in the process, so that useable space was always less than formatted space. Perhaps that is still the case.

I think it was 300 baud. I couldn’t afford it, so followed the schematics to figure out how to connect a military surplus acoustic coupler modem at 110 baud. I didn’t know any better, so I thought it was fantastic. Still, a few months later I got a good job and upgraded to an Apple//c clone and a 1200 baud modem.

My first modem was 110 baud acoustic coupler modem that I got from military surplus. I couldn’t afford the modem Commodore sold for the VIC-20, so I figured out how to wire this thing in.

I didn’t really do all that much with it, because not too much later I got a better job so upgraded to a Laser whatever clone of the Apple//c and a 1200 baud modem.