22 Apr
2016
22 Apr
'16
1:28 p.m.
On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote:
I like the new types of peripherals but it makes me a
little uncomfortable
knowing that e.g. in the case of the uIEC-SD for Commodores, the clock
speed of the peripheral is 16 to 20 times that of the original host CPU. I
keep hatching little schemes of perhaps putting a tiny OS kernel in the
thing, but at that point *it* would become the computer and the 128 would
be just sort of sitting there. The same is true of the CosmosEx device I've
been thinking of getting for my Atari STs; it has a Raspberry Pi inside.
I heard at the time, that the Apple Laserwriter was the "most powerful"
machine that they made, and that certain people were connecting terminals
to it and programming in Postscript. I did some trivial programming in
Postscript, but didn't have a Laserwriter. It was a stack based language,
with similarities to Forth. I suspect that the "terminals" were actually
terminal emulation in whichever machines were currently connected anyway.
I made a company logo that was outline letters with a fill of lines
radiating from a point (think about Moire pattern artifacts when pushing
the resolution limits). Then I found that the "Freedom Of Press"
Postscript emulation of the commercial large format printer was too slow,
and did not have a large enough stack space. (whilst other deadlines were
looming).