Thanks. Fixed.
It still says "44 characters" when I click the link.
Readit Newsdrfuchs commented on Text case changes the size of QR codes johndcook.com/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/ibobev
drfuchs commented on A Lost IBM PC/at Model? Analyzing a Newfound Old Bios int10h.org/blog/2025/11/l... · Posted by u/TMWNN
Any chance it was for the "IBM Personal Computer AT/370" that nobody remembers (perhaps because nobody used)?
Oops. Anyway, I remember attending a talk by one of the IBM engineers back when they first released the XT/370. He said that they looked at all possible ways to integrate their production line as a kind of secondary track off of one of the main production lines for the PC/XT, but the most economical option ended up being a separate facility that would receive normal pallets of regularly boxed, end-user XTs from the main factory, unbox them, make the mods, and pack them back into XT/370-labeled boxes for shipping.
drfuchs commented on A Lost IBM PC/at Model? Analyzing a Newfound Old Bios int10h.org/blog/2025/11/l... · Posted by u/TMWNN
Any chance it was for the "IBM Personal Computer AT/370" that nobody remembers (perhaps because nobody used)?
drfuchs commented on Downloadable movie posters from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/di... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
> Yoda had said "A Jedi craves not revenge" in the previous episode
No, he never said that.
Yeah, and I suppose you’re going to tell me that Han didn’t shoot first, either. Did you refer to an original 1980 70mm release print, before all the fiddling around they did on subsequent releases? And newspapers and fanzines from 1982 that covered the issue (at first, LucasFilm denied these posters even existed).
On the other hand, it seems that you are, in fact, correct. Oh, well.
drfuchs commented on Downloadable movie posters from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/di... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
I recently sold a bunch of movie posters for a relative's estate, and only just came across the name Drew Struzan. Several of his posters were in the collection, including this one [0], and I was stunned by the sale price.
[0]https://auctions.emovieposter.com/Bidding.taf?_function=deta...
The high sale price was due to the fact that this was a rare "REVENGE of the Jedi" rather than the normal "RETURN of the Jedi" poster. The back-story is that the movie title was originally going to be "Revenge..." but then there was pushback because Yoda had said "A Jedi craves not revenge" in the previous episode, so it got changed.
Real programmers would have donated $524,288. But seriously good news nonetheless.
drfuchs commented on The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/kencausey
I would guess that many early systems just didn't have the storage space for a lot of multiple versions of files. Was VMS saving diffs or full copies of files?
Once storage space was plentiful, the pattern of "overwrite the existing file" was already well established.
Typical TOPS-20 and VMS hardware of the time would have less than a gigabyte of spinning disk space, to be shared among many dozens of users. Full copies of files were saved, and there were strict per-user disk allotments. Creating Generation 2 of a file would mark the Generation 1 version as deleted. When you ran out of allotment during execution, the OS would pause your program and give you the chance to issue an Expunge command to really recycle all (or a subset) of the deleted files, and then you'd just Continue the paused process. Similar to desktop "Trash" folders where deleted things go, and that you may have to Empty once in a while.
drfuchs commented on The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/kencausey
Not being able to chown() caused us grief developing Frame Maker back in the 80s. The responsible way to handle "save" was to write the document into a new file mydoc.new, then rename mydoc.cur to mydoc.backup and then rename mydoc.new to mydoc.cur, so that failure never left you in the lurch. The only problem was that there was no way to create mydoc.new to have the same owner as mydoc.cur and customers complained that we'd keep changing the owner of their files. If only the semantics of the unix filesystem supported file generation numbers, like on Tops20 or VaxVMS, where the default for writing to a file isn't "yeah, sure, write over top of the old data, and let's hope nothing fails along the way" this would not have been a problem.