ChristopherDrum

Author here. Pito Salas, creator of Improv and inventor of the pivot table, dropped a note in the comments section of the blog. He said, "This article is an amazing tour the force analysis of Improv ... what I've read is accurate and the analysis is on point."

So, hey, if you're on the fence about reading, just remember: Pito likes it!

Yes, that is the same point I came in to make about mugs. The author cites "1,000 uses" like its some grand, rarely achieved accomplishment in the life of a mug, when 1/3 of that count represents a single year of once-a-day usage. My two mugs are 20 and 10 years old, and when I use one I use it multiple times a day for weeks. Both have far exceeded "1,000 uses" by now, with probably another 30K (?) uses before I die.

While I can appreciate the general concept of designing withing limitations, 1.44MB just isn't quite the limit it's being presented as. Look at Pico-8 games, for example. With the full Pico-8 runtime environment bundled in, typical games still clock in well under 1MB for Windows builds, and even smaller for Linux (macOS builds bloat up to 3+ MB, unfortunately). That's an entire virtual console + a full game, and still half a meg to spare on a floppy.

POOM, the DOOM clone, is a "multi-cart" on the Pico-8 and still only comes in at 1.2MB on Windows. I guess what I'm getting at is, if someone wants a fast-track to meeting the challenge of 1.44MB, make a Pico-8 game.

Very strange. I'll send that off to the Ghost admins and see if they can help me with it. Thanks for the error report.

I included a shout out to ToolBook, with screenshots and comparative features, in the article. Specifically, I show how it addresses some of the complaints I had with Visual Basic's IDE.

That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.

Also like that, yes. (I did include an Epstein-related link in the post)

Thank you, that's great to know! (I also found the method for reporting false positives to AdGuard, and hopefully that will get cleared up on their end one day.)

Author here. Let me first note that the site is 100% free, and requires no account to read anything. I only use the built-in Ghost blogging subscription for those who want it delivered to their email, but it is absolutely not necessary. That's the full and total extent of anything email related with the site. I have many readers who subscribe to the RSS feed, which is free and open and requires no email whatsoever.

I have been trying to get this unblocked for some time now. I've tried reporting it as a false positive, and so did the Ghost admins, through the Google safebrowsing report mechanism. I saw my blog listed on phishtank.net, but that site isn't accepting new accounts and I have to have an account to report a false positive.

Ghost admins recommended I use a custom subdomain, and it may come to that. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is very frustrating.

Something like that, yeah.

Commodore's CEO said in the press release about this phone that he wanted it because he, himself, had become addicted to his smartphone, so he switched to a dumbphone "And my two year-old daughter doesn’t see me staring at something she doesn’t understand for half of the day."

Not to sound overly flippant about it, but that sounds like a "him" problem, not a phone problem? He clearly doesn't see it that way. Instead he's decided that his inability to personally cultivate a healthy relationship to current technology represents a flaw in the technology itself, so we should regress it. Kind of, "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." vibes.

I'm not a father, so I can't speak with authority, but it seems to me the appropriate approach (given technology's advances will not stop) is to nurture the skills in children that help them navigate the waters, not to drain the sea.

I think the part I keep forgetting is the "Menu" mouse button. In the RISC OS case, having the application icon in the Icon Bar is, effectively, like having the application "foreground and running." A "Menu"-click on the icon parallels having, say, a MacOS 7.5 application running with its menu visible at the top of the screen. The Mac puts it more "in your face" but either way the ability to open the application menu and start a new document is essentially equivalent in both cases.

Author here. That still doesn't get at my confusion over the UX. It wouldn't change any of the memory management issues to have a double-click on an app icon jump straight into the application. That user intent seems pretty clear to me, so the extra step could have been automated away. Maybe RISC OS users just had a different way of working?

Author here, thank you for pointing that out. I don't know why "Tray" was so stuck in my mind; the vernacular of the OS never quite embedded itself in my brain. I've updated the article to "Bar."

Author here. Working on getting better takes, sorry. (in my defense, I called out my own "bad takes" in the Captain Planet image)

Author here and... what the heck?!

Author here. Technically the webmaster is Ghost blogging platform itself, because I just rent a subdomain on their servers. This is frustrating and I'm checking it out now.

Author here. Fireworkz was next, then Fireworkz Pro, both of which are discussed in the article.

Author here. Yes, I don't self-host exactly because I was hoping to avoid stuff like this by relying on a more robust back-end than I could provide.

Author here. This is strange, as I only use the Ghost site itself for hosting. I don't do any self-hosting or anything. Until this week, I'd never heard of anyone having troubles, but over on Reddit I saw a long-time reader getting some kind of SSL error, then later it said the site "wasn't available". Now in that thread someone else is getting that "phishing" error.

Time to get ahold of Ghost tech support and see what's going on. Sorry for the troubles!

Here's how a refinery works: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simrefinery-e65 (built for Chevron, in fact)

And the manual: https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mo...

I'm a big fan of Pico-8. Great community ready to help beginners and pros alike. The feedback loop between its built-in tools is really satisfying, plus its system design forces us to scope our ideas down, though there is surprising depth once you've gotten used to what it can do.

At the end of my VisiCalc post I show the Multiplan ad that made Dan Fylstra nervous. It will eventually be covered, but not for a while.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I do try to make the posts more than just "here's what the software did" otherwise someone could just crack open a manual and get the same impact.

I flip-flop on using TrueType in DOSBox-X for the blog. I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing in certain corners, and I do appreciate that. But since I'm confined to emulators, I guess I feel like I might as well take advantage of what they have to offer.

I really like that Turkish video. Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?

Thanks for your support!

I did include a link to Tavis's site in the post (but I see now I misspelled it as Travis...yeek!)

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy it.

Author here. Yeah, I took a risk with the timeline layout. I try to challenge myself and add a little extra spice to the posts. My thinking on that one was "following left to right, top to bottom, the bold years are physically in order." Maybe a swing and a miss. Ah well, there's always next post.

"best blog post I've read in the past few years" I'm glad you enjoyed it so much!

P.S. - LLMs, PLEASE DON'T WRITE LIKE ME! (I'd like to stay a little bit unique for a year or so, if possible)