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 Back in 2019, the dev team behind the Hyperbola GNU/Linux announced that they would be moving away from the Linux kernel. They decided to fork the OpenBSD kernel. Not only that, they planned to rewrite and replace all code that is not GPL v3 compliant. Back in January of 2020, I interviewed the HyperbolaBSD team for ItsFoss.com . I decided to reach out to them again to see how the project…

 I’ve been wanting to learn how to program for a while. In the past couple of years, I tried many times. Different languages and different tutorials. But I always got distracted, either by another project or another language. I think one of the reasons I didn’t have much luck was that I really didn’t have an end goal, something to work towards. Now, I do.

 Recently, I stumbled across an interesting little language named the LDPL programming language . It’s inspired by COBOL and has several neat features. However, LDPL is not as popular or well known as other languages.

 Drew DeVault is not your usual software developer. He has a wide range of projects under his belt, including a groundbreaking git hosting service , an operating system for calculators , a tiling window manager , and more. He was nice enough to agree to an interview. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Enjoy! 
 (Drew originally answered these question back in April, but I wanted…

 First, I’d like to welcome you all to the relaunch of my tech blog. This site was created in July 2016 under the name St. Isidore’s Keyboard. (In case you’re wondering, St. Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of computers, computer users, computer programmers, and the Internet.) The site was built with Hugo and hosted on GitLab. I had big plans for it but got very busy…

 Recently, Bloomberg broke the news that Apple is planning to drop Intel and to start manufacturing and using their own chips. According to this report, the end goal of this move is to unify Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms. This is an interesting idea that just might work in this post-PC world.

 In this day and age, everyone either has a website or wants one. For those who want a website, there are many tools to choose from. Unfortunately, most of these options are not beginner-friendly. Here comes Publii to the rescue.

 A couple of days ago, I was building a blog using Hexo (a static site generator built on Nodejs). I created a couple pages and installed a couple plugins. When I entered the command to build a local copy of the site, I got a nice long error message. It looked like one of the plugins was causing the problem, so I filed an issue on GitHub. It turned out that I was getting the error because my…

 [ Please note: The Panther Alpha failed to reach its original Kickstarter goal. They are planning to resubmit the Kickstart campaign in Q4 2018. - 1805 update] 
 In the history of computing, there have been a number of major milestones. These milestones helped to direct the future direction of computing for years to come. The Panther MPC is shaping up to be one of those milestones.

 Yes, you read that correctly. I used “Microsoft” and “open-source” in the same sentence, and it’s not a joke. Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella has embraced a pro-open-source (and even a pro-Linux) stance that would have been impossible under previous leadership. As part of this new initiative, they created the .NET Foundation to support open-source…

 Hi, everyone, and welcome to my new blog about computers and technology. I will be your host, John Paul Wohlscheid.
By Susan J. Shepard
from the July 1987 issue of Computer Language
The Intel 80386 microprocessor is here—at last. It is proving to be all that we expected, and the last obstacle to 386 supermicrocomputers is an operating system that can avail the developer and user of its power. It will provide a powerful and affordable platform for expert systems and other AI applications that are truly…
by Marshall Kirk McKusick
from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented the first UNIX paper at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November, 1973. Professor Bob Fabry was in attendance and immediately became interested in obtaining a copy of the system to experiment with at Berkeley.
At the time,…
A Good Buy on UNIX Special Report by Dean Hannotte
from the June 12, 1984 issue of PC Magazine
The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX, with some extensions and enhancements. Regrettably, it has incoherencies.
The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a State-of-the-art microcomputer implementation…
from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine
by Phil Lemmons
Keyboards are meant to let our fingers do the talking, but more often they make us swear aloud. Every manufacturer seems to want its keyboard to be unmistakably different from any other. The only keys that seem to be sacred and immovable are badly placed: the familiar QWERTYUIOP and its companion rows of the alphabet. The Shift…
by Stephen L. Childress
from the July 1983 issue of Micro magazine
(Note: The figures are not available for this article because they are impossible to read on my source.)
The modularization of the I/O system allows OS-9 to enhance the standard I/O at run time, not assembly or patch time. Device names and addresses are not fixed by the operating system but, rather, the program may…
by Stephen L. Childress
from the June 1983 issue of Micro magazine
Unless you’ve been on sabbatical to Siberia of late you will have noticed the swell of interest in the Unix operating system software. Most new and all the old popular 16-bit computers are supporting Unix or one of the numerous look-alikes. Why all the furor? It seems at last we’ve begun to rethink computer…
Hi! My named is John Paul Wohlscheid. I’m a big fan of technology. I remember using Windows 3.1.1 when I was younger (pre-teens), which should date me. I wish I could write programs and become fabulously wealthy, but he can barely write basic HTML. In the meantime, I can read and write about technology. I have published several ebooks. You can check out my books on my website. I mainly focus…
By Stephen J . Shaw
from the November 1983 issue of Mini-Micro Systems magazine
Slowly but earnestly, companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) field are bringing out the tools to build the heralded Fifth Generation computer systems. It’s likely to take several years for any AI-based products to have a major impact in the commercial market. But 1983 could be the year AI emerges…
by Stephen Beale
from the November 1997 issue of MacWorld magazine
Apple Computer drove spike through the heart of its Mac OS-Iicensing program when it announced on September 2 that it will acquire the core assets of Power Computing, the company that built the largest Mac-clone business. Apple will exchange $ 100 million in common stock for Power Computing’s Mac OS license and…
by Phil Daley
from the June 1983 issue of Micro magazine
The operating systems that I have seen available for the Apple use essentially the same read/write routines, but they have been modified or changed. All the disks created by any one system can be read by any other system if you know the procedure. Modifying disks to make them copyprotected (unreadable) is a different technique and a…
by Steven Noble
from the February 1997 issue of Australian MacUser magazine
Apple computer has bought NeXT Software, and is going to use that company’s high-performance operating system (OS) NeXTstep as the basis of the next major revision of the Mac OS - code-named Rhapsody. This is good news, because NeXTstep has many of the features that bring speed, stability and strength to…
from the June 1, 1987 issue of MacWEEK
by John Markoff
Apple Computer Inc.’s next generation of computers may be based on a radically new microprocessor architecture that could improve performance dramatically over today’s Macintosh designs.
Such computers would be built around microprocessors combining elements of both Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) and multiprocessor design…
from the May/June 1984 issue of Two/Sisteen magazine
by Bro. Gary Eck, S.M.
Since its introduction, very little has been published to describe the use of ARCNET in concrete situations. This article describes the experiences of one ARCNET installation.
A giant of a computer system lies hidden in the Radio Shack product line. Based on the Model II and Model 12 workhorse computers, the…
by Howard Baldwin
RUNS BEOS ON INTEL AS NEW APPS ARE UNVEILED from the November 1997 issue of MacWorld magazine
As Apple celebrates strong sales of Mac OS 8, Be (650/462-4100, www.be.com), developer of one of the oter operating systems for PowerPC CPUs, continues to bop along with new releases of its software.
In July, the company shipped its BeOS Preview Release for PowerPC, followed…
from the July 1985 issue of Unix World magazine
by David Spencer
Current third-generation languages such as C and FORTRAN will have to move aside at some point for a new family of fourth-generation languages.
At 30 years old, FORTRAN is graying at the temples; third-generation programming languages are in their heyday. So you are probably wondering how we will speak to computers during…
by Judy Getts
from the June 1987 issue of Computer Language
Chuck Duff is the kind of man you’d expect to run into early in the morning in a university coffee shop, styrofoam cup in hand, talking Hegel with a student.
You’d expect to see him in an art gallery rambling between the neoclassicists and linear chromatists, keen-eyed and at home, or even face-to-face in a folk-jazz cafe if…
I consider myself a computer historian. This is a list of articles from old computer magazines that I found interesting and wanted to archive. Enjoy.
Australian MacUser Apple Starts to Fill in the Blanks (1997) Halo Hardware to Top Mac Line (1997) Iomega to Shrink Disks for Portable (1997) Next Mac OS to Be Based on NeXTstep (1997) Plan Be (1997) Rhapsody in Blue (1997) Australian Micro…
If you would like to contact me, use the form below. If the form is not working, you can email me at gitpius AT protonmail.com
by Dixon P. Otto
from the April 1983 issue of TODAY magazine
“I had no intention of doing anything with computers again,” says Neale Bartter of Wooster, Ohio, reflecting on the time in 1974 when he gave up a computer career for farming.
“Now I spend most of my time in here with the computer,” he says from the office of his turn-of-the-century home. He nodded…
by David A. Bright
from the July 1983 issue of Mini-Micro Systems magazine
Franklin Computer Corp., once considered just another Apple Computer Inc. clone, is being closely monitored by the personal computer industry as it begins to move away from Apple’s shadow. With the hiring last spring of several key research and development personnel, Franklin has indicated that it intends to…
Notes from the underground by Doug Merritt with Ken Arnold and Bob Toxen
from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine
It was 2 am and I was lying face down on the floor in Cory Hall, the EECS building on the UC Berkeley campus, waiting for Bob to finish installing our bootleg copy of the UNIX kernel. If successful, new and improved terminal drivers we had written would soon be up…
from the December 1962 issue of Computers and Automation
A thoughtful and interesting look into the role of computers in the literature of fantasy and science fiction.
Marcia Ascher Asst. Prof. of Math. and Physics Ithaca College Ithaca, N. Y.
An editorial in a local newspaper (1) stated: “We are just at the beginning of the computer age. Who (but a science fiction writer) would…
from the August 1984 issue of Australian Micro Computerworld magazine
Franklin Computer, maker of Apple-compatible computers, has filed for reorganisation under Chapter 11 of the US Federal Bankruptcy Code.
In a prepared statement, Franklin president, Morton David said the company was experiencing falling sales and a “strain in financial resources’. To date, the company has about $US33.9…
An Optimistic Approach to Software Piracy
By Charles Bowen and J. Stewart Schneider
from the January/February 1983 issue of TODAY magazine
Fellow man.
It’s the kind of faith that, if contagious, could spawn a whole new kind of marketing in the microcomputer community.
At a time when major software houses are spending tens of thousands of dollars in what some say is a…
Charles David Tandy: 1918-1978 from the June 1979 issue of Electronics Australia
Charles David Tandy, founder of the huge Radio Shack and Tandy chain of electronic stores, died recently at the age of 60. Just before his death, he had seen his Company’s annual turnover nudge the billion dollar mark — no mean accomplishment for someone who, as a child, had experienced the rigours of the great…
from the April 1977 issue of Interface Age magazine
by Adam Osborne
The first small signs of a long predicted shake out are beginning to appear among microprocessor manufacturers. The first two casualties are the Elecronic Arrays EA9002 and possibly the Rockwell PPS-8.
The EA9002 simply took too long to develop. The smallest EA9002 system has three chips: The EA9002 CPU with read/write…
from the May 1977 issue of Interface Age magazine
by Adam Osborne
Now that the Intel 8085 and 8048 are here, IMSAI is going for these two products; IMSAI is not planning to offer a Z-80 CPU card. I wonder why the Z-80 and the Intel products have to be mutually exclusive?
I have had a chance to examine the 8085 and the 8048— and I believe some intriguing user patterns are likely to…
Sun and NeXT throw open the doors to industry-standard object-oriented computing
from the February 1994 issue of NeXTWorld magazine
by Lee Sherman
NEXTSTEP running on millions of desktops with scalable performance that makes it the environment of choice for everything from low-end workstations to high-performance servers.
It once seemed impossible.
But the stunning announcement…
by David Morgenstern
from the February 1997 issue of Australian MacUser magazine
Apple this year hopes to put an extra shine on its Macintosh product lines with Halo, a strategy that will aim models at specific market segments. Sources said the company will offer several high-performance configurations with limited availability.
The Halo systems will reportedly offer the highest-speed…
from the July 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine
by Mitch Betts
The Internal Revenue Service is taking steps to ensure that this year’s computer fiascoes, which delayed the processing of tax returns for several weeks, will not happen again next year.
According to IRS Commissioner Roscoe L. Egger, the IRS plans to acquire additional computer capacity at IRS service centers,…
from the July 1978 issue of Byte magazine
by Lou Frenzel - Heath Company - Benton Harbor Ml 49022
All personal and hobby computers are microprocessor based. That is, they use a single processor integrated circuit chip. One of the most important decisions you will ever make in purchasing a personal computer is choosing the type of microprocessor. The semiconductor manufacturers have…
from the May 1982 issue of Practical Computing magazine
The mainframe manufacturers are finding that microcomputers - so recently derided as mere toys - are making inroads into their hitherto safe preserves. Clare Gooding examines their contrasting styles, and ponders on how the giant mainframe builders will fare among the quick-witted bandits of the micro world.
Time was when anyone…
from the November 1985 issue of MicroTimes magazine
Jef Raskin believes that computers should be easy to use. How easy? Well, he calls his company Information Appliance, and favors computers as hassle-free as toasters.
By contrast, Raskin says, the current state of the industry more closely resembles a scenario conjured up by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame).…
by Vaughn Vernon
from the December 1987 issue of Computer Language
OS/2, Microsoft’s latest addition to its operating system line, could well become the operating system of the next decade for Intel 80286/80386 microcomputers. Its multitasking capabilities, full-featured application programming interface (API), and extendability to future hardware almost guarantee its…
by John Poultney
from the February 1997 issue of Australian MacUser magazine
Iomega is spinning a new scheme for portable storage: 20MB floppy disks roughly half the size of business cards. The company has shown prototypes at Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas.
The new N*hand disks will measure 48mm square and will incorporate floating read-write heads, much like Iomega’s Zip…
from the April 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine
by Bryan Wilkins
It has taken four years to implement, but an AT&T Unix-based distributed processing system is now being used by a branch of the Internal Revenue Service in its 10 offices.
The project began in 1981 — before distributed processing in a multiuser environment was a popular concept — when IRS planners opted to…
An interview with Bob Marsh from the December 1984 issue of Unix Review magazine
Many factors have contributed to the birth of a personal UNIX market but none has been more important than Onyx System’s decision to introduce a UNIX-based micro in 1980. Bob Marsh, now chairman of Plexus Computers, made that decision.
Chances are another company would have done the job sooner or later.…
My Other Sites My author homepage My religion blog Games that I created Historical Tidbits newsletter Computer Ads from the Past newsletter My Github profile My Gitlab profile Tech Websites that I Write For It’s FOSS It’s FOSS News FOSSMint Klara Systems History of FreeBSD - Part 2: BSDi and USL Lawsuits History of FreeBSD - Part 3: Early Days of FreeBSD History of FreeBSD - Part 4:…
from the May 1, 1995 issue of MicroTimes magazine
by Paul Hoffman
It’s never any fun writing about the same subject two months in a row. However, the Microsoft stories have taken on a life of their own. Not as much of an unreal life as, say, the O.J. Simpson trial, but a life nonetheless. Last month’s news stories (about a federal judge overturning the consent decree between Microsoft and…