User talk:PaulBoddie
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A 1990s enterprise kitten for you!
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Whoa whoa whoa you are blowing my mind right now with this 1990s enterprise research! I saw your Indy edit and hunted your edit history for Insignia and others. I worked a lot to greatly expand SGI Indy and flesh it out beyond WP:FANCRUFT, and legitimize its place in history. That's really really hard to do with SGI topics, and Indy is an exception due to its personal desktop market. How did you find those magazine archives? Through WP:LIBRARY, I have a free subscription to ProQuest and EBSCO and they have no archives of the keywords like "quorum latitude" and anything else. They have some hits, but only of a few abstracts, and no actual archives. Ditto for books.google.com. In other words, you are a champ. Please, keep it up. I was all over unix and Mac stuff in the 1990s, I went dumpster diving for a complete in box copy of Photoshop 3.0 for IRIX which I also used to use at college, and it kills me that I never heard of Quorum or Liken or any of that. I'm flipping out. They are such a forgotten foundation, and they beat Apple to its own market on Rhapsody before Carbon came out. Thank you. I hope you like two articles that I spent countless months writing, Taligent and Workplace OS. And I wrote most of Star Trek project and A/UX which I also can't believe I never used back then, in the day when I did use MachTen and I used NetBSD on my IIsi because Linux didn't work and GNU was boycotting Apple's proprietary hardware. FYI, in the sources you gave, right next to the magazine articles about Liken and Latitude, are articles about WABI and friends which are equally forgotten but vital in the struggle for crossplatform legitimacy. I strongly encourage you to apply at WP:LIBRARY and let me know if I can help. Thanks.
— Smuckola(talk) 22:32, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- Cute kitten! And thank you for the kind feedback! It all started a few years ago when I was thinning out a magazine collection at my childhood home, where I was feeling some guilt about some old magazines that were taking up space, but I decided to scan the interesting pages before they went to recycling. As a result, I have scans of some articles from Personal Computer World and Computer Shopper (from the UK) that you won't easily find online. Having been trawling the Internet Archive and trying to improve some articles here, I decided to revisit some of these offline articles, and some interesting things emerged: nothing Earth-shattering, but things which now made a bit more sense. So, the mention of Quorum got me searching, and it has hardly been the only thing like that in the past few months. In one case, I'd watched a YouTube video about "plug-on" PC processor upgrades where the creator didn't have much luck finding information online, and then I stumbled across an article I'd scanned where they were reviewed, so I had to send him that. The Insignia details actually come from the same issue (PCW April 1994). Maybe I should upload them somewhere, although I find it frustrating when I come across individual articles on places like the Internet Archive when I am looking for a complete publication.
- I am clearly very interested in "modern" computing history, and so Workplace OS is a rather interesting topic in itself, particularly since I am also interested in microkernel-based system development as well. Despite its reputation, I actually think that IBM did a lot to make OSF Mach more viable, even though it perhaps finds itself at a disadvantage compared to other microkernel architectures. There are plenty of journals covering Mach, and I've uncovered some interesting articles in them as well, such as the prototype version of VMS on Mach 3.0. You can find plenty of things like this if you're bored enough, certainly! I also think that sometimes a bigger picture emerges, too: A/UX, Star Trek and MAE must all share some kind of technological heritage, or at least highlight a strategic compulsion at Apple during a certain era. And then there are the projects that are not well documented or understood publicly where there will be some continuity in terms of personnel between them and more famous projects. The details of these are a challenge to uncover, but I hope that the right people can be enlisted to help us understand them before it is too late. You may have noticed that I have edited a lot of pages related to Acorn Computers, and as that company was dismantled in a rather disgraceful feeding frenzy (an opinion that others undoubtedly share, even though I wasn't interested in their products any more by that point and so did not feel personally betrayed, as some will have done), there really needed to be people dumpster diving to rescue a lot of technological heritage that still means a lot to many people today.
- I'll certainly look at WP:LIBRARY, though. I got a message saying I was eligible, but I just thought that I was having so much fun digging stuff up in the Internet Archive that I didn't really need privileged access to other sources. But you never know what you might find, I suppose. Then again, I feel a bit guilty spending so much time editing Wikipedia, too! PaulBoddie (talk) 23:23, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
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Acorn etc
[edit]Hi PaulBoddie
I notice that you are interested in a variety of computer pages. Our interests meet with the Acorn Computers range.
From time to time I look at the Acorn Archimedes the Risc OS and the ARM articles. The ARM is well organised but the Risc OS and the Acorn Archimedes are indigestible! The message at the top of the Acorn Archimedes about being too long make sense. I am interested in the subject yet I do not want to read it. The article is probably about 10x the size that it should be. Information is fragmented throughout and suppositions and insignificant details have 'growed like topsy'.
As you are knowledgeable about the Archimedes, how do you think that the points in the 'very long' box from about 18 months ago should be done? Turning it into an article that anyone would want to read is not going to be easy.
I have already had a go at the Sophie Wilson article which needed a bit of sensitivity, but got rid of most much of the unsourced stuff. For such an obviously capable person, I did not think her genuine achievements needed to be overshadowed by imagined junk.
I am now revising the BBC Basic article which is where I started with a BBC Model B. Unfortunately it has has too many suppositions and POV problems. Like you I have a Computer Science degree so have a wider knowledge base than many of the editors. Have already got rid of many rubbish references. I have things that I want to include, but am revising my proposed edits to remove all but the essentials (it is just too easy to keep writing more).
I replaced my own BBC Model B with an early A440 (which I still have) then A5000 then RISC-PC with Yellowstone HDD and 2nd processor. I have done done BASIC / 6502 assembler commercially & for myself. BASIC / ANSI-C commercially. BASIC / ANSI-C also a combined ANSI-C / ARM Assembler project for myself. Experimented with multi-processor processing over Econet.
I still have 7*A4x0/1, 2*A5000, 2*A4000, RISC-PC. Lost all my BBC Model Bs, Masters, 6502, Z80, 32016 in a fire. BlueWren0123 (talk) 22:03, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- I'm sorry that the Acorn Archimedes article isn't an article you would want to read. I've also been busy trying to get the Acorn Electron article into shape, too, which some might also argue is too long. My objective was to make sure that these topics get some proper coverage. Personally, I don't care about the length: I'm not reading the article on a phone, for instance, and don't entirely agree with the maintenance notice, either. I have also been very careful to source everything I have added, almost to the point of obsession, so I would be annoyed if someone started just culling content. I do think that the prose could be refined, however. When editing, I have sometimes prioritised the introduction of new content over the formulation of existing content, but I have never neglected the latter.
- As you can see with various other Acorn-related articles, there are often quality issues with the content, such as assertions from almost twenty years ago about things people "remembered", brain dumps of trivia, and the expression of some very narrow perspectives. As an example of that latter point, the BBC Micro article implied that Acorn made all the interesting hardware whereas third parties just sold monitors and printers. It completely neglected the role of influential third parties that in many ways drove the market for those machines. I did update that to be slightly more reflective of the reality, witnessed by the publications of the time and their readership. People should be reviewing those publications and broadening their minds instead of perpetuating their own misapprehensions or extrapolating from their own narrow experiences.
- The articles where I have been significantly involved in editing should not have these kinds of quality issues, not least because I have gone back to the literature and extensively confirmed assertions made in the text. With regard to the Archimedes article, I am intrigued about which parts are "suppositions and insignificant details". Naturally, one can debate what is or isn't significant. Certain applications or aspects of the system might be uninteresting to some, but they might nevertheless help others to understand the development of the range, the adoption or lack of adoption by certain kinds of users, and so on. For example, is it really necessary to go into depth about floating-point arithmetic hardware and application support? Obviously not for anyone who wrote that off as a "bad idea" at the time, but it strongly influenced Acorn's direction and eventual level of success.
- I did think about breaking the article into subtopics, as is done with articles for similar computers, but one reason why I held off - apart from it being yet more work - was that it was likely to invite people to suggest that these subtopics were not worth separate articles, and then we get into that familiar dance where some people want to merge things back together, split them apart again, and so on. If you look at the A7000 and Risc PC articles, they really suffer from being separate articles. And even more mainstream articles like those for the Atari ST and Amiga arguably suffer from being insubstantial due to their generality, augmented by product-specific articles that risk duplication of content, inconsistencies, and more besides.
- Another reason I have kept the article together is that I thought it better to cover all of the major topics first before splitting it all up: so far, I have not managed to find time to add a gaming topic, for instance. One topic that is entirely absent in any detail is that of educational computing, which was perhaps the most significant market for these computers, requiring contributions from those far more interested in such matters than I will ever be.
- Maybe any discussion of subtopics should go on the talk page for the article itself, as the maintenance notice suggests. Incidentally, the talk page was previously full of misguided arguments about things like what "MIPS" means in terms of performance, going back almost twenty years, with people grinding their own axes - whether it was unfair to claim that the Amiga only did so many MIPS, and so on - over and over again, when some light background reading would have made the entire topic clear to everyone. That was the motivation for completely reworking all of the performance-related coverage and debunking decades-old misunderstandings, allowing me to purge such discussion into the archives. Again, one might question the value of that effort, but I don't think it helps anyone to perpetuate people's false impressions and memories of such matters and to have them arguing about it for all eternity.
- Sorry to come across as being negative, but I think the only feedback I ever get about this particular Wikipedia article is negative, with one relatively well-known developer from the era even going so far as labelling it "full of lies", if I remember the turn of phrase correctly. I read comments on YouTube videos where people "wonder" about something or other when they could just go to the appropriate Wikipedia article and educate themselves, but the problem is that many of these people have been convinced that Wikipedia is "full of lies" or off-the-cuff suppositions when my every effort has been to present completely factual, accurate information, at least on topics that have interested me.
- I am also sorry to hear that you lost your older computers in a fire. I can only hope that no lives were lost or harm sustained, but I offer my sympathy if that was indeed the case. PaulBoddie (talk) 23:30, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- I really do want to read the Archimedes article but it is just too long (too long didn't read). I am interested in the product but am still put off by the length.
- I completely agree that peoples remembered 'facts' are not often useful. I am also including refs. There is a bit of a problem here as the primary have the correct information, but the secondary often get things wrong. But I am not establishing notability and can justify choice.
- My employment was in the application of computer control in heavy industry, nothing to do with Acorn. I only moved to Acorn school system support when I needed to supplement other inconsistent employment. My own interest was in how RISC actually worked, to practically extend my knowledge of computers.
- In the education sector, I evaluated software for customers, got their networks working, wrote student login software and teacher's student access software. Also repaired broken stuff and rewrote Level 3 FS HDD formatter to fix Acorn bug. Again some excellent software but a lot of real duds.
- On Acorns part generally (some significant exceptions) good hardware, good OS, quite good computer language support. Hampered by poor management decisions, bad marketing.
- I never thought of the FPA as significant. They had reasonable floating point software support, both in the module(s) and within BASIC. Had they not announced it so early before it had been thought through and then only delivered half a solution after almost every one had lost interest, no one would have cared. It was one of the cul-de-sacs that Acorn made for themselves from time to time.
- For the Mandelbrot that I have written for myself I have fixed point. Acceptable for low precision, slow for others. Different coding for ARM2/ARM3 to StrongARM (SA0110). Program checks which processor, version of OS and memory size.
- No lives were lost, all humans and sheep survived. House just survived. All sheds and outbuildings destroyed. All fences gone. BlueWren0123 (talk) 04:58, 23 January 2024 (UTC)