Shout out to City Lights Bookstore in San Fancisco. I bought a lot of poetry books there in the late 80s and early 90s.
The stuff published during his lifetime is fabulous. The posthumous books are butchered in a terrible way.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/charles-bukowskis-posthu...
Well I guess, the 1571 drive was released that summer, with the hardware capable of reading IBM PC floppies, but I think it took some years for the software to be developed (Big Blue Reader).
To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).
You can read the full letter from which this quote was taken, along with a short bio, here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-j...
At first, I thought this was a well-written parody. I never had one inkling about this poem or his technical knowledge. I understand what he was talking about because I was around back then and understand and suffered from these gotchas.
Compatibility was their greatest weakness and, at the same time, their greatest strength. It allowed the Cambrian explosion of the 70s and 80s personal computers, each with their own superpowers.
- Bukowski
I've loved that from the moment I stumbled upon it.
Both funny and serious at the same time.
Is this a citation of a former work? There's a famous Italian song titled “And yet the wind still blows” (1978), built in the same format of this poem.
Only a few expansion options were available, all from Radio Shack: a color graphics option (640x400x8 colors in 1983!) for which you had to procure the matching monitor, a memory expansion (up to two could be installed for a total of 768k, by stacking RAM chips some aftermarket vendors got this to 896k), a bus mouse adapter/real-time clock combo board, and I believe an external hard disk controller. One expansion, the "TV/Joystick expansion" which would give the 2000 composite out and access to joysticks for gaming, was planned but (to my knowledge) never released. As far as I know only one graphical game saw commercial release for the 2000: a special build of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
Currently I’m looking for a VT-330 or some other terminal with Tektronix graphics. These seem like unobtanium this side of the Atlantic.
So, if someone has a Rainbow, Z-100, AT&T Unix PC, 3278 terminal, or anything like that, I’m rescue stray computers.
The PGC was perhaps the first GPU for PC systems. It had its own 8086 processor on board, which would accept graphics commands through a ring buffer shared with the host system, and the 8086 would translate those into frame buffer operations it needed to perform. A few years back some clever git found an exploit to allow arbitrary code to be run on the PGC's 8086.
The Tandy 2000's color graphics was not spectacularly great by any means, nowhere near comparable to high-end solutions like the PGC. It was a 96 KiB framebuffer divided into 3 bitplanes, only one of which was mapped into system memory at any one time. You changed which plane was accessible by poking one of the video registers. There were also some palette registers that let you change which 8 (out of the standard IRGB 16-color set) were visible on the screen at once. Since drawing a full-color display meant 3 plane selects followed by 3 writes to video RAM, it was slow to produce such a display and there were "temporal color fringe" artifacts as the writes to different planes were momentarily visible. But it was still great for CAD and DTP applications, especially for the money, and good enough that Microsoft used it as a development platform to build a color GUI for Windows, while Macintosh was still committed to producing the best looking, black and white display they could for the money.