My first internship when I was 19 and still in college (well, failing out at that point but that's another story...) was at a small consulting company where every desk had a 286 clone running MS-DOS 3.3.
We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and SuperCalc didn't? But 1-2-3 was clearly better.
I had to train the older staff members on how to use a mouse. One person thought you had to reboot the computer if the mouse cursor wouldn't go far enough in one direction without reaching the end of your physical desk area -- they didn't know you could Lift The Mouse Off The Desk to move the physical mouse to a better location without moving the cursor. It is truly hard to explain just how newfangled all this technology was back then in a small office.
A big breakthrough for us was switching from dBase to "Clipper" which was basically dBase on the backend but with the ability to write text-mode UI code, so you could build nice purpose-built data-centric applications for clients.
There was a LOT of data entry, digitizing the stops and routes of city transit maps into dBase and these DOS spreadsheets. The keyboard shortcuts were SO FAST and when we eventually moved to Windows 3 in 1991, I always enabled the 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts in Excel. I still remember some of them.
I imagine there's nothing unique about my experience: these types of tasks were surely replicated all over the business world, with interns and staff getting their first taste of spreadsheets and programming languages in these powerful, tiny DOS programs.
I'll skip our brief foray into the dead end that was OS/2 2.0 :-)
Everytime someone mentions Clipper (or dBase or FoxPro, or even FoxBase, but Clipper the most), I feel a sene of productive nostalgia, and a constructive anger at the state of technology today. xBase was a beautiful thing - I haven't had as much fun at building software that I've had from the first plink86 till CA-Clipper 5.3's blinker and exospace. Even prolific use of Opus 4.6 doesn't bring the sense of quality and satisfaction that those systems produced.
I'm building a new database tool for the web, a frankenstein of Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, MS-Access, and Claude Code. It is where that anger goes these days.
Clipper compatible language that compiles on Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac (I think) even today is at xHarbour.org . I have played around with it but never did Clipper development before, so can’t comment about compatibility.
> We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and SuperCalc didn't? But 1-2-3 was clearly better.
At that time I don't think I was using either spreadsheet program at a level where I would have needed advanced features. I remember using both, and looking now at old screenshots of the splash screens, I think we did eventually upgrade to SuperCalc 4, probably because of better 1-2-3 compatibility.
There was a "red carpet area" in the office where the high-ups worked, and I remember they all used 1-2-3 and we had to support them sometimes... But we pions were using SuperCalc. More than that I don't remember, it's just been too long.
I'm curious: the "Script" screenshot looks like it's using standard GEM Desktop, while the "Signum" is some other desktop. Are these both for ST? Was Signum written using some other full-screen graphic environment?
Signum! was highly opinionated. It ran on the Atari ST but did its own thing for the user interface. You could access a lower layer of drawing primitives and obviate GEM. In those days multitasking did not exist.
There were a good number of these kinds of application back then. Steve was one, GFA Basic another.
The display controller they are using (RA8875 or RA8889) has several hundred KB of internal memory. So you can write to the screen and the image will "stay there" as it were, you don't have to store a framebuffer or keep writing out the image like with a CRT.
It probably has a character mapped display, so you can only display 256 different (ascii and graphics) characters in a memory mapped 80*25 = 2000 bytes display buffer.
EDIT: I can now see that is does have bit mapped graphics. It must have a built-in serial like terminal with graphics capabilities.
This book specifically targets beginners that are new to 6502 assembly. The examples cover all of the 1980s-era computers including the Apple II. It's free on archive.org and the introductory chapters are worth reading.
Atari Basic source with comments was published [1] in 1983. Literally published, as a spiral bound book! Teenage me learned a ton of 6502 from that book, back when learning 6502 was hugely useful!
The book has intro chapters describing the entire design, bugs that snuck in, etc.
While this code dump is cute, and MS basic more widespread (at the time), the overdone readme and the 48 year delay make it a lot less interesting
Article doesn't mention the worst offender in my view: the default GBoard keyboard on my Android phone sends everything I type to Google -- and voice typing goes through their servers too. This is the default keyboard on a billion phones.
I've done tests where I text a friend using Signal and WhatsApp, E2E encrypted apps, and the default keyboard tracks every word. Mentioning how much my sister really loves her convertible BMW, and wondering if maybe I should buy a new convertible (this is LOL, I am a bicycle commuter) and within three minutes the auto ads start appearing relentlessly all over the internet and especially on Instagram!
This is not the thing where you just happen to notice it because you're looking for it -- literally 50% of the ads switched to car ads after I sent that message.
I can install a different keyboard from F-Droid, but how many people do that? And I lose voice typing even though it could be done on-phone. Sad.
That's quite the claim that GBoard keylogs. This has come up before and it is claimed that GBoard does not keylog and send data to Google. I feel like if it was really doing that it would be a huge controversy that everyone would know about.
> A technology called federated learning helps Gboard learn new words and phrases. Federated learning doesn’t send the text you speak or type to Google, but will send what it learns to Google, where it will be combined with learnings from other users to create better speech and typing models.
I had heard elsewhere that Samsung really was collecting everything typed on their keyboard. I did a couple minutes of research just now: doesn't seem totally outlandish. Under "information we collect":
> Samsung Keyboard information: The words that you type when you enable Predictive text. This feature may be offered in connection with your Samsung account to synchronize the data for use on your other Samsung mobile devices. You can clear the data by going to the Predictive text settings.
Something I've wondered about, because it seems like you might have run across this in your testing: does the default keyboard get anything if it's present on the system, but not the currently active keyboard? I enjoy FlorisBoard for English input, but I've had a hard time finding a quality replacement for Gboard's Japanese input mode.
I have experimented with "Simple Keyboard Simply" and "SayBoard", both available on F-Droid. I don't love either of them.
On the Signal App, you can request the incognito keyboard mode, and my tests show that GBoard does respect that setting. But that's just for the one app.
Just yesterday I witnessed a pretty gruesome scooter accident right in front of me on the sidewalk in Berlin. The young woman was just riding down the sidewalk bike lane, nothing at all out of the ordinary, and the scooter just slipped right out from under her on some slippery wet leaves. She went headlong into a tree and was left with a bloody nose on the ground. Her friends stayed with her until the ambulance came.
I was happy I did not relive it in my dreams last night.
I have two friends that wiped out on stand up electric scooters resulting in knee injuries. And actually another that did the same on a gas powered one. So I'm thinking these things are generally unsafe.
My first internship when I was 19 and still in college (well, failing out at that point but that's another story...) was at a small consulting company where every desk had a 286 clone running MS-DOS 3.3.
We spent our entire days in SuperCalc 3 and dBase III, and some of the fancier staff actually got to use 1-2-3. I think we used both because 1-2-3 had copy protection and SuperCalc didn't? But 1-2-3 was clearly better.
I had to train the older staff members on how to use a mouse. One person thought you had to reboot the computer if the mouse cursor wouldn't go far enough in one direction without reaching the end of your physical desk area -- they didn't know you could Lift The Mouse Off The Desk to move the physical mouse to a better location without moving the cursor. It is truly hard to explain just how newfangled all this technology was back then in a small office.
A big breakthrough for us was switching from dBase to "Clipper" which was basically dBase on the backend but with the ability to write text-mode UI code, so you could build nice purpose-built data-centric applications for clients.
There was a LOT of data entry, digitizing the stops and routes of city transit maps into dBase and these DOS spreadsheets. The keyboard shortcuts were SO FAST and when we eventually moved to Windows 3 in 1991, I always enabled the 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts in Excel. I still remember some of them.
I imagine there's nothing unique about my experience: these types of tasks were surely replicated all over the business world, with interns and staff getting their first taste of spreadsheets and programming languages in these powerful, tiny DOS programs.
I'll skip our brief foray into the dead end that was OS/2 2.0 :-)