The Mac is like a modern day Betamax 1731

p linnane

yup. or they could've paid me 2% of the project cost to do it all by myself, finish in two months instead of two years and i could've retired on the proceeds! TBT, i probably would've blown it.

i seem to remember that there was one 'demi-byte' config that wasn't interpreted by the dec instr's as a sign, maybe i was going to use that one as a switch but it's all so long ago now that i've probably got it wrong. i remember 0 through F except for x'E' - was it special? or maybe i just planned to zero them all and trap exceptions for a month or two after production in case i missed something!

in the 1990's i met a guy on a plane who commuted to London putting some military grade 8086 into the Underground trains. something to do with opening the doors. they would test at night when each line was closed down. he said these also had the capability to make the trains driverless but the Underground authority or maybe the conductors union wouldn't allow that to be enabled. i asked him what his biggest worry was and he said it was running out of memory - his latest release had just gone over 48K. not exactly what i would have worried about. i believed him perhaps because he knew the exact weight of the paint on a fully-coated Boeing 747 which i also forget but it was a much bigger number.

LOL, pc