Hacker News: pdw

New comment by pdw in "A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts"

pdw — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:20:57 +0000

I think that's out of date. The banner at the top of the page says "you can request a free license for version 5.4 from us." According to archive.org that was added later than the text you quoted, somewhere between 2022 and 2024.

New comment by pdw in "Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook"

pdw — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:46:46 +0000

In the early 90s Microsoft distributed the full Win32 API documentation as a WinHelp file. It felt very much as hyperlinked man-pages. Super fast too, even on machines of the time. WIN32.HLP can still be easily found, but modern Windows versions no longer ship WinHelp :(

New comment by pdw in "Let's compile Quake like it's 1997"

pdw — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:06:29 +0000

"Shipping" wouldn't be a problem, they could just run it from a network drive. Their PCs were networked, they needed to test deathmatches after all ;)

And the compilation speed difference wouldn't be small. The HP workstations they were using were "entry level" systems with (at max spec) a 100MHz CPU. Their Alpha server had four CPUs running at probably 275MHz. I know which system I would choose for compiles.

New comment by pdw in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

pdw — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:29:03 +0000

Even then it was not universal. For example, that Apple I ad that got posted a few days ago mentioned that "the system is expandable to 65K". https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...

New comment by pdw in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

pdw — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:17:33 +0000

Even in computing the binary definition is only used with memory sizes. E.g. storage, network speeds, clock rates use the standard definition.

New comment by pdw in "Recreating the lost SDK for a 42-year-old operating system: VisiCorp Visi On"

pdw — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:21:10 +0000

All of Microsoft's applications used to do that! The 16-bit versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc all were implemented using bytecode. That technology was only integrated in Microsoft C and made public in 1992 [1], before that the Microsoft applications group used their own private C toolchain. A copy of it can be found in the Word 1.1 source release [2] ("csl").

[1] https://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code... [2] https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD

New comment by pdw in "A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2"

pdw — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:06:37 +0000

Rosetta uses software emulation for x87 floating point. That's slow, but in practice that doesn't matter much. Mac software never had a reason to use x87 FP, every Intel Mac had at least SSE3 support.

New comment by pdw in "Show HN: My hobby OS that runs Minecraft"

pdw — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:47:08 +0000

The signedness of `char` is implementation-defined, it is signed on x86 but unsigned on ARM. So assigning a plain char to a wider integer type is suspicious, did the programmer expect sign-extension or zero-extension?

New comment by pdw in "What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO"

pdw — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:11:36 +0000

The Nintendo GameCube and Wii also had IBM CPUs.

New comment by pdw in "ECL Runs Maxima in a Browser"

pdw — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:34:53 +0000

I wouldn't assume ABCL runs on Android. It's not listed as a supported runtime on their website.

New comment by pdw in "Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall"

pdw — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 07:08:47 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)

New comment by pdw in "After 2 decades of tinkering, MAME cracks the Hyper Neo Geo 64"

pdw — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:47:49 +0000

A lot of game devs of that era sadly treated the Adlib/SoundBlaster OPL2 chip as nothing more than a very poor MIDI synth, but it was capable of much better. For example, listen to some of Stéphane Picq's music. https://vgmrips.net/packs/composer/stephane-picq

New comment by pdw in "The phaseout of the mmap() file operation in Linux"

pdw — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 22:00:46 +0000

In those days malloc would use sbrk to allocate memory. And yes, mmap was designed to memory map files. Using it to allocate anonymous pages came later.

New comment by pdw in "Debian 13, Postgres, and the US/* time zones"

pdw — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 07:08:45 +0000

Are they in widespread use? They were deprecated in 1995.

New comment by pdw in "Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector"

pdw — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 11:24:08 +0000

I always wondered how secure AS/400 actually is. The original implementation might have checked tag bits in hardware (I don't know), but the current (PowerPC) implementation relies on the compiler generating a "check tag bits" every time a pointer is dereferenced [1]. So it seems that any arbitrary code execution vulnerability would be absolutely devastating. And the "SLIC" is not a small microkernel -- it also contains the compilers, the database and other system components. It'd be hard to believe there would no exploitable bugs in there.

[1] https://www.devever.net/~hl/ppcas

New comment by pdw in "Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep"

pdw — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 08:53:34 +0000

Debian woody (2002) shipped gnustep. I tried it back then, but as far as I remember, it was weird enough that anybody who didn't have NEXTSTEP experience would bounce right off. The floating menus, the weird scrollbars, etc. There were also no non-trivial applications that I can remember.

People back then were looking for something that would be familiar to Windows/Mac users. GNUStep (at least at the time) was not interested in being that.

New comment by pdw in "Kernel-hack-drill and exploiting CVE-2024-50264 in the Linux kernel"

pdw — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:32:30 +0000

Security researchers rarely fix bugs. They don't see it as their job, and it requires a very different skill set than finding or exploiting them anyway.

New comment by pdw in "Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs"

pdw — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 15:28:47 +0000

From that article:

> While similar, it is not the widely reported Asrock motherboard problem, as the motherboards we use are of a different make

New comment by pdw in "Areal, Are.na's new typeface"

pdw — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 23:19:54 +0000

The Windows 2000 launch is closer to the release of Altair 8800 than it is to today :/

New comment by pdw in "Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published"

pdw — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 15:09:39 +0000

Right, people forget that the xz-utils backdoor happened to a very traditional no-dependencies C project.