" A dark shadow falls over me when I think about all the hours of work spent by Atari ST engineers to build something almost lost to oblivion."
Sigh. There are sooooooooo many things people have built which are sitting there in "oblivion" now. One of the most awesome things of playing with turn of the century computers (like PDP 11's or VAXen) is that you can see the stuff they did, in the contraints they had, and really understand how amazingly inefficient/overpowered OSes are today. When you have only one font, its fixed width and size, and it comes out of a ROM you don't worry about typography for example.
Sigh. There are sooooooooo many things people have built which are sitting there in "oblivion" now. One of the most awesome things of playing with turn of the century computers (like PDP 11's or VAXen) is that you can see the stuff they did, in the contraints they had, and really understand how amazingly inefficient/overpowered OSes are today. When you have only one font, its fixed width and size, and it comes out of a ROM you don't worry about typography for example.