foone

It was deleted because it was posted here.

yeah, same. they really need to be blocked from HN, permanently.

my favorite part of this bullshittery that there's quotes around my name. it's just my name. it's on my license and everything.

anyway you can keep linking to my threads. I just won't like it.

ADHD. If I have a long-form blog post to write end, I get caught up in going back and rephrasing and re-editing and such, and it never gets finished.

Twitter's paragraph-size chunks with minimal editing (if I really have to, I can delete the last post and re-create it) means that I can't get stuck in the process of editing and revising, so I have to keep moving forward.

So it's really the only way I can write. My wife's gone through and rewritten some twitter threads into a blogpost for me, but she hasn't gotten to this one yet.

BTW, You can also use a threadreader/unroller to make a pseudo-blog-post out of it.

Feel free to write it as one!

But personally I can only do it this way, as I've got rather bad ADHD. So when I'm writing, it's a choice between "a rambly twitter thread" or "an unfinished never-posted blog post".

Yeah, if you read to the bottom I apologize for this.

I made this rant at 5am after being in the hospital for 8 hours, I could barely see the screen. It's amazing the thread doesn't have even more typos

A few people have mentioned that! I'm keeping my eye out for a second one, so if I find one (or I figure out a way to talk to off-the-shelf hardware with this one) I'll send it his way and we can exchange disks.

The drive itself was actually very powerful and capable, it just was very limited by having to talk to the C64 using the Vic20-compatible interface, which had issues.

That's why there were so many products for the c64 to fix it: Epyx Fast Load cartridges, for example. And plenty of games worked by having you first load a very simple file that just installed faster disk IO code and then used that code to load the rest of the game.

That's basically what Disk II drives did on the Apple II, just for EVERY (bootable) DISK instead of only some of them: The first bootloader is encoded in a simplified method so that they can save firmware space, but the first bootloader is just better disk IO routines to load the rest of the disk.

Very neat! That sounds like it's pretty similar to this one then. I wonder if the FISK was directly inspired by the DiskFax? I'm hoping to get in touch with the designer so I may have some answers soon.

I'd love to see those schematics if you can find them!

oh, hello!

I've been looking for a DiskFax machine for a long while, in fact I think it was my searches for that that ended up finding this one (on ebay).

That was a few years before the FISK, right? (FISK was ~1993). What was it internally? Something like a 6502/Z80 ?

Sorry. I've got ADHD, so that's really the only way I can usually do these things.

I'm planning to videoify it in the future, if that's more your style.

I just now realized this story I'd been ignoring isn't about the game "Portal" for the Apple II. Activision published a game with that title in '86 about exploring the future internet after the death of all mankind.