kiwidrew

The game engines for C&C and Red Alert are full of Dune II references; as just one example, the factions (GDI/Nod or Allies/Soviets) are still called "houses" in the internal configuration files of C&C/RA.

C&C is pretty much what you get when you want to produce a sequel to Dune II but can't (or don't want to) license the Dune I.P. again so everything has to be re-skinned...

excellent! I'm tired of search engines that optimize for natural language queries because the inevitable trade-off is that they become useless at keyword/exact queries.

The 8088 has a four-byte instruction queue, and at times when the data bus would otherwise be idle the bus interface unit will prefetch the next instruction byte. So fetch and decode/execute are already overlapped.

What really slows down the 8088 is that each 8-bit transfer on the data bus requires four clock cycles. That means simply fetching the two-byte instruction requires eight clocks! Instruction fetch is so slow on the 8088 that it's virtually impossible to achieve the published instruction timing.

> it's missing many many culturally specific things like accents and other diacritics

fun fact: some of the symbols included in ASCII were intended to be used as (non-spacing) diacritical marks, specifically the tilde/caret/backquote characters...

[too lazy to dig up a proper source at the moment but the Wikipedia ASCII article covers some of this]

When implementing the decoding in silicon, each bit you want to compare requires one or more transistors; but no transistors are required for the "don't care" bits.

What are your thoughts on handling the authenticated portions of the API? For example, retrieving the list of subreddits a user is currently subscribed to? Or posting a comment / checking the user's inbox?

Shame that the shell script is so concise compared to the "G-expression" mess that's meant to replace it.

Are there any alternative (open source) implementations of the _server_ side of the Reddit API? Then you could just point Teddit, Aurora, etc. at the alternative server. The only required work would be implementing the database backend which seems... feasible.

This is fascinating, I really did not think it was possible to implement even a tiny subset of C in just 512 bytes of x86 code. Using atoi() as a generic hash function is a brilliantly awful hack!

I miss the days when NZ was truly innovative. RealMe was very promising when first introduced.

Of course it was never going to be adopted en masse by the private sector since part of the "get approval to use RealMe on your website" was "get Parliament to pass an Order in Council adding you to the authorized users schedule".

If you have a "stock" IBM PC, just the standard dual 360K floppy drives without a hard drive, it's actually possible to run this demo!

Use DOS 3.30 and FORMAT /S a blank floppy, copy APPEND.EXE to the floppy, and copy as many of the AREA5150 demo files as will fit. Then copy the remaining files to a second floppy. Put first floppy in A: and boot off it, put second floppy in B:, and then run APPEND B: followed by AREA5150. Behold, it works!

You absolutely do need the full 640K of RAM though, refuses to run with only 512K.

Yep, there was a (brief) period of time -- before MS-DOS became wildly popular -- when Microsoft was pitching Xenix as the future operating system for the PC.

(Also worth noting is that MS-DOS 2.0 was a nearly complete rewrite of the 1.x codebase...)