Inside the Apple STAR

I fell into another nostalgic computing rabbit hole, this one a few years later, looking at how the Xerox STAR and Apple Lisa could have succeeded, wildly, bringing the graphical computing era forward by almost a decade.

That story begins with an earthquake, a few months before Apple’s IPO. A quake that puts the company’s existence in peril and ends up waking up Xerox to the opportunity of being “The Document Company” 15 years sooner.

I read a lot of fan fiction in my free time, but I don’t recall ever seeing much fan non-fiction. Copying the style of the Inside the ____ book series was fun too, including designing and drawing the cover.

Plus below is the 1970s style Apple advertisement which is included inside the book.

What is the point of all this? I’d say 90% this was a hobby project, giving me something to think about to get my mind off of work, when I needed to get my mind off of work. But the other 10% is the continued lesson that it is important to question assumptions, to question whether there are better solutions, and to keep innovating.

Cover of a (could have been) BYTE Magazine

The last time I found a book explaining the workings of a stock exchange was literally called The Work of the Stock Exchange, describing the New York Stock Exchange in 1922. Confusion of Confusions is a bit older. 234 years older. Published in 1688, describing the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. One might assume that the first-ever stock exchange back in the 17th Century would be lacking most of the...

Why does Africa lag behind the rest of the world as measured by economic development? Why didn’t Africa follow along with the growth of the Asian Tigers, China, India, and Southeast Asia? What was missing? Joe Studwell gives a plausible explanation in his new book, How Africa Works. TL;DR, the answer is population density. That isn’t a factor that I had ever considered, as Africa...

For institutions whose ages are measured in centuries, the day-to-day inner workings of the stock exchanges are amazingly undocumented. I’ve asked numerous traders and others in the capital markets, and they all tell me they learned those details “on the job” from their peers. Almost a year ago I found The Work of the Stock Exchange, which did document quite a bit of the...

I grew up in the early years of personal computers and was a young adult in the early years of the web/internet, with most of my career in the age of mobile phones and wireless connectivity. I’ve never had to run a company without having a computer-based spreadsheet for computations. I remember adding machines with paper tapes, but never owned one. And until this week had never seen and NCR...

While reading about nostalgic computing on the Chip Letter, I came across the following picture of hand-written assembly code for the IBM S/360. What caught my eye wasn’t the paper spreadsheet, but the ah ha moment of clarity explaining why assemblers assume anything in the first column of text is a label, i.e. why assemblers require mnemonics to be prefixed by a space or tab. I’m an...