16-bit Intel 8088 chip (c. 1985)

16-bit Intel 8088 chip (c. 1985)allpoetry.com

135 points•rbanffy•8 days ago•23 comments•

23 comments

Everyone should own at least one book of Bukowski poetry: in addition to computers he wrote about cats, going to the track, drinking and other things his life. I remember riding the train from Dresden to Prague and the person next to us was reading his novel Post Office which is a wonderful story of irresponsibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(novel)

deepspace8 days ago

Reading Bukowski often makes me yearn for a life that could have been. An often miserable, always irresponsible, but often wonderful life. Of course, his real life was probably far less glamorous than he makes it sound, but, man, did he have a way with words.

ggerules8 days ago

My favorite Bukowski book of poetry "Love is a Dog from Hell". Very Bukowski.

Shout out to City Lights Bookstore in San Fancisco. I bought a lot of poetry books there in the late 80s and early 90s.

brudgers8 days ago

There are books of Bukowski poetry and then there are books of Bukowski poetry.

The stuff published during his lifetime is fabulous. The posthumous books are butchered in a terrible way.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/charles-bukowskis-posthu...

Luc8 days ago

"nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created on an IBM Personal Computer."

Well I guess, the 1571 drive was released that summer, with the hardware capable of reading IBM PC floppies, but I think it took some years for the software to be developed (Big Blue Reader).

badc0ffee8 days ago

I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.

To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).

bitwize8 days ago

I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.

badc0ffee8 days ago

What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later! Also 16-bit ISA would have too many address lines for this thing.)

ErroneousBosh8 days ago

It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.

I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.

rbanffy7 days ago

Same here. And I wouldn’t pass anything weird.

Currently I’m looking for a VT-330 or some other terminal with Tektronix graphics. These seem like unobtanium this side of the Atlantic.

So, if someone has a Rainbow, Z-100, AT&T Unix PC, 3278 terminal, or anything like that, I’m rescue stray computers.

em3rgent0rdr8 days ago

Still is just a bit true to today with all the walled gardens.

jojocool05018 days ago

My favorite Bukowski quote is: 'To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.'

You can read the full letter from which this quote was taken, along with a short bio, here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-j...

snozolli2 days ago

This revived a memory of my homework, saved from GW-BASIC on a Leading Edge Model D, being unreadable on the school's IBM PCs. I always thought it was something like line-ending encoding, but current Google results indicate that it should have worked. Maybe our disk drive was miscalibrated... I'm glad to now be living in the era of USB thumb drives and Dropbox.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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