Who remembers Bill Condie? He still has his old Delphi forum up

The other day I remembered it; and I dropped a cryptic message, to test his memory You can enter the Delphi forums as a guest if you like:

http://forums.delphiforums.com/macwindos/messages/?msg=931.35

Surprisingly, he also has a very old picture of me online. Haha! Is it really possible that I was once that young?!

https://billcondie.com/MacWinDOS/

Lauri

Series of interesting email exchanges, nro 0009:

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Hello Andy...

My name is Lauri Pesonen, and I feel a bit embarrassed to ask you this ...

20+ years ago, I ported Christian Bauer's excellent Macintosh II emulator "Basilisk II" to Windows, for the sheer love of the classic Macintosh.

Now I'm retired, and writing up some kind memories, or at least anecdotes about my experiences back then.
I tried to ask you the following question. I created a Twitter account for that, but the message was not delivered -- it didn't appear on your "wall" or whatever it is called. I'm an old-school email guy

Maybe you would know the answer to this burning question? Haha! I got your email address from Bill Atkinson.

This was the message I tried to send:

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Hi Andy ... I'm sorry, I'm new to Twitter and I don't know what is the proper way to ask ... I created an account just for this. Could you please shed some light on this extremely important issue:

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/basilisk-ii-old-windows-builds-lauri-p...

Lauri
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...Andy , if you feel that this is too ridiculous, please just forget it But I found it so interesting tidbit about Mac legacy that it was impossible for me to ignore, and I would guess that maybe you would appreciate that kind of humour as well. At least I had to give this a try I have done my best now. Haha!

Best regards,
Lauri

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Hi. Lauri,

     Sorry, but I don't know the answer to your question.   I am certainly not responsible for the offset of 42 in the Mac II ROMs, as I wasn't working for Apple during the Mac II development, and had little to do with it (besides optimizing the graphics routines via QuickerDraw, which was incorporated into System 6 in 1988).

    I can speculate why there was some offset, though - my memory is fading but I think the very beginning of the ROM contained the absolute addresses of various interrupt and exception handlers used during the early booting process, before RAM is initialized, which the emulator would need to skip over - maybe offset 42 was where the actual boot code started. It's curious that it's not a multiple of 4, though, as you would want it to be long word aligned.

    Anyway, good luck with your writing and emulation work.

   -- Andy

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Thank you very much Andy for taking the time to answer me May I quote what you said in my forum writings, please?

And especially, thank you for folklore.org!! It has given me very much pleasure, and other people around me as well

Lauri

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Hi Lauri,

   Sure, feel free to quote my response in your writings.  I’m glad you like folklore.org.

   — Andy

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Thank you!

Please keep an eye on me, in case I make other blunders! Haha!

Lauri

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... so my HitchHiker's Guide theory was not verified -- yet! But I got some other very interesting information, thanks to Andy. And maybe I'll find the answer to the "42" puzzle sooner or later, remember what I wrote about my stubbornness!

Anyway, the high point of this day was that Andy is, really, that kind of down-to-earth guy that I thought he would be. Even though this was the first time I talked to him, I got that impression already long ago -- read his www.folklore.org writings!

Lauri

[Edit:]
I finally realized what he really said:
>> It's curious that it's not a multiple of 4, though, as you would want it to be long word aligned.

Unaligned start vector for no apparent reason -- that could give some credit to my theory that it was indeed a deliberately selected offset, or what? Haha!

Another blast from the past! I can't believe that those guys still have this page up, it must be an accident! This was fall 2002. Probably one of the world's first web browsers for smartphones. Written by me, for the Symbian OS that those Nokia phones used.

http://www.anygraaf.fi/browser/indexe.htm

I also wrote the text for this silly advertisement page, and the documentation provided.
"Surfing the Net, with one hand free!". Haha! I should have been working at Madison Avenue

This was the only time our company released consumer products -- during my time at least. It had a protection which was based on the IMEI-code of the phone. Well, each time I released a new version with fixes and new features, the next day a cracked version was available at the warez sites

Lauri

Well, I like how Bill Condies MacWinDOS page looks on a proper web browser, lol!

This has nothing to do with MacIntosh emulation but apparently I feel the urge to tell you the following story

In 1985-1986 and again 1988 and onwards, I was working for a company called "Monigraaf". Three guys had seen an early opportunity to implement a distributed publishing system using DOS PC computers -- they founded the company and it was moderately successful. After some years, they decided to sell the company to Siemens Nixdorf and took the money out ... and after a proper grace period, they all left.

When companies merge, naturally there is always a big hunt for synergy benefits. We had a publishing system and a classified ad system; they had, among other things, the CSC -- a steel monster weighing maybe 200 kg = 400 pounds. Resembling ATM machines. Of course, it had to be robust to be able to withstand all kinds of late-night abuse at the dead of night, standing all alone in railway stations. And indeed, it was used for example as a self-service system to sell train tickets and things like that.

Our new CEO got a bright idea: let's combine these products! Let's make a self-service system that people could use to place their own advertisements! Of course, nowadays this is a terribly outdated concept because of another monster called the Internet.

But I kind of understood the merits of the idea back then. I could see why people just might adopt it: it could be convenient to type in one's own "private" and perhaps embarrassing ads in peace, without having to tolerate the badly disguised grins of the newspaper ad desk girls

The task was to combine the software packages and coordinate the effort. Who do you think got this first-class job assignment? Yep ...

So I drove between two places and finally it was ready. It actually was sold to two rather large (in local scale) newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Turun Sanomat. We also dragged this chunk of steel around Europe at some expos -- someone translated the texts to English and German and I integrated them into the code.

Although the machine worked quite well, there were no more sales. The project slowly died and I was happy to get rid of it! It is not that exciting to combine other people's software, it is so much more fun to write something original

I have no pictures to show, but yesterday I stumbled on a bad OCR copy of UK Financial Times from 1992, there was a short news about the machine. Search for "classified":

https://archive.org/stream/FinancialTimes1992UKEnglish/Sep%2004%201992%2...

The cool thing was that the bank/Visa card reader that was used to make the payment could not only read cards. Using a small extra program, I could write to them as well. Pretty soon I had a couple of copies of my own Visa card. Practical value: zero -- but it was nice to watch the faces of my friends when I made a random payment with a card that was completely blank on both sides! Haha! "I forgot the card in my pocket before the laundry day".

Lauri

Sorry ... even if I had copies of those, I could not give them out ... they are proprietary software, owned by my ex-company. Sadly there is not much, if any, 68k or PPC software that I could actually contribute. But I can take a closer look at my archives.

There is, however, one piece of Windows software that I have been thinking releasing. But since it's Windows, the Macintoshgarden probably would not be interested. I'll find some other way if I decide to release it.

It's a very interesting implementation of professor David Turner's functional language SASL, with some features taken from the language Miranda courtesy by the same gentleman; for example Zermelo-Fraenkel set abstractions. Me and three other guys wrote it in early eighties for VAX computers running Unix. I later on ported it to Windows and fixed and improved many things while I was at it.

"SASL" stands for "St. Andrews Static Language", named after the University he was teaching at the time.

This particular implementation uses combinators and lambda-calculus. The compiler generates self-optimizing combinator code which is then interpreted. It might be valuable to some people like students as a learning tool. Take a look at this, the Quicksort algorithm written in SASL, using ZF notations. Quite elegant:

def
quick [] = []
quick (a:x) = quick {b; b <- x; b < a;} ++ [a] ++ quick {b; b <- x; b >= a}

No imperative elements are allowed. No side effects, only "pure" functions and recursion!

Lauri

[Edit: had some trouble with "<" and ">", they were probably confused with html tags, should be ok now.]

This is the story of my first computers, Commodore PET and Mac 512k or Fat Mac ... a long story, bear with me:)

I was about 16 or 17 years old when I got my first computer, the PET. Before that, I had played with only two "computers": the Texas Instruments SR-56 programmable calculator, and the computer at our high school.

I don't remember the make and the model of the school computer; it was already a terribly outdated computer that had been donated to our school by a local bank when they kicked it out and upgraded to some more advanced system. The mass storage unit was a paper tape. To program it, there was a built-in Basic interpreter. In theory, we could also load a version of Pascal from the paper tape, but it was a practical impossibility: after one trivial mistake it crashed, and we needed to spend another 20 minutes or so reloading the Pascal! It could not be used, really.

PET was something else. In retrospect, I have been a bit sorry that I didn't choose Apple II instead -- but PET had an appeal because it was a complete package. Power it up, start using, and enjoy the glorious 8 kilobytes of RAM memory, Or was it 7168(?) bytes after the "operating system" reserved some for itself.

When a kid starts to use a new toy, everything is wonderful and exciting for a short while. But as the skills build up, one starts to hit the limits.

There were three major obstacles...

The first obstacle was the terrible C cassette tape drive that was used as a mass storage system. It was slower than the slowest modem, and more tragically, very unreliable. My father once wanted to sponsor me for a job: he was a French-language teacher at the University and also some kind of an union leader. They made a study about the opinions of all the professors, lecturers, assistants and whatnot. I got a stack of paper and I was supposed to enter the data into the PET, write a simple statistical program and print out the results.

What a nightmare! Night after night, after the school, I tried to run the data. And sooner or later, a transmission error occurred. Must do it all over again. When I finally got it done, only at that point I realized that the printed lines were not properly aligned. I dreaded giving those print-outs to my father, but that's what I did. The feedback was bad, of course, but I didn't want to get involved in it again. So he used scissors to do the good old clip-and-paste method to make the results readable.

Later on, I wrote my own cassette controlling software for that damn thing. It used pulse-code modulation, it was three times faster and more reliable. I wish I had done that earlier.

The second obstacle was the limited RAM memory. 8k gets you only so far! Me and my kid brother had already done all kinds of circuit boards, painting them first on a blank copper board and then corroding the extra copper away with a solution of ferric chloride. Since the PET had an external  memory expansion slot, we started to design an extra memory board. The plan was to expand the RAM from 8k to the maximum possible 32k, so 24k more was needed. Surely 32k would be enough for the rest of my life!

But there was a practical problem. We could only buy 4 kilobit static RAM's -- and even those were expensive. So we needed 48 of them, and placing all of them side by side would introduce too long transmission delays -- at least so we calculated. Hmm? Solution: We made the circuit board 3D! Four IC circuits on top of each other, kind of hugging, or making love, soldered together Address selection pins were sticking out and connected to the main board with short pieces of wire.

Please note that I'm not too sure about the correctness of the numbers I mentioned above. What was actually the static RAM size and how many was needed... The numbers may be inaccurate, but you get the basic idea anyway

When finished, the RAM board worked flawlessly. Now I could write my first assemblers and compilers -- and that also solved the third problem: speed.

Later, my brothers bought Commodore 64. It was obvious that my assembler could be useful to them, but we could not figure any way to transfer it. C64 had a floppy drive (it became unreliable, too, as it grew older) and PET had that damn cassette drive ... they were not compatible ... and we hadn't even heard about any kind of networking solutions at that time.

Finally we bought a cheap roll of the kind of thin, enamelled copper wire used in transformers and such, and made a 30 meters long twisted-pair cable. My brothers lived at the opposite end of the house. After spending two days wrapping it, we ignored our parents' objections and installed it at the ceiling. I wrote two small communication programs for both of the computers. Some more time was spent to transport the assembler and the compiler from the PET to the C64 ... and finally they were left to compile themselves overnight. After that, the kids had tools to make games in 6502 assembly. One of them actually sold some games written by him, but only locally I think.

At some point of time, one bit was burned out in the original RAM and soon after one bit in the ROM. They were not socketed circuits but were soldered. It would have been too expensive and troublesome for me to try to fix it, and more importantly, the PET was already outdated. Because there was the Macintosh!

This must have been the year 1986, because the Mac Plus had just come out. When people upgraded their old 128k and 512k to Plus, many left-over parts accumulated in one computer shop. I'm not quite sure what the upgrade mechanism really was, but the end result was that one of my friends bought a substantial stock of old motherboards, diskette drives and keyboards quite cheaply. Monitors were not included in the deal. He sold them to everybody around us -- he was not out to make any profit, this was nothing but his willingness to help out.

I watched in envy how the other guys built nice boxes and installed fancy monitors, and demoed the Macs to me. I was quite low on money, so the solution was to rip the guts out of my PET -- may she rest in peace. Then some sawing of iron out of the casing because the motherboard would not fit otherwise. And finally I made a small adapter circuit board to translate the Mac video signals so that the PET screen would understand them. The end result looked ugly, but it worked as it should. Now I had, for all intents and purposes, a Fat Mac; my first Mac ever.

First, it was all about gaming, of course. But soon I started to learn about how the Mac operated internally and write some trivial programs for it as well. So -- in some very far-fetched sense, this was the beginning of "my" Basilisk II Windows port! One branch of the many paths which eventually led to attempt it. Haha!

Good old times

Lauri

Here's another story about B2 development; shows once again how I had an uncanny ability to embarrass myself.

This was the fall of 1999. Back then, the UAE CPU could emulate 68020 and there was a kind of patch so it could fake to be 68030. Everybody was hoping that 68040 emulation would soon follow because it would allow running more applications. Many of them also incorrectly thought that this would somehow magically speed up the emulation, probably because the real 040 was so much faster than its predecessors. But emulation does not work that way Some people even had the misconception that 68040 would allow PPC code to run!

I happened to scan through the Motorola manuals while doing other things, and I suddenly realized how easy adding the 040 support would actually be, from the point of view of the CPU emulation. So I did it. It was maybe 3(?) new opcodes in the CPU and some changes in the FPU, I don't remember exactly -- but it was surprisingly easy to do. I didn't tell this to other B2 developers. I sometimes wanted to surprise other people ... quite human, possibly.

I was also in the process of helping Marc Hoffman to write his excellent B2 manual, giving advice and information and answering to his questions. There was necessarily a lot of email exchange, and at some point I blurted out that the next B2 build would include support for the 68040 processor -- maybe because he could then include this information in his manual and wouldn't need to rewrite too much later.

He was excited, and asked for my permission to publish this news on his web site. Well, why not ... and so he did. Lots of talk about it followed in the forums. Lots of exclamation marks, smileys, and whatnot.

Then immediately after this wonderful newsflash -- Christian released his next beta of the B2 core and the Linux version. He had done exactly the same thing! Without knowing it, apparently both of us had simultaneously realized how easy this actually is and just wrote the code.

Why did I feel that this was so embarrassing to me? Because Marc had published something along the lines that "Lauri has made it possible etc..." And now it was obvious that it was Christian! Actually I don't know whether anybody else besides me noticed this, but I felt bad ...

Well, never mind, I combined our efforts and released a new build, I think it was number 100.

What does this amusing anecdote tell about my communication skills? I don't even dare to think about it! Haha!

Lauri

Lauri, to be honest, to me your recollection simply underscores the obvious to all of us, and that's that 'great minds really do think alike', and further, the gentleman in you sees the acknowledgements made to you rather than Christian as an embarrassment.. even in those 'oops' moments we can freely say 'job well done' my friend!

Thanks cbone for your kind words

Watchsmart previously wrote about Mark Nadelin and his premature passing ...  made me recall this ...

Does anybody remember Yoav Shadmi? He was the author of the vMac DOS port. He passed away while serving in the Israeli army, 3 weeks after his 18th birthday. It was a training accident. Everybody was shocked when his brother David wrote to inform us. It was in January 1999.

Yoav was very respected in the community. One of the unsung heroes of Mac emulation. Besides his DOS port, he made other contributions as well. I would not be surprised if some of his old code would still be alive in Paul Pratt's excellent Mini vMac.

Lauri