Programming at the right level

In the fall of 2005, my employer was acquired by another company, and I was transferred to the team that developed a centralized translation memory system.

MS-DOS was an unwanted child.

In the summer of 2006 I started an open-source C++ library for handling UTF-8 strings.

In May 1984, Digital Research Inc (DRI) announced a product called StarLink1.

On Thursday, August 21, 1980, Phil Nelson, a technical support representative at DRI’s headquarters in Pacific Grove, CA, answered a phone call.

MP/M, or “Multi-Programming Monitor Control Program” is usually described as a multi-tasking and multi-user version of CP/M.

September 28, 1980, was a Sunday, and the Old National Bank Building in Bellevue, WA was mostly empty.

There is a widespread opinion that Microsoft’s lucrative 1980 contract with IBM must have involved some kind of foul play.

In part VI of the UTF-8 decoding series we saw how a simple non-validating decoder might look like, but we emphasized the importance of validation.

In fact, there was an unwritten agreement between Gates and Kildall that Microsoft would stay out of the operating system end of the business, and Kildall would not get into microcomputer languages, according to industry sources.

The sixth part of my series on decoding UTF-8 was a pretty uninteresting one: in it, I described a basic non-validating UTF-8 decoder.

It is hard to believe there is anything left to say about the controversy over MS-DOS (including its predecessor 86-DOS) being a “CP/M lookalike”.

In parts 2-5 we spent some time on determining length of a UTF-8 sequence.

The story of how MS-DOS became the industry standard for the 16-bit business computers at the expense of Digital Research’s CP/M is somewhat of a legend among fans of computing history.

Position‑independent code is fundamentally simple: it is machine code that can execute correctly regardless of the memory address at which it is loaded.

Most of us imagine the microcomputer revolution as small groups of nerdy kids working in garages and bedrooms to build technology that would change the world.

In Parts II, III, and IV of this series on decoding UTF-8, we examined several methods for determining the length of a UTF-8 encoded byte sequence.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was one of the best-selling home computers ever released.

Recently I have been working on benchmarks comparing techniques for calculating UTF-8 sequence lengths.

Sometime in 1988, the keyboard of my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K was finally broken beyond repair, and I asked my parents for a 128K version of the same computer.