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Showing posts from October, 2021

Emulating Old Hardware - The State Of Cellphones Before The iPhone

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The screenshots above is quite represented of what a typical cellphone was like in the middle-late 2000's. They ran a small, embedded OS that was tailed for that particular phone. The interface was quite simplistic, and the phones was just exactly that: a phone. The marriage of the phone and PDA was occurring, but it was still in progress. For the vast majority of want their media on the go, they would need to maintain a separate MP3 player/PDA if they wanted their entertainment on-demand.   These phones were not multimedia capable. The furthest extent of their multimedia capabilities was the ability to play short ringtones and display pictures at low resolution. As time went by, the flip-phone gained more features like playing short video clips at very low resolutions. However, by the time of those developments, smartphones were already leaving them behind in the dust. These flip-phones were very low-spec, and only had enough memory for the bare necessities, and nothing more. Yet,

Classic Systems Emulated: The Macintosh (Microsoft's Offerings)

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While the Apple II did well enough when it was first introduced, sales of the computer skyrocketed when VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, was released in late 1979. VisiCalc, referred to as a "killer application", became so popular that it caused a increase in hardware sales. People wanted VisiCalc, and they didn't care how much they needed to run it, computer and all.  We fast forward to 1982. Apple realizes that in order for their new platform-in-progress to succeed, they needed killer applications to spur adaption. Even though Apple was able to provide some of their own worthy killer applications in the form of MacPaint and MacWrite, Apple would need to court third-party developers. In their quest, one developer would become essential for the Mac's success: Microsoft. Microsoft was no stranger to Apple's products. The version of BASIC used in the Apple II, Applesoft BASIC, was licensed from Microsoft. It's interesting to note that during this point in comput