Years later, I had that story on my mind when I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.

It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?

Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?

In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make "the world's best video game". In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev. By using in-house integrated-circuit-fabrication facilities for prototyping, the engineers had cut design time for each chip to less than nine months, and they had designed and built five prototype computers for the show in less than five weeks. What surprised the rest of the home-computer industry the most, however, was the introductory price of the Commodore 64: $595 for a unit incorporating a keyboard, a central processor, the graphics and sound chips, and 64 kilobytes of memory instead of the 16 or 32 that were considered the norm.

Are we focusing too much on analyzing exactly how many jobs could be destroyed by the coming wave of automation, and not enough on how to actually fix the problem? That's one conclusion in a new paper on the potential affects of robotics and AI on global labor markets from US think tank, the Center for Global Development (CGD).

The paper's authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it's impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it's fairly certain there's going to be significant effects - especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed towards work that require the sort of routine, manual labor that's so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.

As earlier studies have also suggested, Schlogl and Sumner think the affects of automation on these and other nations is not likely to be mass unemployment, but the stagnation of wages and polarization of the labor market. In other words, there will still be work for most people, but it'll be increasingly low-paid and unstable; without benefits such as paid vacation, health insurance, or pensions. On the other end of the employment spectrum, meanwhile, there will continue to be a small number of rich and super-rich individuals who reap the benefits of increased in productivity created by technology.

It's well-known that you should measure the performance of your code, and not rely only on the opcode's "cycle counts".

But how fast is an IBM PC 5150 compared to a PCjr? Or to a Tandy 1000? Or how fast is the Tandy 1000 HX in fast mode (7.16Mhz) compared to the slow mode (4.77Mhz)? Or how fast is a nop compared to a cwd?

I created a test (perf.asm) that measures the performance of different opcodes and run it on different Intel 8088 machines. I run the test multiple times just to make sure the results were stable enough. All interrupts were disabled, except the Timer (of course). And on the PCjr the NMI is disabled as well.

That, so the story goes, was the remit given to BBC engineers in the late 1960s: find a way to transmit a printable page of text so that the corporation’s transmitters weren't simply left to idle overnight. Their efforts would eventually give rise to an iconic medium that would span five decades, become the basis for a global standard and - perhaps most importantly - let you check the lottery numbers on Sunday morning. (Well, you never knew.)

As is so often the case when a revolutionary technology's lingering just over the horizon, it's difficult to know precisely where the tale of teletext truly begins. Engineers at several different corporations were already experimenting with ways of transmitting text remotely, each with different goals in mind. The Post Office, who at that time were responsible for the telephone system, naturally wanted to use their infrastructure to boost the number of phone owners across the country. Boffins back at the BBC, meanwhile, had begun investigating ways to provide subtitled television programmes for the deaf.

Over the past few months, the wildest rumors in video game industry circles haven't involved the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Two. The most interesting chatter has centered on a tech company that's been quietly making moves to tackle video games in a big way: Google, the conglomerate that operates our email, our internet browsers, and much more.

We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.

Microsoft has been working on a new mysterious Surface device for at least two years. Codenamed Andromeda, the device has appeared in patents, reports, and in operating system references multiple times and will include a dual-display design. According to a Microsoft internal document obtained by The Verge, it's also going to be a pocketable Surface device.

KaiOS Technologies Inc., developer of the emerging operating system for smart feature phones, KaiOS, today announced a $22M Series A investment from Google to help bring the internet to the next generation of users.

In addition to the investment, Google and KaiOS have also agreed to work together to make the Google Assistant, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search available to KaiOS users. These apps have been developed specifically for the KaiOS platform, which is entirely web-based, using open standards such as HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.

A titan of tech and industrial innovation has been laid low by a mere speck of dust. Last week, Apple quietly announced that they were extending the warranty on their flagship laptop's keyboard by four years. As it turns out, the initial run of these keyboards, described by Jony Ive as thin, precise, and "sturdy", has been magnificently prone to failure.

A while back I was going through Dolphin's issues page out of sheer boredom.

I don’t know anything about coding to fix any of this stuff, but I do like to test really old issues sometimes to see if the hundreds of changes made over the years has produced any change or potentially even fixed some of the issues. After a few pages, I eventually came across issue 726 - Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.

Inspired by the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 from 2003, Microsoft has recently released the new Microsoft Classic IntelliMouse. Offering the same classic ergonomic look and feel, the new Microsoft Classic IntelliMouse offers improved performance and additional features made possible by technology today.

In remembering the classic mouse, we sat down with Simon Dearsley, Devices Design Director at Microsoft, to discuss the legacy of the Microsoft IntelliMouse and what you can expect from the newest version of the iconic IntelliMouse range.

A month ago we saw Qualcomm release a new "upper mid-range" SoC with the announcement of the Snapdragon 710 - the emphasis was on the fact that this was a new market tier aiming slightly below the top-tier flagship chipsets. Today, we're seeing Qualcomm expand the traditional mid-tier and also what can be considered the low-end for smartphone devices. The Snapdragon 439 and 429 follow in the footsteps of the 435 and 425 and bring FinFET to the low-end; the Snapdragon 632 is more akin to the Snapdragon 652 as it's now the first time we see big cores brought down to the lower mid-tier successor to the Snapdragon 630.

If you spend the major portion of your work day in front of a workstation chasing bits through the electronic networks of cyberspace, aka the information highway, so that your users can be more productive, this book is for you.

If you spend your days (or, thanks to some corporate edict, are about to spend your days) living in the Common Desktop Environment, so that your users can focus on their work and not the mechanics of getting to their work, this book shows you what you can do to make that environment their home.

Gomez isn't alone. She's one member of a vast, global community of people who revere the 46-year-old entrepreneur with a passion better suited to a megachurch pastor than a tech mogul. With followers like her, Elon Musk - the South African-born multibillionaire known for high-profile, risky investments such as Tesla (electric cars), SpaceX (private space travel), the Boring Company (underground travel), and Neuralink (neurotechnology) - has reaped the benefits of a culture in which fandom dominates nearly everything. While his detractors see him as another out-of-touch, inexpert rich guy who either can't or won't acknowledge the damage he and his companies are doing, to his fans, Musk is a visionary out to save humanity from itself. They gravitate toward his charisma and his intoxicating brew of extreme wealth, a grand vision for society - articulated through his companies, which he has an odd habit of launching with tweets - and an internet-friendly playfulness that sets him apart from the stodgier members of his economic class. Among his more than 22 million followers, all of this inspires a level of righteous devotion rarely glimpsed outside of the replies to a Taylor Swift tweet.

The most vocal of those fans have an impact: they're an army of irregulars waiting to be marshaled via a tweet and sent on the digital warpath against anything Musk decides he doesn't like, the iron fist in Musk's velvet glove. They've become known for haranguing people they believe have crossed him, journalists especially, with relentless fervor. The attacks are standard social media-era fare: free-for-all bombardment across social platforms by people who are not always vitriolic but who nevertheless barrage the perceived enemy with bad-faith questions.