Monthly Archive:: April 2015

"WHAT are you on? The 'fuck Windows' strategy?" Back in the late 1990s, when Bill Gates was still Microsoft's boss, any employee who had the temerity to suggest something that could possibly weaken the firm's flagship operating system was sure to earn his wrath. Even after Steve Ballmer took over from Mr Gates in 2000, that remained the incontestable law at the company's headquarters in Redmond, in Washington state. Everything Microsoft did had to strengthen Windows, to make it ever more crushingly dominant. Many of the company's best innovations were killed because of this "strategy tax", as it was known internally.

Today the rules are different in Redmond. The new boss who took over last year, Satya Nadella (pictured, centre, with Mr Gates to the left and Mr Ballmer on the right), recoils when he hears the term "strategy tax" and says he now tells his staff simply to "build stuff that people like".

I recently created my own NES emulator. I did it mostly for fun and to learn about how the NES worked. I learned some interesting things, so I wrote this article to share. There is a lot of documentation already out there, so this is just meant to highlight some interesting tidbits.

Along the way, the Apple team landed upon the Watch's raison d'être. It came down to this: Your phone is ruining your life. Like the rest of us, Ive, Lynch, Dye, and everyone at Apple are subject to the tyranny of the buzz - the constant checking, the long list of nagging notifications. "We're so connected, kind of ever-presently, with technology now," Lynch says. "People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much." They've glared down their noses at those who bury themselves in their phones at the dinner table and then absentmindedly thrust hands into their own pockets at every ding or buzz. "People want that level of engagement," Lynch says. "But how do we provide it in a way that's a little more human, a little more in the moment when you're with somebody?"

The goal was to free people from their phones, so it is perhaps ironic that the first working Watch prototype was an iPhone rigged with a Velcro strap. "A very nicely designed Velcro strap," Lynch is careful to add.

Mark Williams Company closed in 1995. In 2001, Bob Swartz asked me to archive the hard disks containing the Mark Williams source repository; the command and system sources here are from that repository. I have long intended to catalog and organize these sources, but in the meantime they are posted here as is. MWC's documentation guru Fred Butzen provided the MWC documentation sources.