A lot of this discussion actually more about "use baremetal" or "put servers in your closet". HN tells Americans to do the same thing (and hire them to do it).
Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.
It's a shame to see you get downvoted (presumably because you don't cite any evidence for your assertions). As a counter-point, I will give the oft-quoted-by-me 1990s promotional video of the use of IBM CallPath on an AS/400 which should get you all misty-eyed https://youtu.be/5pY6Xxptp9A?t=2058
IBM it's a special case. You often have the exact tools under the terminal interface and the GUI 1:1. You can do the same task in the CLI, TUI or with a GUI, now it can perfectly be over a web. But for minimum latency the CLI and TUI are essential and even a 9front user as me I acknowedge that. But 9front it's a special case too; it was basically made to be modular from day one and you can just set a CPU server and connect anything into it over 9p, be physical or not. No SSH needed, everything works the same everywhere.
Huh? Guess you do learn something new everyday - I've been calling it that for ever too but apparently it is "engine-x" ... (thanks to you, I guess I won't sound like an idiot any more, to some ;).
Entirely intentional because they want to filter out anyone who can see how scammy it looks, so they don't waste their time. This is bulk spam stuff. If they are actually targeting you, it will look very real.
I don't buy it. The actor running the website likely gets paid for every user that installs the app or possibly even every user they direct at the app.
Even in the unlikely case that they get paid for achieving some later payoff, the "work" on the way there is almost certainly 100% automated so there is no harm in spraying the attack more widely (as opposed to Nigeria scams where pre-AI, pre-slave-farm, the scammers would have to invest significant amounts of a very limited resource - their time - on each victim).
The thing is Windows 98 let you throw up a HTML window with almost zero overhead (the OS used the same libraries) and javascript could get data easily from another process via COM etc.
Now like 25 years later, apparently our choices are shipping bespoke copies of Chrome and Node, OR making shit work on an emulated 1981 DEC terminal. Lack of vision is exactly right.
Apparently PowerBasic was the successor to Borland TurboBasic and complied to a native executable. So this wasn't an interpreted 'line number' Basic like our kiddie computers. It also probably had the Borland Windows GUI stuff.
(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)
No line numbers but you can use numbers as goto labels. It uses Dynamic Dialog Tools which is a Win32 wrapper which most of my "job" is gutting out those calls, implementing Single Responsibility in functions and plugging in Electron UI. And trying not to break EVERYTHING...
Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!
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