Never used a Franklin, but I remember the Albert which was a IIe clone. Had a voice synthesizer which you could type words into and it would say them back (poorly) which as a young kid was a good time. Also had a stylus/drawpad for graphics which was kinda neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_(computer)
I remember the text Games Apples Play and typing the code manually in from the pages on that machine in Basic. Some of them were pretty fun. https://archive.org/details/gapa2
My friend, who's data was a swapmeet/fleamarket/gunshow guy, brought one home (a franklin 500, the //c clone) for him. Seemed to run all the pirated floppies that I the friend group had accumulated for our //e's just fine. I remember liking it's black and grey case/keyboard colorscheme.
Idk who would even want them as a client. They'll change course on you every 4 years at minimum potentially in massive ways that might force you to change your product putting all your other users at risk - and they might just do that to you legislatively, anyway!
I can testify that Qwant, if nothing else, is a superior image search engine (basically does what GIS used to do 10-15 years ago) and it's better for just getting to a quick answer without your first 4 results being ad-driven.
Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these days.
Some states (Iowa, at least, maybe Nebraska?) seem to have a rule that billboards have to be a certain distance away from the road - a fairly large distance. You have to work to read them. It makes them much easier to ignore.
I don't know if that's the rule for all roads, or just for interstates. I don't know if it's for driver safety if they veer off the road, or for avoiding distraction, or just to limit advertising. But I like it.
Regardless, the general feel of driving here is very different from many other states because of this rule. It's one of the first things I notice when I drive somewhere else in the US.
My dad had one of these and I thought it was the coolest because it had the text-to-audio synthesizer. Because it was such nascent tech, it said a lot of hilarious pronunciations which was infinitely entertaining when you're like 7 years old.
I liked his journals from Karateka better than those from PoP. He was much less cocky then and his innovations seemed more novel and exciting, plus you know he was squeezing a lot more out of the hardware from that time.
MoD was really an amazing book, though. Highly recommend for anyone who played the game back when it was still new (or anyone interested in a case study in product management).
Second on Masters of Doom; my favorite part is near the beginning, when Carmack showed Romero the smooth scrolling on a PC, and Romero is running through the office trying to show everyone, only for most of them to be largely unimpressed. I thought it was telling that the only person who really understood what Carmack had made was Romero, and it showed why they (initially) made such a good team.
I was going to cite the example of the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit. Even moving a cursor around a map requires pushing a physical knob in 360° to guide it.
I wouldn't call the Garmin G1000 a paragon of UX design though. I wish there were some serious competitors that would give the UX another try (like Avidyne), but Garmin seems to be the standard now.
Philip Greenspun wrote about some of its problems (back in 2006):
> In some ways this makes life more difficult for the pilot. For example, suppose that you are busily trying to fly the airplane and study an approach plate when ATC gives you a new transponder code. With a less integrated system, you know exactly where the buttons are to enter a transponder code and your fingers will find their way there almost automatically. The buttons are always in the same place, i.e., on the physical transponder box, and they never change their function. With the G1000, you find the soft key labeled "xpdr" and press it. Then some more soft keys take on the function of digits. It is clearly a less direct and more time-consuming procedure.
Similarly for entering a frequency into COM 2. With a traditional radio stack, you reach over to COM 2, which is probably underneath COM 1 and labeled "COM 2". You twist the knob that is always there and that always adjusts the COM 2 frequency. With the G1000, you study the COM freqencies display (typically four numbers) and figure out which number is surrounded by a box. This is the number that you are going to be changing if you twist the COM knob. If the box isn't surrounding the number you want to change, you have to think long enough to push the COM knob to toggle between "I'm adjusting COM 1" and "I'm adjusting COM 2" modes.
> A 1965 Cessna has what computer nerds would call a "modeless interface". Each switch and knob does one thing and it is the same thing all the time. This is a very usable interface, but it doesn't scale up very well, as you can see by looking at the panel of a Boeing 707. Both the Avidyne and the G1000 have some modal elements. Knobs and switches do different things at different times. The G1000 is more deeply modal and therefore, I think, will always be harder to use.
> I wouldn't call the Garmin G1000 a paragon of UX design though.
In some ways I would.
I wouldn't call it "intuitive," but once you understand its semantics, it's phenomenally predictable in its behavior. And quite well thought through I think. Here's one of my favorite examples: On the MFD, in an urgent situation, two of the most helpful pages are the "map page," and the "nearest page." These are (unintuitively) the first and last page. Until you realize that that means you can access both without looking which page you're on by spinning the page knob either all the way left or all the way right.
It isn't perfect, but I find it generally well thought through.
I certainly can't argue with the points about transponder and com1/com2 inputs, but within the parameters for the device, I consider the UX for the G1000 to be ... maybe not a paragon in its entirety, but certainly much more thoughtful than what I encounter in other life daily.
I started to have the most minor of flight-or-fight symptoms April 2020. I'm guessing I was exposed to covid then but was asymptomatic. Fast forward to August 2021 and I suddenly couldn't lift weights anymore without feeling like my head lost all oxygen. Like, my body can DO the thing but it will be severely punished for having done so.
I've been lucky that I've never had any of the breathing issues, even after I for sure had covid in December of 2021. But the post-anaerobic activity suffering is the worst. The general neurological damage (brain fog, nerve pain, untriggered anxiety) is the most frustrating bit as no one can seem to find the cause of it using any conventional scanning, at least not with me.
that all reminded me the time when i had anemia (for different than covid reason though), and reading symptoms described by others it all very similar to low oxygenation. I wonder if covid screws with oxygenation machinery - either lung function or in some anemic like way.
>The most common reported symptom of long COVID is fatigue and the overall symptom picture resembles that of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which is often triggered by a viral infection.
There have been studies connecting the chronic fatigue syndrome to the post-viral infection rage of B-cells which may go for months https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/are-b-cells-to-blame... - in this and other similar studies they've used cancer (like methotrexate) and/or immune suppressing drugs to kill the B-cells.
>I wonder if covid screws with oxygenation machinery - either lung function or in some anemic like way.
Covid messes around with the oxygenation machinery in multiple possible ways including botching up the lung ability to restrict blood flow to damaged vessels in the lungs, formation of micro-clots in the blood vessels and severely disrupting the normal air-blood flow ratios.
how long after the exposure did the anaerobic intolerance begin? it takes that long to manifest? had you been lifting the whole time and found it suddenly started happening?
and how soon after lifting weights do the symptoms begin?
Have you tried re conditioning your cardiovascular system with aerobic exercise?
If I'm honest reading your message makes me nervous the same will happen to me. I've been able to do some simple calisthenics without obvious fallout so far.
I remember the text Games Apples Play and typing the code manually in from the pages on that machine in Basic. Some of them were pretty fun. https://archive.org/details/gapa2