I’m evaluating the usability of GitHub merge queues under a set of conditions that makes merge queues hard: pull requests have a high probability of failing CI when merged together despite passing on their own. (Plus, GitHub’s implementation has like 11 different knobs, and the documentation is somewhat limited.)

I could make a bunch of PRs on my own, but that’s boring, and I’m not good at finding edge cases on my own. So I am welcoming you to send PRs of whatever to haha-business/cizzbuzz, a repository whose default branch is guaranteed to have the total number of lines across all files be divisible by 3 or 5, but not both.

I’ve done one batch of merges and have already learned quite a bit, and now have a lot more questions to answer. I’m keeping notes and I’ll turn them into a blog post Soon™.

(If you do send a PR, thanks in advance! Understand that the likelihood of your PR being kicked out of the merge queue is probably about a coin flip; this is by design, but by no means do you need to babysit your PR to rebase it. It might still get merged later on anyway due to anything that lands later!)

(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.)

The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platforms that were never released outside Japan? I thought it’d be worth expanding that answer into a full-size post.

A quick introduction: the players

It’s hard to remember these days, but there there used to be an incredible amount of variety in the computer space. There were a lot of different computer platforms, pretty much all of them totally incompatible with each other. North America settled on the IBM PC/Mac duopoly pretty early¹, but Europe still had plenty of other computers popular well into the 90s, and Japan had its own computers that essentially didn’t exist anywhere else.

So who were they? By the 16-bit computer era, there’s three I’m going to talk about today²: NEC’s PC-98, Fujitsu’s FM Towns, and Sharp’s X68000. The PC-98 was far and away the biggest of those platforms, with the other two having a more niche market.

The PC-98 in a time of transition

First, a quick digression: what is this DOS thing?

The thing about DOS is that it’s a much thinner OS than what we think of in 2024. When you’re writing DOS software of any kind of complexity, you’re talking straight to the hardware, or to drivers that are specific to particular classes of hardware. When we talk about “DOS” in the west, we specifically mean “DOS on IBM compatible PCs”. PC-98 and FM Towns both had DOS-based operating systems, but their hardware was nothing at all like IBM compatible PCs and there was no level of software compatibility between them. The PC-98 was originally a DOS-based computer without a GUI of any kind - just like DOS-based IBM PCs. When we talk about “PC-98” games and software, what we really mean is DOS-based PC-98 software that only runs on that platform.

Windows software is very different from DOS in one important way: Windows incorporates a hardware abstraction layer. Software written for Windows APIs doesn’t need to be specific to particular hardware, and that set the stage for the major transition that was going to come.

NEC and Microsoft teamed up on porting Windows to the PC-98 platform. Both the PC-98 and the IBM PC use the same CPU, even though the rest of their hardware is very different, which made the port technically feasible. The first Windows release for PC-98 came out in 1992, but Windows didn’t really take off in a big way until Windows 95 in the mid-90s. And so, suddenly, for the first time software could run on both IBM PCs running Japanese language Windows and PC-98 running Windows.³ Software developers didn’t have to do anything special to get that compatibility: it happened by default, so long as they were using the standard Windows software features and didn’t talk directly to the hardware.

Around the same time, NEC started making IBM-compatible PCs. As far as I can tell, they made both PC-98s and IBM PCs alongside each other for quite a few years. With Windows software not caring what the underlying hardware was, the distinction between “PC-98” and “PC” got a lot fuzzier. If you were buying a PC, you had no reason to buy a PC-98 unless you wanted to run DOS-based PC-98 software. If you just wanted that shiny new Windows software, why not buy the cheaper IBM PC that NEC would also sell you?

So, for the PC-98, the answer isn’t really that it died - it sort of faded away and merged into what every other system was becoming.

The FM Towns

The FM Towns had a similar transition. While it had a homegrown GUI-based OS called Towns OS, it was relatively primitive compared to Windows 3 and especially Windows 95. The FM Towns also used the same CPU as IBM PCs and the PC-98, which means Microsoft could work with Fujitsu to port their software to the platform. And, just like what happened with the PC-98, the platform became far less relevant and less distinctive when it was just another platform to run Windows software on. If you didn’t care about running the older FM Towns-specific software, why would you care about buying an FM Towns instead of any other IBM PC?

Fujitsu, just like NEC, made the transition to making standard Windows PCs and discontinued the FM Towns a few years later.

The X68000 loses out in the CPU wars

Unlike the other two platforms, the X68000 had a different CPU and a distinct homegrown OS. It used the 68000 series of processors from Motorola, which were incredibly popular in the 80s and 90s. The same CPU was used by the Mac until the mid 90s, the Amiga, and a huge number of home consoles and arcade boards. It was a powerful CPU, but when every other platform was looking for a way to merge with the Windows platform, they had a big problem: you simply couldn’t port Windows to the platform and get it to run regular Windows software because they didn’t use the same CPUs. Sharp were locked out. While they also switched to making Windows PCs in the 90s, they had no way to bring their existing users with them by giving them a transition path.

The lure of multitasking

Why did Windows win out, though? In the west we often credit Microsoft Office as the killer app, but it wasn’t a major player in Japan where Japanese language-specific word processors were huge in the market for years. I’d argue instead that multitasking was the killer feature.

In the DOS era, you ran one program at a time. You might have a lot of software you used, but you’d pick one program to use at a time. If you wanted to switch to something else, you’d have to save whatever you’re doing, quit, and open a completely different full-screen app. While competing platforms like the Mac⁴ had multitasking via their GUIs for years, Windows and especially Windows 3 is what brought it to the wider market.

If you’re going to be using more than one program at the same time, having a wider amount of software that’s inter-compatible becomes more important. I’d argue that multitasking is what nudged market consolidation onto a smaller number of computers. Windows, and especially Windows 95, became very hard for other platforms to compete with because its base of software was just so large. It made far more sense for NEC and Fujitsu to bring Windows to their users even if it meant losing the lock-in that their unique OSs and platform-specific software had gotten them.

Shifts in the gaming market

In the 16-bit era, the FM Towns and X68000 were doing great in the computer gaming niche. They had powerful 2D gaming hardware and a lot of very sophisticated action games. Their original games and ports of arcade games compared extremely well against what 16-bit consoles could do, giving them a reputation of being the real gamers' platforms. By 1994 though, they had a problem: the 32-bit consoles were out, which could do 2D games just as well as the FM Towns and X68000, and the consoles could also do 3D that blew away anything those computers could handle. Fujitsu and Sharp, meanwhile, just weren’t releasing new hardware that could keep up. The PC gaming niche had already been shrinking and moving towards consoles for a few years, and this killed off a lot of what was left.

I also suspect that Sony’s marketing for the PlayStation changed things significantly. Home computers had older players than the 16-bit consoles did, but Sony was marketing the PS1 towards those same older audiences. It probably made it easy for computer players to look at the new consoles and decide to move on.

What about the 8-bit platforms?

Japan had a variety of 8-bit computer platforms, some of which (like the MSX) were also well-known in western countries. While in Europe the 8-bit micros held on right into the 90s, and many users upgraded straight from 8-bit micros to Windows PCs, in Japan the 8-bit computers had already been supplanted by native 16-bit computing platforms before the Windows era. In some cases, these were 16-bit computers by the same manufacturers - both Sharp and NEC had been major players in the 8-bit computing era too. The MSX, meanwhile, had failed to produce either a 16-bit evolution of the platform or a 16-bit successor and so many of its users had already moved on by the time Windows 95 came out.

So, in conclusion

None of the 16-bit Japanese computer makers acutally died off - they just switched to making standard Windows PCs that were interchangeable with anything else out there. Microsoft took over that market just like they did everywhere else in the world, but at least the companies themselves survived better than the Commodores and Ataris of the world.

Gummy worms!

I live in the North. Which is to say, I live in Edmonton, which is technically south of the middle of Alberta, but given how the rest of the population in this country is distruted, most people just say it’s the North. And despite the fact it’s October and they’re still calling for ~23°C next week it’s still gonna get cold this winter (we usually manage a couple weeks of between -30°C and -40°).

So after a few years of suffering with heavy socks and still cold feet, I took a gamble and ordered some boots online and when they arrived today I was surprised they fit! This isn’t an ad, I wasn’t paid/coerced into this, I’m just genuinely surprised the sizing was right on the first try.

What it does mean is aside from Uhauls and saying “I love you” to my partners super quickly, I get to check off Yet Another Lesbian Stereotype: I finally own a pair of Doc Martens. …In the spring I’m gonna get a pair of non-insulated platform boots from them…

🐈‍⬛ and XSLT

2024-10-04T00:00:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀

On the last day one could post on Cohost, I put together a repository with an Atom to HTML stylesheet with folks who were on Cohost in mind.

Since then, I’ve been playing with the idea of why not just post a feed and a stylesheet? So I created a site at https://dr-mae-space-cat.nekoweb.org/ which is just that: an Atom feed and a XSLT stylesheet.

A couple of hacks I had to do:

1. Redirect index.html to feed.xml since Nekoweb expects index.html as the default document.
2. Name the XSLT stylesheet format.xml instead of .xsl because the site editor doesn’t make files with the .xsl extension editable.

The feed is not strict Atom since I’m doing things such as making the links either external (a.k.a linkblog style) or use the feed itself as the link element value in each entry. But it works!

Most syndication feed post content is either summaries, or the post wrapped up in a CDATA section or XML escaped, so I have to write the content of entries as XHTML. See the stylesheet and the feed for details on that.

One could also use the description child of an entry element for microblogging.

Dr. Mae, mentioned above, is our own Dr. Mae Space Cat, who along with her two sisters, we rescued from a park my rocketry club was launching from in Hollister, CA in the spring of 2023. The three were dubbed the Lady Astronauts since they were found at a launch. Mae’s siblings were adopted by friends in the City and sometimes get mentioned in the Our Opinions are Correct podcast.

Nekoweb’s nice. Definitely in the spirit of Neocities, but with more cats. You can create a site for free, and if you chip into the project’s Patreon, you get multiple sites, custom domains, the ability to run JavaScript site generators such as Eleventy, and even Git integration.

So get out there, make an 88x31 icon, and build a site!

Trashboat asked:
I dont really have a question, i just wanna see how this works so i can potentially steal this.

Hey hi! It’s really simple! Sort of.

What the “Ask Me Anything” feature does, really, is just allow someone to fill out a form that then gets sent to me as an email. That’s it! All the reader sees is a nice little set of input boxes and a button.

Because I’m using WordPress, I went looking for some plugins that would let me do this. As it turns out, there were a few, and they’re all free! That’s great for me, because while I loved cohost’s Ask feature, I’m not sure that love was enough to justify piling on yet another monthly charge to my existing bill of damocles.

Here’s what I use:

Check & Log Email

Very straightforward, maybe optional depending on your setup, but not optional for me! This essentially lets me check to see the list of all emails my WordPress blog has sent, or attempted to send. If, like mine, your WordPress blog can’t quite manage to send emails that make it to you, at least you can check them all in a handy list and work from that!

WPForms Lite

All I needed was a customizable form and this delivered IN SPADES. There’s way more functionality here than I need! Thankfully, it’s also very user-friendly, so I was able to quit out of the forced tutorial and just made my question form very quickly. I basically just used a regular “contact by email” form and put in these fields:

• Question (mandatory) so the reader can ask their question,
• Name (optional) so the reader can stay anonymous (the default) or input their name
• Website (also optional) so the reader can link back to their blog—very important!!

My dear friend Nat poked me about adding the website field, which I hadn’t thought about at all, but which made perfect sense in retrospect. This isn’t a social network anymore, people’s usernames aren’t clickable—so we gotta add that back in manually! If someone declines to be anonymous, of course I want folks to be able to click through to see their site. We’re building communities ourselves, so a little elbow grease is necessary.

Oh! One more thing I do (well, two more things) is to set the question-asker’s website link to open in a new tab (so clicking it doesn’t interrupt the post) and mark that link as nofollow (common practice for blog comments so search engines don’t think this link is part of my post)

Write the actual post

All that’s left is for me to do a bit of copy-pasting! Someone asks a question, I get an email that looks like this:

…and I just paste the question in here, set it as a quote field, add the asker’s name, and then make the name a clickable link leading to their website! That’s all there is to it! ^^

Thanks for your question, and for helping me demonstrate how it works for me; hopefully this guide will be helpful for you too! Adding anonymous-optional asks is straightforward enough that it should be easy to reproduce it on your blogs of choice with other means. It’s not as user-friendly for the blog writer—that’s me—because I have a few extra steps, but honestly that’s a price I’m more than willing to pay for a feature I really like. And since we’re now scattered across the web like in days of old, something like this that helps us communicate, stay in touch, and stay interested in each other’s day-to-day, well… that’s really important to me.

Take care, and happy asking! ^^