Windows 10 calculator now has graphing capabilities

Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
I just ran across this and it might interest people.

In the latest version of Windows 10 - if you're up to date - the feature is no longer preview, its now an official capability of the calculator!

1613066508636.png
 

BobaMosfet

Joined Jul 1, 2009
2,110
Not a reason to use the abortion known as Windows10. It is a blight and plague on the computing landscape. It does not even qualify as an Operating System- it's just an App written in VB that blows chunks. Bloatware in the extreme. IMHO
 

Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
Not a reason to use the abortion known as Windows10. It is a blight and plague on the computing landscape. It does not even qualify as an Operating System- it's just an App written in VB that blows chunks. Bloatware in the extreme. IMHO
Wow.

My post was not a suggestion or recommendation about what operating system people should use. But as someone schooled in operating system design and development I must disagree with your characterization of it.
 

SamR

Joined Mar 19, 2019
5,031
To take it a bit farther... Check out Microsoft Mathematica for Win10. Their version of a full-blown mathematics program. I found it as good as several of the online apps I've used in the past and even better it's free.
 

Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
To take it a bit farther... Check out Microsoft Mathematica for Win10. Their version of a full-blown mathematics program. I found it as good as several of the online apps I've used in the past and even better it's free.
You mean Microsoft Mathematics? I thought that was old, discontinued?
 

Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
I would go even further.
Intel/MS/IBM set back the computer revolution about 25 years.
There's some truth to that, I was never impressed with the IBM PC being based on the brain dead 8080 family and then the messed up 80286 and descendants.

Then there was Digital Research and Gary Kildall who in some way did too little to confront Microsoft at that time.

Remember it was Gates who actually recommended IBM speak to KIldall about an the CP/M OS. Kildall should have treated a deal with IBM as if it was winning the lotter, but he did not, Gates did however and somewhat reluctantly agreed to deliver an OS for IBM

Later on CP/M was available for the PC but sold at a stupid price, if it had sold for less than DOS who knows where we'd be today.

But all that is decades before Windows NT (which is what Windows 10 is really) was developed, architected by Dave Cutler the respected OS engineer from DEC who always worked very closely with hardware teams, that was a major shift and you'll note how no company at that time took the commercial risk to invest in a brand new OS design, not even Apple, only Microsoft made such a decision.
 

BobaMosfet

Joined Jul 1, 2009
2,110
There's some truth to that, I was never impressed with the IBM PC being based on the brain dead 8080 family and then the messed up 80286 and descendants.

Then there was Digital Research and Gary Kildall who in some way did too little to confront Microsoft at that time.

Remember it was Gates who actually recommended IBM speak to KIldall about an the CP/M OS. Kildall should have treated a deal with IBM as if it was winning the lotter, but he did not, Gates did however and somewhat reluctantly agreed to deliver an OS for IBM

Later on CP/M was available for the PC but sold at a stupid price, if it had sold for less than DOS who knows where we'd be today.

But all that is decades before Windows NT (which is what Windows 10 is really) was developed, architected by Dave Cutler the respected OS engineer from DEC who always worked very closely with hardware teams, that was a major shift and you'll note how no company at that time took the commercial risk to invest in a brand new OS design, not even Apple, only Microsoft made such a decision.
Gates actually basically stole the deal from Kildall and licensed QDOS so he had something to go to IBM with. Gates is not a techie, not really. He's just a guy at the right time, right place, and a willingness to screw others. He wouldn't have even had a mouse, if he hadn't basically done corporate espionage and gotten a foolish Apple tech to show him how to do it.

Windows 10 is not Windows NT, it is a departure. Windows 7 was basically Windows NT. Windows10 came out console development with the XBOX One, where it was originally designed and then moved to the PC.

There was nothing wrong with the 8080, or the 80x86. I remember well when they came out, and they were far faster then other things around at the time. I was simulating DEC PDP8a/s systems on the 80386 for nuclear reactor robotics simulators at that time (for testing machine operations before conducting same in the reactor)

IMHO

Don't dog intel. It shows a lack of understanding as to what Intel did at levels below the monitor which paved the way for multi-core and hyperthreading, long before anybody even knew what they were doing.
 

Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
Gates actually basically stole the deal from Kildall and licensed QDOS so he had something to go to IBM with. Gates is not a techie, not really. He's just a guy at the right time, right place, and a willingness to screw others. He wouldn't have even had a mouse, if he hadn't basically done corporate espionage and gotten a foolish Apple tech to show him how to do it.

Windows 10 is not Windows NT, it is a departure. Windows 7 was basically Windows NT. Windows10 came out console development with the XBOX One, where it was originally designed and then moved to the PC.

There was nothing wrong with the 8080, or the 80x86. I remember well when they came out, and they were far faster then other things around at the time. I was simulating DEC PDP8a/s systems on the 80386 for nuclear reactor robotics simulators at that time (for testing machine operations before conducting same in the reactor)

IMHO

Don't dog intel. It shows a lack of understanding as to what Intel did at levels below the monitor which paved the way for multi-core and hyperthreading, long before anybody even knew what they were doing.
Well so far as I'm aware Gates does has some decent technical competencies (certainly compared to Jobs!), recall he coded a basic interpreter in 8080 machine code that was tested on an 8080 emulator running on a VAX (written by Paul Allen) and which ran first time on a real 8080 when they demo'd it for Altair over in New Mexico, that's a pretty impressive feat - it ran first time.

As for the mouse, Gates already responded to that years ago, he said that MS tried to steal a GUI from Xerox PARC but when they broke into the labs they were astonished to find that Steve Jobs had beaten them to it, the point being that Jobs stole it from Xerox, singling out Microsoft is inaccurate.

Windows 10 is Windows NT, you can see the full release history here, also if you look at an internals books for Windows 10 and the DDK for Windows 10, it is clear that this is just another release of the same core OS. Memory management, device driver model, scheduler, IO model, threading model - all the same - Win32 code for earlier versions of NT still runs in Win 10.

There were some real problems with the 8086 family, one was the segmented memory stuff, the other was that it was dated technology the Motorola 68000 came out about a year later and was a much cleaner instruction set, much better suited to supporting a real operating system. The x86 instruction set is horrible, I've written compilers for that family and the number of idiosyncrasies it has is mind boggling. Many operations and addressing modes can only be done with this or that register and the inflexibility is huge.

I have nothing bad to say about Intel but they did not know how to design computer CPUs back in the late 70s, Motorola did a much batter job as is evidenced by the fact that no company other than IBM (and clone firms) built machines on an Intel CPU. Silicon Graphics, Stratus, Apple MAC, Amiga, Sinclair, NEXTStep, etc etc etc all reached for the Motorola device over the Intel - this was for architectural reasons whereas IBM's choice of Intel was for political and non-technical reasons, the Intel CPUs were never chosen for technical superiority.
 
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SamR

Joined Mar 19, 2019
5,031
Ooops, yes Mathematics and in 64 bit on Win10.

Not to spin this way far off-track but if Win10 is NT what happened to nutcracker? I ran a lot of process control systems on Venix and Xenix systems that got ported over to NT for a windowed desktop environment by running nutcracker. Which came with NT for running Unix applications under it.
 
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Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
Ooops, yes Mathematics and in 64 bit on Win10.

Not to spin this way far off-track but if Win10 is NT what happened to nutcracker? I ran a lot of process control systems on Venix and Xenix systems that got ported over to NT for a windowed desktop environment by running nutcracker. Which came with NT for running Unix applications under it.
Well I never heard of "nutcracker" - I'll do some reading...
 

Thread Starter

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
OK I read about Nutcracker, seems it was very useful for getting Unix apps (including GUI) to run on Windows NT.

Part of that being feasible is that the designers of NT designed a mechanism they called a "protected subsystem".

That was an abstraction that allowed them to expose different "personalities", make the OS "look like" something or other.

That was done initially to allow old 16 bit Windows apps to run on NT, that's how they provided that compatibility, the protected subsystem interfaced between the legacy app and the underlying 32 bit Windows NT OS. They also used that mechanism to support crude DOS applications, these apps had no "idea" they were not running on a real 16 bit Windows or real DOS machine.

I think they then decided to leverage it for OS/2 and Unix (POSIX) support, the core NT OS was "unaware" of this, it provided a very robust and solid OS upon which this other stuff ran.

This in itself was a huge achievement, enabling DOS, 16 bit Windows, OS/2 and Unix applications to run on a single OS. Today its done with VMs but back then VMs were unknown in the PC world.

Today you can easily install a protected subsystem for running Linux apps on Windows 10, this explains more about what it is.
 
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MaxHeadRoom

Joined Jul 18, 2013
28,619
While on the subject, I could never understand the hack (twist) done on the IBM ribbon cable in order to address the floppy drives, the drives already had 1 of 4 selection built in without the need for the ribbon mangle.
The Heath-Zenith PC operating system did it the way it was intended, without the hack.
Max.
 

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,712
While on the subject, I could never understand the hack (twist) done on the IBM ribbon cable in order to address the floppy drives, the drives already had 1 of 4 selection built in without the need for the ribbon mangle.
The Heath-Zenith PC operating system did it the way it was intended, without the hack.
Max.
Just another crazy example of the hundreds of idiotic things they did on the IBM PC.
 

wayneh

Joined Sep 9, 2010
17,496
Macs have had a graphical calculator since 1994. Back in the Mac-vs-PC days, it was one of my favorite ways to piss off the PC side. They had nothing close. Of course only a few years earlier, printing to a networked laser printer also blew their minds.

Great story about the development of the Grapher here.
 

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,712
When the Mac first came out I implemented an automated sample handling system for making radioactive pharmaceuticals. I used HyperCard years before the PC crowd knew the meaning of the word interactive.
 

BobaMosfet

Joined Jul 1, 2009
2,110
Well so far as I'm aware Gates does has some decent technical competencies (certainly compared to Jobs!), recall he coded a basic interpreter in 8080 machine code that was tested on an 8080 emulator running on a VAX (written by Paul Allen) and which ran first time on a real 8080 when they demo'd it for Altair over in New Mexico, that's a pretty impressive feat - it ran first time.

As for the mouse, Gates already responded to that years ago, he said that MS tried to steal a GUI from Xerox PARC but when they broke into the labs they were astonished to find that Steve Jobs had beaten them to it, the point being that Jobs stole it from Xerox, singling out Microsoft is inaccurate.

Windows 10 is Windows NT, you can see the full release history here, also if you look at an internals books for Windows 10 and the DDK for Windows 10, it is clear that this is just another release of the same core OS. Memory management, device driver model, scheduler, IO model, threading model - all the same - Win32 code for earlier versions of NT still runs in Win 10.

There were some real problems with the 8086 family, one was the segmented memory stuff, the other was that it was dated technology the Motorola 68000 came out about a year later and was a much cleaner instruction set, much better suited to supporting a real operating system. The x86 instruction set is horrible, I've written compilers for that family and the number of idiosyncrasies it has is mind boggling. Many operations and addressing modes can only be done with this or that register and the inflexibility is huge.

I have nothing bad to say about Intel but they did not know how to design computer CPUs back in the late 70s, Motorola did a much batter job as is evidenced by the fact that no company other than IBM (and clone firms) built machines on an Intel CPU. Silicon Graphics, Stratus, Apple MAC, Amiga, Sinclair, NEXTStep, etc etc etc all reached for the Motorola device over the Intel - this was for architectural reasons whereas IBM's choice of Intel was for political and non-technical reasons, the Intel CPUs were never chosen for technical superiority.
Intel was CISC at the time, Motorola was RISC. Different architectures for different reasons. Both worked well, and paged memory has been done on both architectures heavily in the beginning. As for why many makers preferred Motorola- it isn't what you think. They chose Motorola because RISC architectures have many, many more registers- made programming far easier.

It is widely know that concept of the windowed GUI was developed originally by Xerox. Not disputing that. I was speaking specifically about where Bill gates acquired knowledge about how the mouse worked. Jobs didn't copy what Xerox did, he took it much, much farther. Nor did Jobs copy the mouse form Xerox (which they didn't come up with, they borrowed the idea from Douglas Englebart)- what they had was clumsy & fragile- Apple came up with the first real mouse.

If you want to know the truth--- look here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...use Xerox never,side of the university campus.
 

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,712
I attended a seminar on SmallTalk by Adele Goldberg from Xerox PARC back in the early 80's before the IBM PC and Apple Mac saw the light of day. I was blown away with the concept of the mouse, icons, and interactive graphics. I went straight back to our lab and implemented a CAD system for drawing schematics and PCB layouts. This was created on a Data General Nova 16-bit minicomputer running 32k words of memory. The entire program was written in assembly language.
 
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