[HN Gopher] The story of X-Copy on the Amiga
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       The story of X-Copy on the Amiga
        
       Author : onename
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2025-10-11 21:35 UTC (7 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (spillhistorie.no)
 (TXT) w3m dump (spillhistorie.no)
        
       | kwanbix wrote:
       | The Amiga was so, so cool. So sad it couldn't keep up.
        
         | peterashford wrote:
         | Yup. Literally the only tech that I have genuine nostalgia for.
         | I really miss it and the community
        
       | johngossman wrote:
       | An interesting feature of getting old is when you see something
       | you haven't in 30+ years and it suddenly snaps into focus. X-Copy
       | was invaluable.
        
         | mrsaint wrote:
         | I had the same feeling when I read the interview along with the
         | attached screenshots. A nice way to start a Sunday morning.
        
       | spankibalt wrote:
       | Albeit it sort of worked for the kidlets on their lo-rez screens,
       | demoscene- and/or game-style visual aesthetics were (and often
       | still are) a bad choice for good application UI design. But
       | that's of course mostly just preference talking.
        
         | squarefoot wrote:
         | Back then (no Internet for most and scarce documentation)
         | learning proper coding wasn't easy; I recall when a good number
         | of games, demos and some utilities too stopped working because
         | programmers ignored or simply didn't know the guidelines (RKM
         | books were costly for demoscene kids) and used address
         | registers to store data. The plain 68000 CPU had internal 32
         | bit address registers, but physical address bus was 24 bit
         | only, so one could use the most significant 8 bits to store
         | data that wouldn't affect at all the working on a 24 bit bus,
         | but when CPUs with full physical addressing came out, any
         | program using that trick would point to other locations than
         | those intended and thus would fail.
        
           | IcePic wrote:
           | Even AmigaBasic (by Microsoft) did this, so it also broke on
           | 68020+.
        
           | burnt-resistor wrote:
           | In the 80's and 90's, I learned on the evil cousin, the PC,
           | by spending all of my money on overpriced hardware reference
           | books at Computer Literacy Bookshop of Santa Clara. Being a
           | broke, car-less high school student, it was perhaps the only
           | time I ever used VTA light rail from Blossom Valley.
           | 
           | Examples:
           | 
           | - The Programmer's PC Sourcebook 155615321X
           | 
           | - The Undocumented PC 0201622777
           | 
           | - PC Intern: The Encyclopedia of System Programming
           | 1557553041
           | 
           | Coupled with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, until I could afford
           | Borland C++ 3.1 by virtue of getting a job at Egghead
           | Software. :D "Stack Overflow" was the 4 other people in the
           | under-resourced, purposefully (un)managed high school
           | computer lab run by the wisdom of one Dr. Richard Thaw. It
           | had awful PS/2 model 25's and 30's that were an upgrade from
           | discarded PCjr's. It did, however, have 10BASE2 thin-net and
           | a nominal Novell 2.x or 3.x file server.
        
         | immibis wrote:
         | One thing to remember is that these pixels looked a lot
         | different when rendered on a typical CRT of the time.
        
       | gforce_de wrote:
       | Is this sentence true, or should just sound important?
       | 
       | "Cachet created the word <<usability>> for that, meaning <<start
       | it and be able to use it right away.>>"
        
         | yzydserd wrote:
         | Sadly, it isn't strictly true. maybe the article should have
         | said "applied" not "created".
         | 
         | Even the wikipedia page for "Usability" points to a 1982 BYTE
         | article advocating "Usable" for software tools.
         | 
         | The existing word "usability" was being applied in human
         | computer interface texts/papers around the time (1987, 1988) as
         | computer UIs made advances.
         | 
         | The best summary of history I could find was in this article
         | (section 5.1), claiming the first usage was in 1971, or 1979,
         | or perhaps 1981, depending on interpretation.
         | 
         | https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-journal-applied-research-...
         | 
         | If you want a single example it is untrue, a good example is
         | "IBM makes usability as important as functionality" from 1986.
         | I found a copy online but hate deeplinking to such things.
         | 
         | It's possible that Cachet was unaware of all that academia and
         | independently "created" the term.
         | 
         | Of course the actual word is much, much older in the world of
         | meatspace.
         | 
         | I was using xcopy at the time as a kid and still play with a
         | physical Amiga. Nostalgia.
        
       | pjmlp wrote:
       | Ah, the famous tool everyone used to share their "acquisitions"
       | back in Portugal.
       | 
       | Back in the 1980's even regular computer stores used to sell
       | pirated software.
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-18 23:02 UTC)