The Newton laid the groundwork for the I-devices.

"Look," says Jane. "I'm a computer program. Run, computer program, run." Commodore 128DCR is the best 8-bit computer Commodore ever made: built-in 1571 disk drive, burst mode serial, detachable keyboard, 2MHz operation, separate 40 and 80 column video, CP/M option, a powerful native mode, full Commodore 64 compatibility and no external power brick. But when the O.G. "flat" 128 was coming to market in 1985 Commodore really wanted it to be the business computer the 64 wasn't (and prior efforts like Magic Desk and Plus/4 3+1 didn't help). Unfortunately for Commodore, it would still be at least a year before the sophisticated GUI of Berkeley Softworks' GEOS arrived on the 64 and another year after that for the native 128 version, so to jump-start the productivity side, the management in West Chester contracted with a small Michigan company to port their Apple II software suite to the new machine — which Commodore then sold under their own name. That company was Arktronics, led by Howard Marks and Bobby Kotick — the very same names later at Activision — and the software package was Jane. I never used Jane myself back in the day, or for that matter any 128 native word processor, and even when we got a 128 I still wrote my term papers in Pocket Writer 64 or Timeworks Word Writer. However, that faulty but repairable Australian Commodore 128DCR I got last Christmas came with a big box of software and in there was a complete copy of Jane 128 along with the data disk the previous owners' family had used. They were delighted when I said I wanted to take a whack at converting their files as a thank you — and along the way we'll take a look at Jane's oddball history, the original Apple II version, the Commodore 128 version and its all-but-unknown port to the French Thomson MO5, plus those other attempts at productivity applications Commodore tried in the mid-1980s. PETs, of course, had many productivity software options and even the VIC-20, if suitably upgraded, could manage basic tasks. Some small businesses reportedly even used them for simple finances. The 64 itself was hardly an ideal productivity machine when introduced in 1982, but it was certainly far more up to the task than the VIC-20 was and many such software packages were naturally available later on. Initially, however, dealers and customers openly groused about the absence of a spreadsheet or even a word processor, much to Commodore chief Jack Tramiel's profound displeasure. The task of rectifying this situation was handed to executive Sigmund Hartmann and his recently consolidated Commodore Software division, formed in April 1983 from the prior two separate software units handling system software (under Paul Goheen) and games (under Bill Wade). At least one side project would become critical to the reworked division. Engineer John Feagans had been the initial developer of the PET Kernal, its internal ROM-based operating system, which pioneered the then-novel idea of separating I/O and other system routines from the built-in Microsoft BASIC. (Prior versions of BASIC on early microcomputers often simply drove devices directly.) Feagans' innovation facilitated the use of these routines by user-written machine language programs through a standardized jump table, which was reused and greatly expanded by Bob Russell for the VIC-20 and 64. Feagans' side project was a PET demonstration of a small picture-based file manager, using an office filing cabinet as its central metaphor and drawn with PETSCII graphic characters. In 1982 the Commodore office in Moorpark, California where Feagans worked was closed and he was reassigned to their then-executive offices in Santa Clara. With little else to do at the time, Feagans rewrote his file cabinet demo for the new 64 to get familiar with the hardware, primarily in BASIC. As an exploration of the 64's joystick and moveable sprite capabilities, he additionally implemented an animated "hand" controlled by the joystick that served as a pointer. By this time Hartmann had just weeks until Summer CES in June 1983, the deadline he had promised Tramiel. While working on licensing deals with outside firms, Hartmann also ordered Andy Finkel, promoted from the VIC team to technical manager, to find anything the software division was already working on that could get finished fast. Finkel saw Feagans' new demo and convinced Hartmann that it was both feasible and viable as a product. COMPUTE!'s Gazette. RUN found the hand pointer difficult to manipulate and complained "the Help screens [were] little or no help," and Ahoy! noted the file cabinet required a disk drive and the questionable use of RELative files for storage, slowing access and hampering interchange. Reviewers also were quick to notice the icons for later planned Magic Desk modules, nevertheless already on the desktop yet programmed to do absolutely nothing. But the most unanimous and direct criticism came for what few built-in applications there were, especially the centrepiece typewriter which was seen as limited and idiosyncratic — and moreso given Magic Desk initially sold for $71.95 (in 2025 dollars over $230) at a time when other, better and often cheaper options had since become available, including from Commodore themselves. InfoWorld was the harshest of its detractors, concluding, "We really question whether Commodore's approach with Magic Desk is the best way to develop 'people literacy.'" Part of this cost was the expense of manufacture. Magic Desk initially came as 32K of ROM in four 8K chips, quite possibly the largest cartridge developed for the 64 at that time and requiring additional logic on the PCB for bank switching. (Its design is still used to this day for large multicarts, now supporting as much as a megabyte of ROM.) Internally, although some code had been converted to machine language using a custom compiler, there wasn't enough time to do it all and a fair portion of Magic Desk thus remained written in BASIC (moved up to start at $0a01 instead of $0801). As part of initialization this BASIC program is read out of the ROMs and copied to RAM for execution, which is the slight pause at the beginning before the title screen appears. Despite the cool press reception, Magic Desk sold surprisingly well to new 64 users, and in numbers sufficient to solve its production problems such that its price dropped in half by late 1984. Sales were enough to propose an upgraded version called Magic Desk II for Commodore's new (and, ultimately to its detriment, incompatible) 264 series, capable of speech prompts when paired with the speech group's Magic Voice synthesizer hardware, and featuring a more sophisticated interface with "Lisa-like" pulldown menus and icons. The Home Computer Wars, that "home computers would have the power of small business computers like IBM and Apple — but would be priced like home computers, perhaps as low as under $500." Smaller versions of the 264, with their much lower part counts, could even compete in the ultra-low market segment against systems like the ZX series in the UK. As Hartmann, Tomczyk and others in the software group felt the 264 would be most meaningful with built-in software, Magic Desk II became one of several possible option ROMs representing potential machine configurations, along with others featuring different programming languages or applications like a spreadsheet or terminal program. Tramiel embraced the idea, seeing it as a car with different models "just like General Motors." At least three "flavours," aligning with the internal groups in the software division (business, home and education), were envisioned — though the concept also met swift resistance from dealers and even Commodore's own sales team who protested having to handle multiple different versions of one computer. (One possible unspoken reason is that it was already known not to be 64 compatible, and dealers were undoubtedly unhappy about taking stock space away from a financial anchor.) Trilogy was to be a combination of three existing Tri Micro programs, Your Home Office (word processor and spreadsheet) and The Write File (word processor and database) merged into a single application, and Plus Graph (charting) — what would have been called "integrated software" in those days. Commodore contracted with David Johnson, its developer and Tri Micro's VP of software engineering, to also port it to the 264. In January 1984 Jack Tramiel was forced out of the company he founded by chairman Irving Gould and shortly thereafter the 264 line was slashed by new CEO Marshall Smith. Three models were chosen from the various prototypes and experiments, the 16K 16 (and in Europe the 116 as well) to serve as the low-end, and the 64K 264, now renamed the Plus/4, as the high-end. Both the completed Magic Desk and Magic Desk II were cut, as was the education flavour based on a built-in Logo implementation. Only the Plus/4 would offer Trilogy, renamed to 3-Plus-1, and its ROM size was cut to 32K to reduce production costs further which in turn forced Johnson to make serious reductions in functionality. As a result 3-Plus-1 became nearly as maligned as the Plus/4 itself (mocked in the press as the "Minus/60" for its idiosyncrasies, deliberately incompatible ports and lack of 64 software compatibility), though yours truly actually used the spreadsheet for a household budget when I was a starving student, and it wasn't that bad. RUN called it "a high-performance program that Commodore users will discover to be one of the best available"). Johnson later got his chance to show what 3+1 was really capable of with Plus/Extra, a full disk version sold by Tri Micro, but it lacked the close integration of both Team-Mate and 3+1 and ended up tainted in the market by its predecessor. Commodore never adopted it. The failure of the Plus/4 to succeed the 64, much less overtake it, demonstrated clearly to Commodore management that 64 compatibility was essential in their next computer. Around this same time Sig Hartmann had noted the success of Atari's own first-party software unit Atarisoft on non-Atari platforms (though AtariLab was developed externally), even for the 64, and said there were similar plans to port Commodore first-party software and licenses to the Apple II, IBM PC and PCjr. (NARRATOR: This didn't happen.) However, by mid-1984 the software division had also developed a reputation for poor quality, with Scott Mace commenting in InfoWorld that — hits like International Soccer notwithstanding — "so far, the normal standard for Commodore software is mediocrity." In the meantime, Tramiel had bought the ailing Atari from Warner Communications and lured several Commodore managers, including Hartmann (who was already in conflict with Smith over cuts to the software division), to defect. Paul Goheen, the former systems software group head, became the new software chief. As the Commodore 128 neared completion, management constructed a new sales strategy to put it head to head against the Apple IIc and PCjr in specialty stores as well as Tramiel's favoured mass market retailers. To more plausibly bill it as a productivity machine, once again the software division had to look outside the company. Dick and Jane introductory reading books, who accepted shares in the company in lieu of salary. To fund development by their team of about thirty, Kotick tagged along with a friend to the annual Cattle Baron's Ball in Dallas at which he met real estate and casino investor Steve Wynn. Kotick managed to hitch a ride back to the East Coast on Wynn's plane where he pitched him on their company and Wynn encouraged him to write up a business plan. Three months later Marks and Kotick were summoned to Wynn's offices in Manhattan and flown to Atlantic City, whereupon Wynn handed them a cheque for $300,000 (in 2025 approximately $970,000) in exchange for a third of the company, providing business advice as the product progressed. its own single-button mouse (Instagram link), a lower-cost unit — Kotick admitted settling for "a lesser quality product" — manufactured under contract by joystick maker Wico and incompatible with Apple's own later mouse options. This mouse interfaced to the Apple with a custom card and an 8-pin connector. a piece on Arktronics in 1984 (the photo above of Marks and an open Apple II case is from this clip) and, along with pictures of the Arktronics offices which I've scattered throughout this article, had some screenshots that illustrate its capabilities. Here a document is being edited in Janewrite. You can see close, scroll and size gadgets in the window frame, but interestingly the control to maximize the current window is in the lower right. The top of the screen shows the editing tools (hand pointer, arrow, scissors [cut], camera [copy] and paste jar), icons for the three core apps, and then system-wide icons for on-line help, printing, the file manager, preferences and "STOP" to globally cancel an operation. Across the bottom, beside the window maximize gadget, are tools for adjusting line justification, font style (bold, underline, bold and underline, superscript, subscript), print settings and search. I'll have more to say about all of these when we get to Jane's Commodore port. InfoWorld called it "innovative" but also observed that "overbearing use of icons, some slow features, and some awkwardness mar the product, which could benefit from an emphasis on efficiency rather than gimmickry." Down under, Your Computer in November 1984 liked the simple interface and believed it would appeal to undemanding users but criticized the 236-page manual and found the mouse unreliable. "When the mouse works properly, it is good," wrote reviewer Evan McHugh, but "when it doesn't it's the pits." Likewise, although A+'s 1985 review also liked the interface and the fact that multiple windows from each module could be open at once, the magazine also felt that "the individual modules in Jane are not up to professional productivity quality." Perhaps because of the software display, Janewrite "was too slow to respond to the keystrokes of a moderately proficient typist," and Janecalc, equally slow, was also panned as "crippled" because it only supported a 24x20 maximum spreadsheet. "Thank you, Jane," quipped reviewer Danny Goodman, "[l]eave your number at the door." COMPUTE!'s Gazette in January 1985 said it was "scheduled to be released for the Commodore 64 by the time you read this. The price is expected to be about $80 [$240]." Interviewed for the article, Marks said that Jane for the 64 was to come as a combination cartridge and disk package, where a "32K plug-in cartridge" would quickly and automatically bring up the system. The article claimed the cartridge would autoboot the applications from (now) just a single floppy plus the data disk, though I suspect the actual configuration was that the cartridge contained the applications and the disk contained the online tutorial, simultaneously furnishing a modicum of both instant access and copy protection. Notably, this version didn't come with its own mouse; Marks said they were working to support third-party mice as well as joystick and "touch pad" (presumably KoalaPad) options instead. Accounting for publishing delays, the Gazette piece would have been written several months prior in the fall of 1984 — after advertisements for the C64 version of Jane had been in multiple periodicals such as Creative Computing and Family Computing claiming you could purchase it already. BOOT command wouldn't be able to start CP/M. Interestingly, 1581s booting CP/M have a special startup file to keep their own CP/M boot sector in a different location.) JANEGM. Sadly, I didn't see any obvious credits while scanning through the disk files. The manual, which appears to have been written by a third party, insists on camelcasing the apps as JaneWrite, JaneCalc and JaneList even though the rear box copy doesn't distinguish them that way and the Apple II version and Arktronics' own advertising called them Janewrite, Janecalc and Janelist. I'll use the latter here. though Commodore didn't announce MSRPs then for any of them at the time. It eventually emerged later that year for $49.95 [$150]; by the next year some retailers were selling it for as low as $35 [$100], compared to each of the Perfect titles then going for $45 apiece [$130]. Plus, the Perfect titles, being CP/M-based, were bland and text-based and failed to show off the C128's graphics, so Commodore ended up emphasizing Jane more in its contemporary marketing. head-initial language, while most modern GUIs are head-final.) Next to the tools are the main apps, Janewrite (now in purple), Janecalc (in green) and Janelist (in cyan), and next to them in grey are the same standard applets built into the kernel (online help, print dialogue, disk/file manager and setup). Finally, the STOP icon, now a solid red, stops the current app, and can be used to escape some screens, though not all. Unexpectedly it doesn't serve to quit Jane entirely: you just turn the computer off. Jane remembers what app is loaded and doesn't reload the overlay if you exit and re-enter it. However, unlike Jane for the Apple II, Jane 128 does not allow you to have multiple documents open simultaneously, a limitation that challenges the definition of "integrated software." In fact, of the three official Commodore productivity packages we've looked at so far, only poor abused 3-Plus-1 could do so. If you're working in one app and select another, Jane 128 will prompt you to save your work as if you'd clicked STOP, and the window will close. Given that the Apple II version managed to implement multiple documents in 64K of RAM, the Commodore 64 version — let alone the 128 — would seem to have little excuse, though I can think of two potential explanations. One is to increase the amount of memory available for any one document, which the Apple II version was indeed criticized for. The second is particular to the 128: its default memory configuration doesn't have a lot of free RAM, and it may have been judged too complicated to span or swap working sets across banks. (Some fiddling in the monitor shows that the documents simply occupy RAM in bank 1 and don't span elsewhere.) On the other hand, other 128 applications certainly do manage it, and it's possible development deadlines were a contributing factor. Let's start out with the online help, one of Marks and Kotick's fundamental design goals. Assuming you got the joystick (or 1350) plugged into the right port, there's a big honking question mark. What happens when you click on it? .d71 with the full available space, not a .d64, as it will then expect it can format both sides of the virtual disk. However, all of the Jane original disks, including the black one, are formatted single-sided for the 1541 since many early 128 owners would still be using one. then the action will cause an immediate copy to occur before you get the chance to click anything else. I don't think this was just me: there were several spurious duplicate files on the original black data disk I suspect for the same reason. If files are present on the disk, they will appear with their names and a filetype letter (W, C or L for Janewrite, Janecalc or Janelist respectively). Notice the slightly misshapen scrolling arrows, which were nice and clean on the Apple. .d71 to Jane here. Convergent WorkSlate). They can be selected with the pointer in lieu of text entry, which makes them quite discoverable, but in practice it's simply faster to type them. No other functions are implemented. Since the content window cannot be resized, the maximize gadget from the Apple II version became obviously useless and was removed. must select the cell to type in it. avg). The template includes this at the bottom, but this shows you how formula entry worked. those people (vinyl is for art, CD is for listening). Atom Heart Mother is Pink Floyd's finest album and I will tolerate no disagreement. undoes any query. You can query on top of queries for a primitive sort of logical-AND. Partial word searches are supported. Abbey Road. and underlined, superscript, and subscript are all possible. The bottom shows left, right, centre and full justification options, done per line, plus the font options, and then search (this time with a magnifying glass) and page layout. These icons are larger and more detailed than the Apple's. As with other parts of the UI, text attributes are set verb-initial, i.e., you would choose the desired style, then the insertion tool, then highlight the range of text and finally release the button (or, annoyingly, wait, which makes fine adjustments harder than they should be). Notice that there is an explicit bold-and-underline option, instead of using the separate bold and underline options in combination: that's because you can't make superscripted or subscripted text bold or underlined. The top of the content area shows the ruler — in characters, not inches — and margin stops and the single paragraph indent stop, which you can drag to change them. Interestingly, the ruler seems to be new for Jane 128: no screenshot for the Apple II version demonstrates one. BUILDPRT on the grey disk allows you to populate it with your printer's control codes. Control sequences up to three characters long were supported. You would enter these from the manual, it would save them to disk, and then you could use the custom driver inside Jane. The topmost options affect the appearance of Jane. You can choose from three font sizes, all non-proportional, corresponding to 40, 64 or 80 column text. Confusingly, the 80-column option is the last when it's the middle option for printing. (The Apple II version likely didn't support 80 column text due to its smaller hi-res horizontal width.) Pointer speed and the "beep" Jane makes when you select options are also configurable. any character, even punctuation. However, the use of the up arrow to indicate a circumflex means there's no way you can type a literal caret into your document, and while a macron would have been nice, omitting the umlaut seems a greater fault. The decorators are also rather hard to distinguish in 80 columns, so Spanish users of Juana 128 might want to go to cuarenta column mode to mirar mejor. prove they aren't shortly.) While Janewrite will word-wrap at the right margin, inserting text after that will wrap onto a new line, not into the next line, even if the two lines were previously entered "together." There's a speed/flexibility tradeoff here in that Janewrite doesn't have to continuously reflow paragraphs, but it also means its concept of a paragraph is entirely based on how much you select. The text can be manually reflowed, joining lines if necessary, by picking one of the paragraph justification options and selecting the text with the hand, which will then be reflowed (and, if needed, spaces inserted) to match. In fact, this is also necessary if you change the margins because Jane doesn't automatically reformat your document then either. .d71 with VICE's c1541 utility and hexdump it. This got a little more difficult than it should have been: dir 0 "data#000 " 01 2a 39 "c.TESTCALC" prg 3 "l.TESTLIST" prg 4 "w.nOTE.2" prg 4 "w.TESTCONV" prg 1278 blocks free. c1541 #8> read "w.TESTCONV" ERR = 62, FILE NOT FOUND, 00, 00 cannot read `w.TESTCONV' on unit 8 invalid filename c1541's filename conversion fails. Fortunately, the extract command will walk the entire directory and pull out all the files no matter what they're named. The documents are all regular Commodore PRoGram files with a starting address and they appear to be loaded in-place at that address into bank 1. This introduces the possibility of some delightful save-file hacks but we're not here for that today. That means we can also simply extract our previous owners' files en masse as well. I imaged their disk using my ZoomFloppy and external 1571, and since they are normal PRGs, a BAM copy of the allocated sectors is all we need to do, with one wrinkle: extract c1541 #8> quit 000003a0 00 00 00 00 00 20 20 20 4a 61 6e 75 61 72 79 20 |..... January | 000003b0 20 46 65 62 72 75 61 72 79 20 20 20 20 20 4d 61 | February Ma| 000003c0 72 63 68 20 20 20 20 20 41 70 72 69 6c 20 20 20 |rch April | 000003d0 20 20 20 20 4d 61 79 20 20 20 20 20 20 4a 75 6e | May Jun| 000003e0 65 20 20 20 20 20 20 4a 75 6c 79 20 20 20 20 41 |e July A| 000003f0 75 67 75 73 74 20 53 65 70 74 65 6d 62 65 72 20 |ugust September | 00000400 20 20 4f 63 74 6f 62 65 72 20 20 4e 6f 76 65 6d | October Novem| 00000410 62 65 72 20 20 44 65 63 65 6d 62 65 72 00 00 01 |ber December...| 00000420 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 20 20 54 6f 74 61 6c 20 20 |....... Total | 00000430 20 41 76 65 72 61 67 65 20 20 20 00 00 01 04 00 | Average .....| % hexdump -C l.TESTLIST 00000000 00 7f 01 00 36 02 08 00 04 00 54 69 74 6c 65 20 |....6.....Title | 00000010 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 4c 65 61 64 20 41 72 74 69 | .Lead Arti| 00000020 73 74 20 00 4f 74 68 65 72 20 41 72 74 69 73 74 |st .Other Artist| 00000030 00 43 6f 6d 70 6f 73 65 72 20 20 20 20 00 43 6f |.Composer .Co| 00000040 6e 64 75 63 74 6f 72 20 20 20 00 57 68 65 72 65 |nductor .Where| 00000050 20 4b 65 70 74 20 20 00 42 6f 72 72 6f 77 65 64 | Kept .Borrowed| 00000060 20 62 79 20 00 44 61 74 65 20 4c 65 6e 74 20 20 | by .Date Lent | 00000070 20 00 00 00 ff ff 01 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff | ...............| 00000080 ff ff ff ff ff 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 00 01 02 |................| 00000090 03 04 05 06 07 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff 00 |................| 000000a0 00 54 68 65 20 42 65 61 74 6c 65 73 00 00 00 00 |.The Beatles....| 000000b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00000100 d7 09 80 60 60 ac 98 09 ae 04 cf a5 ea a9 d7 15 |...``...........| 00000110 80 ac 1d 21 d6 1c 80 60 60 ac 98 09 ae 04 cf 20 |...!...``...... | 00000120 75 0b 00 00 ac 0a 95 a5 f0 b0 a9 a6 b1 a9 a4 b1 |u...............| 00000130 a5 f1 b0 a9 a7 b1 a9 a5 b1 ac c0 08 cf 20 75 0b |............. u.| 00000140 fe ff a5 37 ae 8c ff 00 c0 d8 4b 80 cf a5 f0 b0 |...7......K.....| 00000150 a7 a6 b1 c0 d8 60 80 a5 f1 b0 a7 a7 b1 c0 d8 60 |.....`.........`| 00000160 80 cf a5 f0 b0 a7 a6 b1 00 00 09 00 01 5d f6 00 |.............]..| 00000170 00 00 00 09 00 09 00 01 66 f6 00 00 00 00 54 00 |........f.....T.| 00000180 50 00 01 b1 f6 69 64 65 20 12 00 42 00 01 6f f6 |P....ide ..B..o.| 00000190 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001a0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 52 65 76 6f 6c 76 65 72 00 |.......Revolver.| 000001b0 54 68 65 20 42 65 61 74 6c 65 73 00 00 4c 65 6e |The Beatles..Len| 000001c0 6e 6f 6e 2d 4d 63 43 61 72 74 6e 65 79 2d 48 61 |non-McCartney-Ha| 000001d0 72 72 69 73 6f 6e 00 47 65 6f 72 67 65 20 4d 61 |rrison.George Ma| 000001e0 72 74 69 6e 00 00 00 00 00 41 74 6f 6d 20 48 65 |rtin.....Atom He| 000001f0 61 72 74 20 4d 6f 74 68 65 72 00 50 69 6e 6b 20 |art Mother.Pink | 00000200 46 6c 6f 79 64 00 00 57 61 74 65 72 73 2d 47 69 |Floyd..Waters-Gi| 00000210 6c 6d 6f 75 72 2d 4d 61 73 6f 6e 2d 57 72 69 67 |lmour-Mason-Wrig| 00000220 68 74 2d 47 65 65 73 6f 6e 00 50 69 6e 6b 20 46 |ht-Geeson.Pink F| 00000230 6c 6f 79 64 00 00 00 00 |loyd....| 00000238 strings for their one cardlist with one single record. Other things I can pick out are the file length minus the starting address at byte offset 4 (as a little-endian unsigned 16-bit quantity), and the value at byte offset 6 might be the number of fields, though we don't need either of those to simply grab the data. Now for the Janewrite files, starting with our test document which should contain every sort of text ornamentation that Janewrite can represent. The first section looks like this. Skipping the start address (this is indeed its location in bank 1), we again see some pieces of what looks like a buffer, as well as the file length (again minus the starting address) at byte offset 14. The left margin is (probably) at byte offset 6 because the right margin is at byte offset 8 (also a 16-bit LE short), followed by the paragraph indent. After this header, we now get the text, shown here in its entirety. Most of the document again can be trivially understood as null-delimited strings. Notice that no single line ever exceeds 80 columns in length: as we demonstrated above, there are no Dana paragraphs, only Zuul lines. There are also various meta-sequences for the formatting. We can pick out the easy ones right away: $90 turns on and off underlining (interesting that Jane automatically skips spaces, much as would be the convention on a typewriter), $88 bold, $98 bold and underlined, $a0 superscript and $c0 subscript. For justification, we can infer that a line starting with $ff indicates different formatting for that line. A superficial guess would suppose the next character sets the justification type, e.g. $58 right, $24 centre, and $0a full justification (left justification is the default and implied). However, looking at some of the family's files, there were other values here, many of which were close to those numbers but many that were also rather disparate, and none that exceeded $8c (140). Eventually it became clear that all it indicates is the number of leading spaces divided by two, or more generally stated, all levels of justification are simply baked into the document and pre-calculated with spaces. This is entirely consistent with the lack of automatic reflow we saw while in Janewrite. Accents are also a little odd. If we take the last four words with single accents, then the ornamented letter would seem surrounded by the metacharacter: $81 $63 $81 for ñ (CTRL-@), $82 $6f $82 for ô (^), $83 $65 $83 for é (CTRL-;) and $84 $65 ($84) for è (CTRL-*), though since it occurs at the end of the line it would be cancelled anyway. An experiment I did showed that this is true for multiple characters as well, as long as they're all the same diacritic. So far so good, but the strange part is alternating between multiple accented characters back to back with different accents. Our letter sequences are unaccented, circumflex, grave, acute and tilde, yet the metacharacters seem to change between the $82s, after which we drop down to $81 following the final character which sounds like the delimiter itself changed too. This is the same pattern for each of the other multibyte clusters in this example. I did a test document with "ãâáàa" (i.e., ascending metacharacters $81 $82 $83 $84) and got $81 $61 $83 $61 $81 $61 $87 $61 $84 $61, while "àáâãa" (descending $84 $83 $82 $81) is rendered $84 $61 $87 $61 $81 $61 $83 $61 $81 $61, "áàãâa" (i.e., $83 $84 $81 $82) is rendered $83 $61 $87 $61 $85 $61 $83 $61 $82 $61, and "àâáãa" (i.e., $84 $82 $83 $81) comes out $84 $61 $86 $61 $81 $61 $82 $61 $81 $61. A couple of Pibb Xtras later, I finally realized what it was doing: it's exclusive-ORing the low nybble of adjacent metacharacters together so that it recognizes them as continuations (or, if the sequence is over, zero). Because of the specific values used, they won't generate any other valid metacharacter. To encode $81 $82 $83 $84, 1 is XORed with 2 and the high bit restored to yield $83, 2 is XORed with 3 to yield $81, 3 is XORed with 4 to yield $87 and then $84 is the expected terminal delimiter. To decode the resulting $81 $83 $81 $87 $84, $81 is used as the initial delimiter, then 1 is XORed with 3 to yield $82, then this is used as the next low nybble XORed with 1 to yield $83, then 3 is XORed with 7 to yield $84, and then 4 XOR 4 is 0, ending the sequence. This is a little complex to model and I didn't need it to convert the family files, so I went with this small Perl script which converted them to RTF, preserving boldface, underline, superscripting and subscripting, and the leading indent. It was also an excuse to learn how to write RTF documents from scratch, though please don't consider its output to be particularly good RTF. I relentlessly tested the output against TextEdit, NeoOffice, LibreOffice and Microsoft Word on the Mac, and Word on my office PC, and concluded there was no good way to make them all happy. Since Janewrite is strictly non-proportional and character-oriented, the resulting document has to be monospace and spaces must be fixed-width to preserve the original formatting. TextEdit was the most flexible about this, accepted nearly anything, and rendered it as expected. Word, however, thought it was smarter than my carefully crafted output and changed the width of spaces even with an explicitly monospace font such that things failed to line up. The solution was to make it use a non-blocking space, which TextEdit also serenely accepts (though it wanted an explicit delimiter, not just a space character), but which shows up as a block character in NeoOffice and LibreOffice. I gave up at that point and declared it good enough. Change the above if you disagree. Maybe I should have done this in HTML because everything renders HTML the same, right? (Right??) A residual problem is that superscript and subscript in Word, NeoOffice and LibreOffice also reduce the font size, which is not consistent with Jane and also messes up alignment, and there didn't seem to be a way to manually specify the vertical baseline in RTF but keep the same font size to get around that. Once again, only TextEdit's output properly resembles Janewrite's. This is another exercise left for the reader since I didn't need that to convert their documents either. With our task complete, let's finish the story of Jane. The Atari 8-bit and IBM PC ports likewise never materialized, but Jane was ultimately ported to one more — and, outside its home country of France, rather obscure — system: the 1985 Thomson MO5, manufactured by French electronics company Thomson SA (now Vantiva SA), which had recently been nationalized out of Thomson-Brandt and Thomson-CSF by French president François Mitterand in 1982. Plan Informatique pour Tous ("Computing for All") to introduce computers to French pupils and support domestic industry. It was sold against, and intended to compete directly with, the ZX Spectrum — particularly as initially sold with a Chiclet-style keyboard — and the Commodore 64. These screenshots were taken with the DCMOTO emulator. does come as a cartridge-floppy combination, and thus requires the optional CD 90-351 or CQ 90-028 floppy disk interface (only tape is supported by the base unit). Although the cartridge is a whopping 64K in size, MO5 Jane is still a three-disk system (i.e., apps, help and data). The cartridge appears to contain the MO5 Jane kernel and low-level drivers. Similar to Commodore and Jane 128, MO5 Jane was explicitly Thomson-badged and sold. When turned on with the cartridge installed, it immediately prompts (with a blue window) for the application floppy. lot of disk swapping. RUN in March 1987 again approved of the interface, but complained about the sluggish performance — both on-screen and on-paper — and that the 80-column software output was hard to read compared to the VDC's native 80-column output, which the reviewer called "[t]he program's greatest flaw." The review also noted that printing a spreadsheet had to be stopped manually or it would merrily waste paper on empty cells until the entire sheet had been iterated over. Still, reviewer John Premack said it was "a must for beginners of all ages" and gave it a "B" grade overall. I don't think Commodore was expecting much from Jane, and it ably occupied the low-end niche that Goheen and Smith wanted it to, so perhaps that was enough. It certainly seems to have been for my Australian 128DCR's previous owners, because the entire family used it (even some brief school papers from their kid) and some documents are dated well into 1990, long after Jane — and for that matter the 128 itself — was off the market. That probably speaks well of its interface and its suitability to basic tasks. the original Textcraft for the Amiga 1000 in 1985. This seems to have been the last product Arktronics was involved in, after which it went under as the new 16-bit systems made its flagship software package obsolete. That same year five employees, including at least two of the original Apple II programmers, sued Arktronics and Marks and Kotick personally (Mantei v. Arktronics) over their now worthless shares, saying they had been misled. In 1989, after protracted litigation, Kotick was ordered to honour the settlement of $17,000 [$44,500 in 2025 dollars] and again in 1998, by then increasing to $49,226 with interest [$96,500]. (In 2022, one of the plaintiffs, John Wiersba, said he was still never paid, an assertion which Kotick's spokesman disputed.) But this was all likely a mere distraction to Marks and particularly Kotick, who in 1987 turned around to make an audacious if unsuccessful attempt to buy Commodore, believing the Amiga could lead a comeback in computer gaming after the 1983 video game crash. Commodore managed to rebuff him and in 1991 Kotick, Marks and their partners executed a hostile takeover of another target instead for just $440,000 [about $1.15 million], an ailing software company called Mediagenic. Mediagenic had a long prior history in video games, but believed the field was unlikely to rebound, and was in the midst of an unsuccessful effort to broaden into productivity software. Kotick, who had just left that market segment, disagreed and reconstituted the company back into its prior business and under its former name: Activision. In the process Kotick didn't forget his previous benefactor and Steve Wynn ended up with a million and a half shares in the new company, which became so successful in its revitalized form that in 2012 Wynn commented in amazement to the New York Times that "[t]he kid [Kotick] was telling me I had $31 million I didn't know about." Marks bought out the trademark of the defunct Acclaim Entertainment to form a new Acclaim Games focusing on the MMO market, which he sold in 2010 and flamed out just months later. Marks subsequently co-founded equity crowdfunding platform StartEngine, where he remains the CEO. Meanwhile, Kotick steered Activision through its 2008 $18.9 billion merger with Vivendi Games and its Blizzard subsidiary, becoming Activision Blizzard and for a time the largest video games publisher in the world, its 2013 split back out from Vivendi, lawsuits over toxic workplace allegations, and Microsoft's 2022 buyout for $68.7 billion under which Kotick left the company at the end of 2023. It isn't clear who retains the rights and IP to Jane today, though at least for the Apple II version they likely remain split between Marks and Kotick personally and possibly Wynn, while Cloanto and Vantiva retain joint rights to the Commodore 128 and Thomson MO5 versions. As for Sig Hartmann, arguably the father of Commodore's software division, he passed away in 2014.

[Concept] Transforming turbine transport

Some time ago, via a certain orange website, I came across a report about a mission to recover nuclear material from a former Soviet test site. I don't know what you're doing here, go read that instead. But it brought up a topic that I have only known very little about: Hydronuclear testing. One of the key reasons for the nonproliferation concern at Semipalatinsk was the presence of a large quantity of weapons grade material. This created a substantial risk that someone would recover the material and either use it directly or sell it---either way giving a significant leg up on the construction of a nuclear weapon. That's a bit odd, though, isn't it? Material refined for use in weapons in scarce and valuable, and besides that rather dangerous. It's uncommon to just leave it lying around, especially not hundreds of kilograms of it. This material was abandoned in place because the nature of the testing performed required that a lot of weapons-grade material be present, and made it very difficult to remove. As the Semipalatinsk document mentions in brief, similar tests were conducted in the US and led to a similar abandonment of special nuclear material at Los Alamos's TA-49. Today, I would like to give the background on hydronuclear testing---the what and why. Then we'll look specifically at LANL's TA-49 and the impact of the testing performed there. First we have to discuss the boosted fission weapon. Especially in the 21st century, we tend to talk about "nuclear weapons" as one big category. The distinction between an "A-bomb" and an "H-bomb," for example, or between a conventional nuclear weapon and a thermonuclear weapon, is mostly forgotten. That's no big surprise: thermonuclear weapons have been around since the 1950s, so it's no longer a great innovation or escalation in weapons design. The thermonuclear weapon was not the only post-WWII design innovation. At around the same time, Los Alamos developed a related concept: the boosted weapon. Boosted weapons were essentially an improvement in the efficiency of nuclear weapons. When the core of a weapon goes supercritical, the fission produces a powerful pulse of neutrons. Those neutrons cause more fission, the chain reaction that makes up the basic principle of the atomic bomb. The problem is that the whole process isn't fast enough: the energy produced blows the core apart before it's been sufficiently "saturated" with neutrons to completely fission. That leads to a lot of the fuel in the core being scattered, rather than actually contributing to the explosive energy. In boosted weapons, a material that will fusion is added to the mix, typically tritium and deuterium gas. The immense heat of the beginning of the supercritical stage causes the gas to undergo fusion, and it emits far more neutrons than the fissioning fuel does alone. The additional neutrons cause more fission to occur, improving the efficiency of the weapon. Even better, despite the theoretical complexity of driving a gas into fusion¸ the mechanics of this mechanism are actually simpler than the techniques used to improve yield in non-boosted weapons (pushers and tampers). The result is that boosted weapons produce a more powerful yield in comparison to the amount of fuel, and the non-nuclear components can be made simpler and more compact as well. This was a pretty big advance in weapons design and boosting is now a ubiquitous technique. It came with some downsides, though. The big one is that whole property of making supercriticality easier to achieve. Early implosion weapons were remarkably difficult to detonate, requiring an extremely precisely timed detonation of the high explosive shell. While an inconvenience from an engineering perspective, the inherent difficulty of achieving a nuclear yield also provided a safety factor. If the high explosives detonated for some unintended reason, like being struck by canon fire as a bomber was intercepted, or impacting the ground following an accidental release, it wouldn't "work right." Uneven detonation of the shell would scatter the core, rather than driving it into supercriticality. This property was referred to as "one point safety:" a detonation at one point on the high explosive assembly should not produce a nuclear yield. While it has its limitations, it became one of the key safety principles of weapon design. The design of boosted weapons complicated this story. Just a small fission yield, from a small fragment of the core, could potentially start the fusion process and trigger the rest of the core to detonate as well. In other words, weapon designers became concerned that boosted weapons would not have one point safety. As it turns out, two-stage thermonuclear weapons, which were being fielded around the same time, posed a similar set of problems. The safety problems around more advanced weapon designs came to a head in the late '50s. Incidentally, so did something else: shifts in Soviet politics had given Khrushchev extensive power over Soviet military planning, and he was no fan of nuclear weapons. After some on-again, off-again dialog between the time's nuclear powers, the US and UK agreed to a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing which began in late 1958. For weapons designers this was, of course, a problem. They had planned to address the safety of advanced weapon designs through a testing campaign, and that was now off the table for the indefinite future. An alternative had to be developed, and quickly. In 1959, the Hydronuclear Safety Program was initiated. By reducing the amount of material in otherwise real weapon cores, physicists realized they could run a complete test of the high explosive system and observe its effects on the core without producing a meaningful nuclear yield. These tests were dubbed "hydronuclear," because of the desire to observe the behavior of the core as it flowed like water under the immense explosive force. While the test devices were in some ways real nuclear weapons, the nuclear yield would be vastly smaller than the high explosive yield, practically nill. Weapons designers seemed to agree that these experiments complied with the spirit of the moratorium, being far from actual nuclear tests, but there was enough concern that Los Alamos went to the AEC and President Eisenhower for approval. They evidently agreed, and work started immediately to identify a suitable site for hydronuclear testing. While hydronuclear tests do not create a nuclear yield, they do involve a lot of high explosives and radioactive material. The plan was to conduct the tests underground, where the materials cast off by the explosion would be trapped. This would solve the immediate problem of scattering nuclear material, but it would obviously be impractical to recover the dangerous material once it was mixed with unstable soil deep below the surface. The material would stay, and it had to stay put! The US Army Corps of Engineers, a center of expertise in hydrology because of their reclamation work, arrived in October 1959 to begin an extensive set of studies on the Frijoles Mesa site. This was an unused area near a good road but far on the east edge of the laboratory, well separated from the town of Los Alamos and pretty much anything else. More importantly, it was a classic example of northern New Mexican geology: high up on a mesa built of tuff and volcanic sediments, well-drained and extremely dry soil in an area that received little rain. One of the main migration paths for underground contaminants is their interaction with water, and specifically the tendency of many materials to dissolve into groundwater and flow with it towards aquifers. The Corps of Engineers drilled test wells, about 1,500' deep, and a series of 400' core samples. They found that on the Frijoles Mesa, ground water was over 1,000' below the surface, and that everything above was far from saturation. That means no mobility of the water, which is trapped in the soil. It's just about the ideal situation for putting something underground and having it stay. Incidentally, this study would lead to the development of a series of new water wells for Los Alamos's domestic water supply. It also gave the green light for hydronuclear testing, and Frijoles Mesa was dubbed Technical Area 49 and subdivided into a set of test areas. Over the following three years, these test areas would see about 35 hydronuclear detonations carried out in the bottom of shafts that were about 200' deep and 3-6' wide. It seems that for most tests, the hole was excavated and lined with a ladder installed to reach the bottom. Technicians worked at the bottom of the hole to prepare the test device, which was connected by extensive cabling to instrumentation trailers on the surface. When the "shot" was ready, the hole was backfilled with sand and sealed at the top with a heavy plate. The material on top of the device held everything down, preventing migration of nuclear material to the surface. The high explosives did, of course, destroy the test device and the cabling, but not before the instrumentation trailers had recorded a vast amount of data. If you read these kinds of articles, you must know that the 1958 moratorium did not last. Soviet politics shifted again, France began nuclear testing, negotiations over a more formal test ban faltered. US intelligence suspected that the Soviet Union had operated their nuclear weapons program at full tilt during the test ban, and the military suspected clandestine tests, although there was no evidence they had violated the treaty. Of course, that they continued their research efforts is guaranteed, we did as well. Physicist Edward Teller, ever the nuclear weapons hawk, opposed the moratorium and pushed to resume testing. In 1961, the Soviet Union resumed testing, culminating in the test of the record-holding "Tsar Bomba," a 50 megaton device. The US resumed testing as well. The arms race was back on. US hydronuclear testing largely ended with the resumption of full-scale testing. The same safety studies could be completed on real weapons, and those tests would serve other purposes in weapons development as well. Although post-moratorium testing included atmospheric detonations, the focus had shifted towards underground tests and the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty restricted the US and USSR to underground tests only. One wonders about the relationship between hydronuclear testing at TA-49 and the full-scale underground tests extensively performed at the NTS. Underground testing began in 1951 with Buster-Jangle Uncle, a test to determine how big of a crater could be produced by a ground-penetrating weapon. Uncle wasn't really an underground test in the modern sense, the device was emplaced only 17 feet deep and still produced a huge cloud of fallout. It started a trend, though: a similar 1955 test was set 67 feet deep, producing a spectacular crater, before the 1957 Plumbbob Pascal-A was detonated at 486 feet and produced radically less fallout. 1957's Plumbbob Rainier was the first fully-contained underground test, set at the end of a tunnel excavated far into a hillside. This test emitted no fallout at all, proving the possibility of containment. Thus both the idea of emplacing a test device in a deep hole, and the fact that testing underground could contain all of the fallout, were known when the moratorium began in 1959. What's very interesting about the hydronuclear tests is the fact that technicians actually worked "downhole," at the bottom of the excavation. Later underground tests were prepared by assembling the test device at the surface, as part of a rocket-like "rack," and then lowering it to the bottom just before detonation. These techniques hadn't yet been developed in the '50s, thus the use of a horizontal tunnel for the first fully-contained test. Many of the racks used for underground testing were designed and built by LANL, but others (called "canisters" in an example of the tendency of the labs to not totally agree on things) were built by Lawrence Livermore. I'm not actually sure which of the two labs started building them first, a question for future research. It does seem likely that the hydronuclear testing at LANL advanced the state of the art in remote instrumentation and underground test design, facilitating the adoption of fully-contained underground tests in the following years. During the three years of hydronuclear testing, shafts were excavated in four testing areas. It's estimated that the test program at TA-49 left about 40kg of plutonium and 93kg of enriched uranium underground, along with 92kg of depleted uranium and 13kg of beryllium (both toxic contaminants). Because of the lack of a nuclear yield, these tests did not create the caverns associated with underground testing. Material from the weapons likely spread within just a 10-20' area, as holes were drilled on a 25' grid and contamination from previous neighboring tests was encountered only once. The tests also produced quite a bit of ancillary waste: things like laboratory equipment, handling gear, cables and tubing, that are not directly radioactive but were contaminated with radioactive or toxic materials. In the fashion typical of the time, this waste was buried on site, often as part of the backfilling of the test shafts. During the excavation of one of the test shafts, 2-M in December 1960, contamination was detected at the surface. It seems that the geology allowed plutonium from a previous test to spread through cracks into the area where 2-M was being drilled. The surface soil contaminated by drill cuttings was buried back in hole 2-M, but this incident made area 2 the most heavily contaminated part of TA-49. When hydronuclear testing ended in 1961, area 2 was covered by a 6' of gravel and 4-6" of asphalt to better contain any contaminated soil. Several support buildings on the surface were also contaminated, most notably a building used as a radiochemistry laboratory to support the tests. An underground calibration facility that allowed for exposure of test equipment to a contained source in an underground chamber was also built at TA-49 and similarly contaminated by use with radioisotopes. The Corps of Engineers continued to monitor the hydrology of the site from 1961 to 1970, and test wells and soil samples showed no indication that any contamination was spreading. In 1971, LANL established a new environmental surveillance department that assumed responsibility for legacy sites like TA-49. That department continued to sample wells, soil, and added air sampling. Monitoring of stream sediment downhill from the site was added in the '70s, as many of the contaminants involved can bind to silt and travel with surface water. This monitoring has not found any spread either. That's not to say that everything is perfect. In 1975, a section of the asphalt pad over Area 2 collapsed, leaving a three foot deep depression. Rainwater pooled in the depression and then flowed through the gravel into hole 2-M itself, collecting in the bottom of the lining of the former experimental shaft. In 1976, the asphalt cover was replaced, but concerns remained about the water that had already entered 2-M. It could potentially travel out of the hole, continue downwards, and carry contamination into the aquifer around 800' below. Worse, a nearby core sample hole had picked up some water too, suggesting that the water was flowing out of 2-M through cracks and into nearby features. Since the core hole had a slotted liner, it would be easier for water to leave it and soak into the ground below. In 1980, the water that had accumulated in 2-M was removed by lifting about 24 gallons to the surface. While the water was plutonium contaminated, it fell within acceptable levels for controlled laboratory areas. Further inspections through 1986 did not find additional water in the hole, suggesting that the asphalt pad was continuing to function correctly. Several other investigations were conducted, including the drilling of some additional sample wells and examination of other shafts in the area, to determine if there were other routes for water to enter the Area 2 shafts. Fortunately no evidence of ongoing water ingress was found. In 1986, TA-49 was designated a hazardous waste site under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Shortly after, the site was evaluated under CERCLA to prioritize remediation. Scoring using the Hazard Ranking System determined a fairly low risk for the site, due to the lack of spread of the contamination and evidence suggesting that it was well contained by the geology. Still, TA-49 remains an environmental remediation site and now falls under a license granted by the New Mexico Environment Department. This license requires ongoing monitoring and remediation of any problems with the containment. For example, in 1991 the asphalt cover of Area 2 was found to have cracked and allowed more water to enter the sample wells. The covering was repaired once again, and investigations made every few years from 1991 to 2015 to check for further contamination. Ongoing monitoring continues today. So far, Area 2 has not been found to pose an unacceptable risk to human health or a risk to the environment. NMED permitting also covers the former radiological laboratory and calibration facility, and infrastructure related to them like a leach field from drains. Sampling found some surface contamination, so the affected soil was removed and disposed of at a hazardous waste landfill where it will be better contained. TA-49 was reused for other purposes after hydronuclear testing. These activities included high explosive experiments contained in metal "bottles," carried out in a metal-lined pit under a small structure called the "bottle house." Part of the bottle house site was later reused to build a huge hydraulic ram used to test steel cables at their failure strength. I am not sure of the exact purpose of this "Cable Test Facility," but given the timeline of its use during the peak of underground testing and the design I suspect LANL used it as a quality control measure for the cable assemblies used in lowering underground test racks into their shafts. No radioactive materials were involved in either of these activities, but high explosives and hydraulic oil can both be toxic, so both were investigated and received some surface soil cleanup. Finally, the NMED permit covers the actual test shafts. These have received numerous investigations over the sixty years since the original tests, and significant contamination is present as expected. However, that contamination does not seem to be spreading, and modeling suggests that it will stay that way. In 2022, the NMED issued Certificates of Completion releasing most of the TA-49 remediation sites without further environmental controls. The test shafts themselves, known to NMED by the punchy name of Solid Waste Management Unit 49-001(e), received a certificate of completion that requires ongoing controls to ensure that the land is used only for industrial purposes. Environmental monitoring of the TA-49 site continues under LANL's environmental management program and federal regulation, but TA-49 is no longer an active remediation project. The plutonium and uranium is just down there, and it'll have to stay.

If you ask someone to think of a battery, they’re probably going to picture a chemical battery, like a AA alkaline or a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. But there are other kinds of batteries that store energy without any fancy chemistry at all. If you find a way to save energy for later, you have a […] The post This spinning water contraption is actually a functional battery appeared first on Arduino Blog.