And if something didn't work he included a complete debugger inside "Apple II Machine Language Monitor" in ROM so you could always just disassemble and poke at things, pipe disassembly to the printer, read memory, change code, add own macros to CTRL+Y and rerun stuff. All that without extra software or a massive pile of printed assembly.

from BASIC:

  CALL -151 (short for CALL 65385, but BASIC can't handle unsigned INT so that wouldn't work)  
  F666G  

I don't think this is entirely due to Wozniak. Early "home" computer systems were based on connecting cards to a bus (eg the S-100 bus), eg. with one card supporting the CPU, another RAM, a third for disk drive, video card etc, etc. The cards where then memory mapped, presumably you controlled the memory mapping by setting jumpers. (I guess you're saying that Apple II managed this automatically?) Of course the full story might be a bit more complicated: 6502 and 6800 used memory mapped I/O, whereas 8080 (and Z80?) had certain I/O pins coming out of the CPU.

>to make sure that expansion cards could disable the default ROMs and even disable the CPU, making this kind of thing possible.

Today we would call this bus mastering, yes?

Clearly Steve Wozniak was a very unique [technical and geeky] guy at that time. Thinking about interoperability at that time was prophetic.

I've never met Raymond but based on his posts, I have a fantasy that Microsoft would make him "Benevolent Dictator For Life" of Windows desktop OS. At this point, it's the only thing that might save Windows 11 as a daily desktop operating system for power users.

I find hosted/hybrid machines particularly fascinating, so I have a 6100/66 DOS with a Houdini II Nubus card and a Education-market LC with the Gemini-based Apple IIe PDS card that I've collected over the years.

They are ...weird... machines.

Both have a (different) extremely bespoke Y cable that are almost required, such that if you find a card separated from the cable, you probably shouldn't pay much for it.

The IIe card has a little lag in the video circuitry compared to the real thing (at least in a first gen LC host, apparently that problem goes away if you stick it in a faster machine with a 24-bit PDS slot).

Coaxing the Houdini II to boot things that are not fundamentally MSDOS is always a good way to throw away a couple hours, but it does a great job of convincing anything up to Win95 that it's a PC. Performance is absurdly better with dedicated RAM.

There are a couple other things in the family, the MacCharlie and AST Mac86/Mac286 products for bolting PC hardware onto various Macs, and the later OrangePC cards (they ended up with the IP from both Apple and ASTs offerings). The apex of "weird hosted computers you can stick in a Mac" are probably the MacIvory (LISP machine on a NuBus card) products, but those are "costly and rare," and are infamously balky even if you do get the hardware (...and I just don't enjoy Lisp).

Sun had a SunPC/SunPCi line in the same vein that will bolt a PC-on-a-card into various SPARC hosts.

Commodore had that first-party Sidecar product with a PC-XT in a box for Amigas, and there was ShapeShifter that would let you fake a Mac semi-native on a 68k Amiga. Likewise DayDream (recently updated into DarkMatter) to run a Mac environment on a 68k NeXT host, both of which "needed" Mac ROMs attached on a dongle for license reasons.

MAE is emulation, but it was an Apple-blessed way to run MacOS hosted on contemporary Unix workstations of the early 90s, which is sort of the opposite. I've managed to prod it onto a (real) PA-RISC/HPUX host, and (emulated, because my SS20 has been super balky as long as I've had it) SPARC/Solaris host just for sport - I'm pretty sure it was built out of decapitated A/UX parts and an emulator when A/UX4 didn't happen.

I'd like to round out my set with at least a IIe with a Premium Softcard IIe at some point, but I'm not willing to pay ebay prices for any of that stuff.

Turbo Pascal and other Borland products used to use keys based on WordStar. These days JOE (Joe's Own Editor) still uses a similar keyset.

WordStar was basically all we needed, and it still is.

Imagine if you had something that small and powerful today.

I got MP/M working on the softcard back in the day. Never really had an application for it though.

The Commodore 128D has two 6502 CPUs. One is in the floppy drive and you can run software on it while the main 6502 ran something else.

Maybe in 2005, but in 2025, Wikipedia is more reliably accurate than many more-official-sounding sources.

I mean Wikipedia is referenced and well sourced so it is a perfectly valid source in this day and age. I read papers weekly and they are full of more lies or dishonesty than Wikipedia nowadays where there is a desire to publish often.

The Old New Thing is very much engineering. Any contemporary engineers who don't think they have anything to learn from the experience of the past as recounted in the blog are doomed to repeat the same missteps.

And much as one would hope that Raymond Chen's blogging is holding up any important Microsoft initiatives, I very much doubt that it's much of a distraction for a megacorporation.

Personally, I prefer cool blog posts over "add another Copilot button that does nothing to something that did not require it anyway" or "paper over a perfectly fine API with a newer version that has 60% of the functionality and 120% of the bugs" (which is what Microsoft engineering mostly seems to boil down to these days), but you be you...

He's been blogging continuously for close to twenty years - he was one of the original wave of Microsoft bloggers (along with Larry Osterman, Michael Kaplan, and several others I can't remember).

It is very much an engineer's engineering blog, and written by someone deeply in the trenches.

They don't have an engineering problem, they have a management problem which ruins and obstructs anything good their engineers might try to make.

Raymond Chen’s blog posts are one of the best things coming out of Microsoft.

As a Unix person for decades, for me it’s great to see his incredibly experienced and insightful view on software development in general and specifically OS development at Microsoft and to read about his experience with all these nice processor architectures no longer supported by NT.

They have been blogging about engineering before blogging was mainstream. You have to subscribe to their CD of MSDN articles to appreciate how info they put out for their products because they used to be developer centric.