This is really cool. I like the idea of combining it with a offline Wikipedia cache.

As I said it in another post, what does Trump expect? His negotiations are all stick and no carrot.

Canada is bound to look for new trade opportunities in the face of that.

You make a deal with Trump, it's always worse than what you had previously.

Then, no mater what you do, he breaks the deal 3 months later with some kind of implied military threat if you complain.

All the comparisons with personal relationships here are silly. This isn't a marital split. This someone who thinks they're the only customer saying they don't want to buy something and the vendor saying fair enough, I'll sell it to someone else.

Trump won't like it but what does he expect? His negotiations are all stick and no carrot.

Canada is bound to look for new trade opportunities in the face of that.

You do make a deal with Trump, it's always worse than what you had before. Then he breaks even that 3 months later with some kind of implied military threat if you complain.

Trump is just really bad at business.

How? They stopped making that stuff years ago.

They whole point of that article is that it's a weird, curious thing from the past that doesn't exist any more.

> I don't know about Canada, but most of the EU runs on US Big Tech to name just one sensitive sector.

That's true, right now. The way things are going though the EU is spurred to finally cut the cord with US Big Tech because of the security risk.

It didn't used to be like that before Trump got into power. Trump is bad for business because he's an unreliable partner that's turning on his allies.

> British, Scottish,

You do realise that British implies Scottish don't you? On which island do you think Scotland is located?

It's not that they want to enter a trade war with Trump, it's that there's large room for growth in trade between Canada and Poland (your example).

Since Trump is hostile to trade with both parties there's an opportunity to replace lost US trade that's probably not coming back.

Trump has weakened himself and his allies where as mutual trade between Canada and the EU makes both stronger.

Many Russians think of themselves not as European but as Eurasian, as if that's something different and special.

They have a whole political doctrine about it. It's crazy identity politics.

Part of Putin's war on Ukraine is that he doesn't want them to think of themselves as European either (although they obviously are).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia#Russian_geopolitical_i...

Yep, I had the same thought. As simple heuristic, text written in all lowercase is often just hot takes and so not worth taking the time to read.

LC;DR :P

I have a similar heuristic for short HN comments.

At a guess I'd say that the spec wasn't quite competitive enough at the price it was pitched.

Consider that the C64 was also launched in 1982 for a much cheaper price and was available in non-NTSC regions too, so would have had a bigger software library available to it.

Many people can put up with less convenience with peripherals if you're paying an order of magnitude less up front.

Even the software on cassette and 5.25" disk would have been so much cheaper to distribute than the newly launched 3.5" disks (which were much better).

> so would have had a bigger software library available to it.

The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.

The video covers how CP/Ms big problem was that the disk formats weren't the same between machines, doubly true for this Sony which used new 3.5" disks. So all the existing CP/M software had to be specifically re-released for this machine, which caused a chicken and egg problem (who is going to release software for a machine nobody is buying because there is no software for it)

The MS-DOS world solved the problem by everyone just cloning the IBM hardware down to the disk format.

This is, indeed, an issue. IIRC, the only interchangeable disk format with CP/M was with 8 inch media.

Unless the disks had copy protection, you could copy them over a serial link. I did that a lot between my Apple II and other CP/M machines.

That's true but all the cool SMC-70 features, like the graphics modes, were custom to it.

CP/M programs written for other machines couldn't really make use of any of that unless they were rewritten specifically for the SMC-70.

If you just wanted the CP/M text compatibility and not the extended features you could buy a machine capable of that for much, much less.

As Kalleboo points out, if you wanted to buy off the shelf CP/M software you'd probably have to buy an external 5 1/4" disk drive too.

Digital Research had GSX, which provided a rich set of graphics primitives. Sony would need to offer a device driver or, alternatively, make the console/terminal emulate a graphics terminal such as the DEC VT-240 (and GSX would use a Tek4014 or ReGIS backend).

A lot of CP/M machines had graphics-capable built-in displays. Unfortunately, publishing software in machine-native media was a real chore back then, a bit like in the 1990's, where we had a "Unix version of NetScape" which was actually 27 slightly different versions for 27 different operating systems and binary architectures.

Some would argue MS-DOS was the CP/M of its time. >smile<

At least it had the FCB, some interrupts and COM executable format from CP/M. :)

MS-DOS was “mostly” compatible across different machines but there were non-PC MS-DOS machines with different disk controllers and media recording formats, giving them better capacity or performance. Only machines that followed the IBM PC recording formats would be media-interchangeable.

Since the PC used off-the-shelf components, it was tempting to be compatible, but some cursed machines tried to be different.

I’m not sure how compatible are floppies from the Victor 9000 or Epson QX-10, but I know the Sanyo 550 (?) and the Mindset, which were not quite PC-compatibles could interchange media with a PC.