From: t-jacobs@utah-cs.UUCP (Tony Jacobs)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: MultiMac MULTITASKING!
Date: Thu, 21-Nov-85 12:12:47 EST
...
It doesn't work with some programs (like MacPaint)
and some apps need to be the first app loaded to work
(like MacDraw.) When you run multiple sound apps the
first one run is the one that works, the rest will
run but you don't hear a them.
...They have always been referred to as "applications" on the Mac, and I know that was abbreviated as "apps" by the mid-90s. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that abbreviation was used by Mac users as far back as the 80s.
-edited for clarity
Are there any synonyms for 'pedantry' that you can think of?
"Application" definitely counts, but for some inscrutable reason I associate that with GUI-only programs.
> Are there any synonyms for 'pedantry' that you can think of?
"dogmatism", "purism", "literalism"... but maybe I'm being too literal, puritanical, or dogmatic. :)
There are also vast numbers of programs designed for action entertainment.
Then there are programs like spreadsheets and word processors that are "applications" -- programs with a humane UI, purely for end users, designed mainly to be employed for some other specific productive purpose rather than to be used in themselves.
It is true that we now have the more generic "app" thanks to the iPhone,[1] but I think at this point the word is only a little more established in the language than "on fleek."
But even when that changes, it won't mean that when grown-ups observe the history and meaning of words as they are actually used they are engaging in "pedantry."
[1] (Yes, I know there are examples of prior usage of "app" from long before 2007. I'm talking about widespread, mainstream language, not your technical chats with RMS when you were a comp sci grad student in the 1970s.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdPb8eh_m7Q&t=27s
It really just depends on what the platform you're talking about called them.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28killer%20app%29%20AN...
[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/exclusive-thom-yo...
In the command line you could do this with they 'say' command.
The parameter -v is used for the voice. And I think "Fitter Happier" is 'Fred'.
say -v Fred "fitter.happier.more productive"
As someone who lives in the area I've always been curious how it came about, especially circa 1996/97.
For examples look at the search hits in https://archive.org/stream/1981-03-compute-magazine/Compute_....
I wouldn't call this an application, though.
"App" is completely wrong, as it was introduced by Apple for user-facing programs running on a mobile phone (if Android had been the OS popularizing this, Google would have picked the first three letters of its company name as the new name for these things, and every web site would have a banner "install our goo" :-))
We've been calling applications "apps" for going on thirty years at a minimum.
As others have pointed out, it was also used as the file extension for "application programs" on NeXTStep (.app). It continued to OS X which is where "App" came from for iOS applications. It has nothing to do with the name "Apple".
It was a really common practice to put in game music as audio tracks on game CDs. Dreamcast GDs also work a similar way where you can play the game audio in a regular CD player despite the data track being formatted differently to the ISO standard.
F if i know today why i bought it though...
A list of games can be found here: https://www.giantbomb.com/redbook-audio/3015-6487/games/
I assume that the CD simply had two "tracks," with the audio CD "partition," if I may call it that, being the first. This allowed the game developers to play music during the game using the CD-ROM drive's hardware audio decoding (remember that small molex that went from the drive to the soundcard?) without impacting the game's performance.
These days, it's impressive to think that decoding WAV audio could at one point be a limiting factor for a CPU.
It's very rare for a game to have its music compressed, unless the hardware can decode it on the fly (think wma on the xbox, or adpcm on the ps)
The same principle is still used in consumer video encoding (and all but the highest-end professional video), where's it's described as eg. 4:2:2 or 4:2:0, the numbers describing how many pixels' worth of chroma (colour) data are provided for each block of luma pixels.
http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/articles/zx_spectrum_graphics-ar...
Another spiritual successor to this 'image compression scheme' are compressed texture formats in modern GPUs.
The rows of pixels were laid out in a wacky fashion to make text rendering fast. The display resolution was 256x192. Being monochrome, the bitmap part of the display therefore used 32 bytes per row of pixels. You might expect that the second row would start at start_of_screen_address + 32. BUT NO! It was at start_of_screen_address + 256 because you can increment an address register by 256 faster than you can increment by 32 (on a Z80). Hahaha.
The result was that drawing graphics was a bit fiddly, but drawing 8-pixel wide character glyphs was easy and fast.
Cool, it seems apparent that nerds that grew up in the 80's have money now, seeing as all these things are coming back.
I'll keep that in mind, thanks!
Then, after a few minutes:
"Hammurabi, I beg to report..."
It played the signal as audio while copying.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_(band)
After the introduction, all that hard work is finally rewarded with some scrolling text and a seemingly random arrangement of bloops and bleeps.
They're more directly referring to the backmasked message on Pink Floyd's Empty Spaces, which goes: "Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont."