The Story of X-Copy on the Amiga

Yup. Literally the only tech that I have genuine nostalgia for. I really miss it and the community

I had the same feeling when I read the interview along with the attached screenshots. A nice way to start a Sunday morning.

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.

One thing to remember is that these pixels looked a lot different when rendered on a typical CRT of the time.

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.