Ed S @EdS@mastodon.sdf.org

@anne Bletchley Park is alright, but it's not especially technical in content - it's very much WW2-focused and a bit jingoistic. Look what Great Britain did, we won the war!

The National Museum of Computing is far more technically interesting and it's independent of Bletchley Park, it just has its building on the same site. It has a working rebuild of Colossus and a lot of volunteers who used to work on the original machines and will talk through them with you, for instance.

Welp, time to fix Derby Day again.

This horsey pinball dates from 1967 and features an elaborate backbox animation of six horses, each of which move individually along a track when the ball hits certain targets. Getting your horse all the way to the finish line enables higher scoring.

As you can see, we had some problems at ReplayFX. I'll transcribe the out-of-order sign in the next post, as it's a long one.

Viewing a retro-site on a retro-computer (see Cameron KAiser's post for details: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/08/and-now-for-something-completely.html)

The contemporary one does not look so well...

#retrocomputing #flloodgap #netscape #sgi #o2

DIY chip fabrication http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/

current programmer status: writing a forth compiler so my Commodore 128 RPG has a scripting language

(2/3)
Heather Meafield and Earl Dayles, both alumni of the Caltech Spaceflight Laboratory and equally instrumental in the design of the AGC, introduce and examine the theories and implications of the Moonbeam anomaly. Incorporating recently declassified data, the pair draw parallels between Moonbeam and a variety of other well-studied computer consciousness incidents. These include the 1970 PDP-11 transmogrification events, the Soviet schema bomb, and the disappearance of Konrad Zuse.

Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly
Article by Peter Winkler
In collections: Attention-grabbing titles, Puzzles
A typical mathematical puzzle sounds tricky but solvable — if not by you, then perhaps by the genius down the hall. But sometimes the task at hand is so obviously impossible that you are moved to ask whether you understood the problem...
URL: https://math.dartmouth.edu/~pw/solutions.pdf
Entry: http://read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/WinklerSevenPuzzles

An interesting bit of news about an #Olivetti #mainframe still in use at a Tuscan high school. 🖥️ #retrobattlestation #retrocomputing #computerhistory

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/silicon-revolution/when-the-history-of-computing-comes-alive

@kensanata I very vividly remember sitting in a college classroom in 1982. I was a 16-year-old freshman. It was a business class, and the professor was a young-ish guy named Pete Doukas. He grabbed the chalk and wrote "BLIPS" on the board and underlined it, then turned around and looked at us. "In the future", he said, "all cash will be replaced by computer blips." We all laughed. No way, impossible. Computers are too unreliable. What happens when they go down, is all business going to just stop? What if they have bugs or the computer operator makes a mistake? Nobody is going to trust computers with their money. That's ridiculous. The professsor just stood there and smirked, while we scoffed. "You'll see," he said.

From the Retro Computing forum.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90380553/meet-the-canon-cat-the-forgotten-1987-alternate-reality-mac

It works!

Photos of the @SDF exhibit at the #Vintage Computer Festival #vcfwest happening right now at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA ... thanks froggyme! Today's the last day so if u r in the area, why not drop by!

For more info on the event, go to:

http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/

We will try to get froggyme to dial the SDF VoIP Conference Bridge (ext. 1088) and stream the sounds coming from the venue into http://aNONradio.net from 19:00-19:29 UTC & 23:00-23:59 UTC so call in or listen ✌️

@EdS @emilio A related Life project: A group of hackers from codegolf.stackchange.com accepted the a challenge and spent ~2 years to develop a 16-bit clockless RISC CPU inside #GameOfLife to build a Tetris machine.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life

Nevertheless, the size of this computer is 2,940,928 x 10,295,296, not sure if can be ran on a retrocomputer... It also needs a extended Game of Life engine to write keyboard input directly to the RAM section.

Without releasing its magic smoke, the CPU board comes alive! #Z80 starts to fetch, decode and execute instructions as expected, although there's nothing to fetch so far.

My breadboard prototype reached the same first step in April 7th. It's a full cycle redoing it on a PCB four months later, learned a lot about 8-bit machines in this process, will continue updating the thread.

#retrocomputing #electronics

Machine Code for Beginners

https://www.emilio.com.mx/pdf/machine-code-for-beginners.pdf

Today I found this "not-too-old" blog post about Forth

https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/forth-programming/

it mentions volksForth and BigForth :)

I've created a github repo for "f68k", an Forth 83 System for m68k computer (Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL and OS-9). I've merged back the Amiga and Atari ST files.

This Forth system is the ancestor of f68kans, an ANS-Forth version of the same system:

https://github.com/cstrotm/f68k

MONIAC - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC