Ed S @EdS@mastodon.sdf.org

Add content warnings to your politics folks. Lots of people having very bad days don't need your pile on shoved in their face.

Tetration in busy-beaver Turing machines and in Conway's Game of Life:
https://www.sligocki.com/2022/06/21/bb-6-2-t15.html
https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2022/06/23/tetrational-machines/
https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/telling-the-tale-of-two-tetrations/

Interesting read about the original OS for the Acorn Archimedes, which was not called Arthur

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ #riscos #arm #acorn

Originally it was going to be called ARX but when it's development was running late they came up with Arthur which was a demo & they ended up using that instead 🤦

Arthur actually meant A Risc by THURsday.

Also interesting fact about the dock - Apple acquired the Dock from Steve Jobs' NeXTstep OS which stole it from Acorn's Arthur Operating System of 1987.

If you're ever looking to watch a random #documentary, I can highly recommend the BBC Horizon collection on Archive.org which has over 500 episodes spanning a large part of #BBCHorizon's aired episodes from 1964 to 2014; that's 50 years of snapshots of explorations of the scientific views of its time.

You can either download the entire archive, or instantly watch individual episodes.

#BBC #Horizon #SeriesFiXatoWatches #FiXatoRecommends #documentaries

Hacked a bit on #unarchive, my tool to #download from the #Internet #Archive

- switched unarchive_collection to use advanced search API with as minimal as possible XML output format instead of RSS feeds

- this allowed increasing the limit of number of identifiers returned from 50 (previous RSS default) to 10000 (which should be enough for most collections I hope); I hope this doesn't put as much strain on the servers (it needs just 1 string per result item, rather than a fully featured RSS feed), and one tested collection has 50% fewer bytes for 10x the utility

- adapted unarchive to download metadata files as well as original files (derivative files are still not downloaded). this includes .torrent files, which might be nicer to use for downloading the items than wget

- added -N (download only if server is newer than local) option to wget invocations, not sure how it will interact with -c (continue downloads); there might still be a chance of corruption but since it does verify checksums the data that should be detected if it happens

- my XML parsing is still brittle in places, parts assume it's split nicely into lines, which is but it didn't break so far in many years....

https://code.mathr.co.uk/unarchive browse

git clone https://code.mathr.co.uk/unarchive.git

no warranty! check the README for security notes

In the past, I've had accounts that crossposted to Twitter, but I've ultimately either disconnected the crossposting or let the accounts go defunct. And gradually I've come to the conclusion that crossposting undermines the goal of building a better social media ecosystem. It provides people with an excuse for staying on corporate social media and encourages them to see it as your responsibility to deliver your posts to them wherever they already have an account.

Elliptic curves animated.

https://curves.ulfheim.net/

aaaand now all the trading volume is down to zero again

this is definitely a super normal 24-hour global cyber trading floor, definitely not a suddenly abandoned mob-run casino haunted by sad robots with no current instructions

How fast are 6502s REALLY? I tried block transfer speeds on 3 different machines: C64, KIM-1, and CERBERUS 2080 (at 8Mhz). Eat your heart out Apple with your 20 Billion transistors. 3200 is plenty for anyone ;-) #commodore https://imapenguin.com/how-fast-can-a-6502-transfer-memory/

@feoh it is a fantastic, modular platform. you can turn a simple starter kit into a full blown CP/M beast with sound and graphics capabilities if you so wish. there are plenty of official and 3rd party expansion modules for it.

#rc2014

@living8bit

Atari 8 bit BASIC. The original version, not any of the nicer XL, XE, or Turbo varieties :)

I finished reading the book "The Computers That Made Britain: The Home Computer Revolution of the 1980s" by Tim Danton. This great work tells the solidly researched story of 19 influential home and personal computers, some of which I had never heard of such as the Research Machines 380Z.

https://wireframe.raspberrypi.com/books/computers-that-made-britain

#retrocomputing #books

I tripped over this declassified ENIGMA/Bombe document when searching for an explanation of the 'drunken drive' https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/02/2002755864/-1/-1/0/PERSONAL-CONTRIBUTION.PDF

(It was mentioned in Computer Conservation soc Resurrection)
#retrocomputing #enigma #ultra

I just completed the rewarding task of reading an ASCII paper tape for a fellow #retrocomputing enthusiast -- it's a #BASIC program that he wrote in high school in about 1970!

Before work this morning I got an okayish mod to the “worlds worst paper tape reader” working. Now can somewhat reliably read the sprocket holes and use them as a timing signal. Super happy at this point and I may call this “complete”. #kim1 #commodore

I'm reviewing a May 1984 interview with Jim Morgan, Atari's CEO in the wake of the crash and before Jack Tramiel bought most of the company's assets. Morgan was an outsider--he came from the tobacco industry and later served as CEO of Phillip Morris.

He identified one reason for Atari's downfall as the "Silicon Valley ethic of making products that are easily made rather than products that the consumer wants." An interesting observation even today.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n5/191_Outpost_Atari_for_the_f.php

#computerhistory

@juliobiason A fun thing back in the mid-2000s during the transition to 64-bit was that floating-point math switched from being done on the x87 fpu with 80 bit internal precision to sse2 instructions with 64 bit internal precision. This caused some numeric results to be different - even compiling the same code with the same compiler version on the same processor, just one for 32bit vs one for 64bit.