> Pondering the disastrous fate of the HP TouchPad, an early tablet based on WebOS that’s best known for being the subject of a well-remembered fire sale.

> This article is about how pipes are implemented the Unix kernel. I was a little disappointed that a recent article titled “How do Unix pipes work?” was not about the internals, and curious enough to go digging in some old sources to try to answer the question.

source: HN

> I’ve had a bit of a thing for airships since I was in my teens. I loved - and love - all airships, but it was the great steampunk contraptions of wood and cloth and wrought iron that had me most under their spell. Where the ‘ship’ is taken literally and a creaking old galleon is slung implausibly and enchantingly beneath bulging balloons. Games love them too - they’re most associated with JRPGs, although I think it must have been in Super Mario Bros 3 that I first encountered them. But the airship that really sparked my love affair was in a much more obscure place. Does anyone remember the Fantastic Worlds expansion pack for Civilization 2? Anyone remember the airship units? I do. For some reason that unit captivated me. I loved it, in all its tiny, pixellated glory. I couldn’t find a picture of it. Sorry. Take my word for it, though: that was a good airship.

source: Dfly

> While my first NEXTSTEP system was a high-end 486 66MHz PC that I purchased from a NEXTSTEP for Intel fabricator called eCesys out of Alaska, I currently own two qualifying systems: a NeXTstation Turbo Color setup and an HP-9000 712/100 PA-RISC system. I went with the rather more unique (and powerful!) HP “Gecko” for this competition, and decided to put together a little video tour of the system.

source: L

> On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.

Knuth writes 8 pages and McIlroy writes six lines.

> A damning counter. But neither of us had ever read the paper. And as you know, I’m all about primary sources. We pulled up the paper here and read through it together. And it left us with a very different understanding of literate programming, and the challenge, than the famous story gave.

source: HN

> An other choice would be Eric Chahi’s 1991 critically acclaimed[1]” title “Another World”, better known in North America as “Out Of This World” which also happens to be ubiquitous. I would argue it is in fact more interesting to study than DOOM because of its polygon based graphics which are suitable to wild optimizations. In some cases, clever tricks allowed Another World to run on hardware built up to five years prior to the game release.

> This series is a journey through the video-games hardware of the early 90s. From the Amiga 500, Atari ST, IBM PC, Super Nintendo, up to the Sega Genesis. For each machine, I attempted to discover how Another World was implemented. I found an environment made rich by its diversity where the now ubiquitous CPU/GPU did not exist yet. In the process, I discovered the untold stories of seemingly impossible problems heroically solved by lone programmers.

source: HN

> A substrate does not have to be solid to compute. It is possible to make a computer purely from a liquid. I demonstrate this using a variety of experimental prototypes where a liquid carries signals, actuates mechanical computing devices and hosts chemical reactions. We show hydraulic mathematical machines that compute functions based on mass transfer analogies. I discuss several prototypes of computing devices that employ fluid flows and jets. They are fluid mappers, where the fluid flow explores a geometrically constrained space to find an optimal way around, e.g. the shortest path in a maze, and fluid logic devices where fluid jet streams interact at the junctions of inlets and results of the computation are represented by fluid jets at selected outlets. Fluid mappers and fluidic logic devices compute continuously valued functions albeit discretized. There is also an opportunity to do discrete operation directly by representing information by droplets and liquid marbles (droplets coated by hydrophobic powder). There, computation is implemented at the sites, in time and space, where droplets collide one with another. The liquid computers mentioned above use liquid as signal carrier or actuator: the exact nature of the liquid is not that important. What is inside the liquid becomes crucial when reaction–diffusion liquid-phase computing devices come into play: there, the liquid hosts families of chemical species that interact with each other in a massive-parallel fashion. I shall illustrate a range of computational tasks, including computational geometry, implementable by excitation wave fronts in nonlinear active chemical medium. The overview will enable scientists and engineers to understand how vast is the variety of liquid computers and will inspire them to design their own experimental laboratory prototypes.

source: L

> I wrote a new version of my 6502/6510 emulator in the last weeks which can be stepped forward in clock cycles instead of full instructions.

source: HN

> Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical. The ZedRipper is my latest attempt to build a fun ‘project’ machine, with a couple of goals in mind:

source: HN

> Like Walkmans and VHS recorders, teletext now seems impossibly quaint. But designer and writer Craig Oldham explains that not only was Teletext a revolutionary technology in its prime, its creative legacy lives on with a new generation of artists who love its creative limits.

source: Dfly

And the Verge review: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20943552/scroll-bar-visual-history-30-years

> Sébastien Matos has built a fantastic interactive trip through the history of one of the most important UI elements we encounter every day: the scroll bar. He’s recreated, as faithfully as possible, 30 years of scroll bars from some of the top desktop platforms of their day, from Xerox Star to Windows 10.

> Take a minute out of your busy day to enjoy the zen of playing with old UI design. Then come back here and read The Verge’s very serious review of scroll bars through history.

source: K

> As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking for a Cray emulator and came up dry, so I decided to do something about it. Luckily, the Cray-1 hardware reference manual turned out to be useful enough that implementing most of this was pretty straightforward. The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that‘s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?

source: HN

> This is a happy story about the power of global communication and manufacturing resources in today’s world. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve certainly heard me whine and moan about how impossible it is to find the obscure DB-19 disk connector used on vintage Macintosh and Apple II computers (and some NeXT and Atari computers too). Nobody has made these connectors for decades.

source: HN

> Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase “special register groups” started showing up in definitions of “CPU”, and it is still there. In this blog post, I uncover how special register groups went from an obscure feature in the Honeywell 800 mainframe to appearing in the Washington Post.

> A lot of this folklore (including the gremlin) is going to be on display at the Unix 50 event. The archivists at Bell Labs have outdone themselves by pulling together a massive collection of artifacts taken from the labs where Unix was developed for over 30 years. I was able to photograph a few of these artifacts last year, but so much more will be exhibited at this event — including several items from the personal archives of some attendees.

Plus quite a few more links at https://www.bell-labs.com/unix50/

source: Dfly

> Quest games started with a premise like “escape the wizard” or “escape the aliens” then forced you to do a series of banal and random tasks to avoid the many, many ways to die. Once you know the way, most of the games can be completed in under an hour. On the first go, it took my whole family weeks. Not the least of the horror was often having to do things several scenes before there’s any reason for having done them: in Space Quest I, the hero-janitor Roger has to refuse the first offer for his bike, so the guy will come back a little later and throw in a jetpack. Of course there’s no indication that he’ll come back with a jetpack, and no reason to think there’s a need for a jetpack until three days later when Roger exits his spaceship and floats into the void because he doesn’t have a jetpack. This leads to replaying most of the game a dozen times just looking for a jetpack, which is hidden not in a spaceship closet or a bar or a cavern, but behind a tough-but-not-too-tough bargaining strategy. It also took about ninety seconds to switch between screens, so exploration was grueling on a good day.

> After playing the first two, I realized I’d been programming for 17 years and could probably make my own, especially when all the art is 320 pixels wide and that’s about how many pixels I can work with before people give me a sideways look and ask if I really have a liberal arts degree. I decided to base the story loosely on my novel, for two reasons: first, if the game happens to get the kind of notoriety my novel has not, I might be able to boost sales by claiming the novel can serve as a hint book. Second, I spent nineteen years writing that stupid book, and this seemed like a good a way to manage the withdrawal symptoms. Three weeks later I’d built a rendering engine I’m quite proud of, a simple command and scene logic processor, and accidentally reinvented GIF compression.

source: HN

> I didn’t expect to find two floors filled with vintage computers in a sleepy town outside Pittsburgh. But that’s the location of the Large Scale System Museum, housed in an abandoned department store. The ground floor of this private collection concentrates on mainframes and minicomputers from the 1970s to 1990s featuring IBM, Cray, and DEC systems, along with less common computers. Amazingly, most of these vintage systems are working. Upstairs, the museum is filled with vintage home computers from the pre-PC era.

> In preparation for a talk on Seventh Edition Unix this fall, I stumbled upon a service list from DEC for all known PDP-7 machines. From that list, and other sources, I believe that PDP-7 serial number 34 was the original Unix machine.

> Anyhoo, I’ve finally been mucking around with AX.25 packet radio. I’ve been wanting to do this since I was a teenager and found out about its existence, but back in high school and .. well, until a few years ago really .. I didn’t have my amateur radio licence. But, now I do, and I’ve done a bunch of other stuff with a bunch of other radios. The main stumbling block? All my devices are either Apple products or run FreeBSD - and none of them have useful AX.25 stacks. The main stacks of choice these days run on Linux, Windows or are a full hardware TNC.