#nobot following please
I confirm every follow request as long as you have own content or at least written an #introduction post. Because I feel uneasy when followed by empty accounts.
"We value your privacy" today means what "FREE" meant in the early web: not.
@mdhughes Yeah, the real early web didn't need those false friend "FREE" popups.
Back in the days when imdb was a downloadable database generated from user contributions. Now I can't even copy my own text inside their app - trivia that I contributed a quarter century ago.
Was in the late 90s when the popup war started and pages asked for credit card numbers? That's at least when I felt the thing becoming commercial, yet thinking they could never control it...
Back to #retrocomputing with some personal commercial history.
I did the fun programming in #Atari BASIC on my own the 800XL. I earned my first money for a program on #kc87, wrote the first *useful* program for money on the A7100 running a CP/M clone, but never got my hands on the real deal: the big office computer A5120.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_KC_87
@trondd It was in school, to somehow process the results of some pupil competition. I spent most of the time to hack an impressive ascii intro with title, author and copyright fluff flying in.
And yes, that #kc87 keyboard is hell.
Maybe I prepared the code in advance and just typed it in instead of actively developing it on the machine? I'm not sure. That was 32 years ago. I only remember the great intro and my surprise to get paid for this. Easy money.
@markosaric This works as expected for my favourite benchmark brigitte.de when I test blockers. That "women's magazine" is basically without real content even measured against the low bar of typical cliché resentment. It's just trackers and cookies.
Oha, they do a crowd-funded rebirth of the #yugoslavia #retrocomputing DIY legend "Galaksija":
Apropos eastern europe #retrocomputing - there is an interesting summary of #eastgerman #diy engineering here:
http://www.robotron-net.de/eigenbau.html
It's mixed with results of the so-called "consumer goods production" ("Konsumgüterproduktion") where industrial companies produced "other" things for everyday life:
German website alert, so let's collect some best-of:
1984 - AC1
Created to support RTTY teletype communication, published as diy instructions.
Based on the U880 - an unofficial Z80 clone.
1/
#eastgerman #diy #retrocomputing
1987 - Computer for the "Jugend+Technik" ("youth+technology" magazine)
http://www.robotron-net.de/eigenbau.html#J+T
- single-chip UB8830 cpu, a remake of the Zilog Z8
- integrated CPU, ROM, RAM, PIO, SIO, UART and CTC
- 8 lines with 13 characters
- 2K OS in external ROM (later 4-K ROM)
- 256 bytes RAM (extensible to 16K, later 64K)
- 2K Tiny-MPBASIC interpreter in ROM
- magnetic tape interface
- b/w graphics
2/
#eastgerman #diy #retrocomputing
1988 - HCX-80
My personal favorite.
I love it when a manufacturer of industrial plant and heavy machinery produces a ZX-80 compatible clone as part of their "consumer goods production" program.
http://www.robotron-net.de/eigenbau.html#HCX
Unfortunately just a pilot lot.
3/
#eastgerman #diy #retrocomputing
1984 - Z1013
http://www.robotron-net.de/z1013.html
Well-known diy set based on quality-rejected yet functional product parts for the modular K1520 system on which the big office computers were based.
You ordered it formally and, after waiting ~1 year, had to pick it up personally in one particular shop in the city of Erfurt.
- U880D (Z80) cpu
- 1 MHz (overclock-able to 2 MHz)
- 64 KB RAM
- two BASIC variants on tape
- modules for ROM, RAM, I/O, serial V.24/RS-232
4/
#eastgerman #diy #retrocomputing
A self-made micro computer. No more details but you can feel the enthusiasm through the decades.
http://www.robotron-net.de/eigenbau.html#Weitere
6/
#eastgerman #diy #retrocomputing
1989 - BCS 03
http://www.robotron-net.de/eigenbau.html#BCS
An example for one of the seemingly lot of ZX spectrum clones.
7/
#eastgerman #diy #retrocomputing
Typical magazines
"electronica"
instructions and schematics for all things around electronics
"Funkamateur"
"Practical electronics for everyone", later "Magazine of the GST ('Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik' / Sport and Technology Association) for amateur radio, radio sport, and electronics.
"Jugend+Technik"
Typical youth magazine, presenting cars, motorcycles, audio, home electronics, life style.
8/
#eastgerman #retrocomputing #retrohardware
Final punch for today: there is a whole page about east germany computers:
http://www.robotron-computermuseum.efb-1.de/
My personal favorites are:
- A 5120 - the big office computer I never got my hands on
- MC 80 - industrial look'n'feel - my father got one at work but nobody knew what to do with it
- A 7150 - the most compatible office computer. Here I played my first DOS games (Sopwith camel!)
- PC 1715 - not a great machine but the strongest "Zeitgeist"
9/9 EOF
@keinea49 This is the most german video I ever saw in the last years. Converted into sepia colors this clip would pass a Guido Knopp documentary. If you ever experienced a police dog barking at you, you can sense what german angst means.
@priryo Never throw away old tapes, especially with self recorded music or self made cover art.
If you haven't thrown them away until now you do have that double nostalgia chromosome and you will regret it.
I need what cool-retro-term does, but for #movies. Starting with a modern flick I could apply the visual style from a list
[ ] Alphaville
[ ] Vertigo
[ ] Dirty Harry
[ ] Once Upon a Time in the West
[X] Black Rain
[ ] Contact
and it would transform the baby actor faces to look like 50+ grown-ups with wrinkles and scars.
Oh, and modify the story to actually mean something to me.
The different variants of the #Atari 800XL keyboard:
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/105170-600800xl-keyboard-variants/
My keyboard is a "type 1". You can identify it by looking for the middle screw below the space key right through the gap.
I only realized that there are different variants at all after 30 years when I played on a sharp-edged "type 5" at last year's #vintage computing festival in Berlin.
Cæsar and Æsop would be excited. The famous internet encyclopædia has a page covering an œuvre of æsthetic words written with ligatures.
It's probably there for æons - did I live in anæsthesia that I haven't found it earlier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_that_may_be_spelled_with_a_ligature
It's now 28 weeks later.
That's not a #fly.
THAT'S a fly:
JVC 3100R Video Capsule Television/Radio (1978)
and its companion, the
JVC Model 3240 (3250) VideoSphere
Dear 23,
how I miss your intellectualism in the age of lunatic conspiracies.
On my #retrocomputing journey
TIL there was a #french #dialup online service which closed in 2012.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/minitel-frances-precursor-to-the-web-to-go-dark-on-june-30/
@cypnk Un-fortune-ately I'm unable to determine the financial jokes there as that reality is already so off track my reality.
"Is it real or is it mimecom?"
@thomasfuchs The Zero Gravity Toilet instructions are analyzed in the blog and book "Typeset in the Future".
https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyssey/
The blog and book "Typeset in the Future" also explains why the finale in the #Alien #movie is victim to the "most expensive on-screen localisation error in the history of science fiction".
https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
Hurry now and spend your weekend on that website. It's like #TVtropes on steroids!
From the #Alien #movie article in
https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
I also learned
"Yoni is a symbol for the Hindu Divine Mother, an embodiment of Shakti, the concept of #divine #feminine #creative #power. This might explain why we also have a “SHAKTI EXCESS” button on the keyboard:"
@th Wow, Pat & Mat at work. What could possibly go wrong?
@neauoire Think of all the funny misunderstandings when you ask for a new keyboard.
Maybe the cliché that programmers were bad in UI design was wrong in the first place.
It got worse since you could actually study it.
Even that once famous-for-usability shopping site from The Jeff is a modern mess.
Today I have to play whack-a-mole with scrollbars, borders, buttons -- with EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT.
It doesn't matter whether it's an application or a web page.
This mess is interoperable, platform independent, and highly available 24/7, but no one planned for disaster recovery.
"If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."
-- Lewis Carroll (Quoted in The Letters of Lewis Carroll, 1979)
The Vertigo book.
@dosnostalgic DR-DOS came with my first 286 PC around 1990, together with ViewMAX, although I mostly used the command line as I had just lately discovered SpartaDOS on the Atari.
#Forth and #PostScript
a side-by-side reference sheet
When I once programmed in #PostScript (executed by ghostscript), does that count as #Forth programming or is it as blasphemous as saying I have #Lisp experience when I actually used #Scheme?
Life can be complicated.
If your choice is still that chicken or a coup, please chose the chicken.
TIL the term "automatic #totalisator" - early transactional (electro-)mechanical parallel computation machine used at horse races to calculate biddings in the 1920s.
Later, the "Brisbane computer based #totalisator" was running on a #PDP11 running #RSX11M in two mobile vans/trailers, each one hosting a twin PDP11 running in hot standby mode.
Woah, and a #VAX based #totalisator "Atlas 2000" in the 1980s.
Character generator: device or software that produces static or animated text (news crawls, credits rolls) for keying into a video stream.
Character Generator Inc.
Atari 800 (CGI-800):
https://www.atarimax.com/technfo/cgi800
and 800XL (CGI-800XL):
