[cctalk] Re: Thirties techies and computing history
On Sunday, May 19th, 2024 at 13:31, ben via cctalk wrote: > My mind is fine, it the eyes that are going. > Screens are getting bigger and text is getting smaller. > I must be dreaming that. HiDPI flatpanel displays definitely don't help with this. :/ The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Altair 8800 50th birthday...
On Saturday, April 27th, 2024 at 07:14, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > > Magazine cover january, and into 1975 the revolution. So I'd say all > > I had that magazine. Wish I hadn't thrown it away oh so many > years ago. This one? https://archive.org/details/197511PopularElectronics The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: typical IC kits on Amazon and elsewhere
On Saturday, March 30th, 2024 at 13:37, Just Kant via cctalk wrote: > Clearly all or virtually all chineseum, correct? > That being the case, um, what type.of.quality can be expected? Some are > fairly cheap. I > guess thenworld isn't to be expected. I've only bought a few in the last couple of years that fit the profile - they've been decently solid. I have the ICs used socketed just in case, but I haven't had any flatline on me so far. Call it five positive datapoints out of however many. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Amoeba OS
On Thursday, March 28th, 2024 at 19:26, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > > You forgot Mickey Mouse. > > Is the mouse's immortality due to his army of intellectual property > lawyers? There's a joke to be made here about Walt Disney being in cryonic suspension[0] and Mickey Mouse is his avatar feeding off of his life force, but I don't have enough coffee in me yet to attempt to be funny. [0] Yes, I know it didn't actually happen. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: How to shutdown RT11?
On Saturday, March 23rd, 2024 at 16:35, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > > > You say that like fsck is reliable now... > > There's a reason it's only one letter off. > > I've always wondered, . . . > "Feature" or "bug"? > Deliberate, or one of possibly many errors in development? I recall hearing somewhere else.net that it was management forcing it to be renamed because the original name was "fuck". And technically it's still supposed to be pronounced that way. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Paper tape in casettes...
On Tuesday, February 27th, 2024 at 13:30, ben via cctalk wrote: > I had z80/s100 kit once, but the power supply failed taking every thing out. Ouch. > I think the PI is too cheap of computer build wise for emulation > of any system. It might blink your lights, but never run 20 users > timesharing. It depends on what they're doing. I've had twelve folks using a 3B+ as a regular old messing around server before. The microSD card wound up being the bottleneck. Anyway. > A good home brew computer is what I am looking for. Like this, maybe? https://rc2014.co.uk/ The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: VCF SoCal
On Wednesday, January 31st, 2024 at 10:04, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: > Probably because Americans in Futtbuck, Idaho never heard of any British > computers but Brits certainly knew about American computers, eh wot? The only place many of us might (might) have heard of them was in the backs of _Micro Adventures_ YA books, because of differences in BASIC implementations. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: FYI: Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April
On Wednesday, January 10th, 2024 at 13:34, John Robertson via cctalk wrote: > > Jason Scott has indicated he has archiving under control. > > I would also suggest you get archive.org in on it... If Jason's on the case, the Archive's on the case. As far as I know he hasn't posted a status report so let's give it a day or so. He's a busy guy, and when last I heard he was getting ready to go on travel. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Anyone have a D1 deck?
On Saturday, December 30th, 2023 at 23:24, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: The Bosch unit may be very difficult to find. Will a Sony > DVR-1000/2000/2100 do the same job for those tapes? At least a few of > those seem to be around. None of us are sure. The Sony DVR units have been pretty easy to find but the possibility of messing up any of the tapes even as a test ties everything in a knot. I know a few folks are asking around the A/V offices of a couple of colleges to see if they have any suitable playback units but so far nothing yet (due to semester break). The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Little Databases
--- Original Message --- On Saturday, August 19th, 2023 at 19:49, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote: > > Surely you hyperbole. > > Since it's used in Android for various things, and in Firefox and > Chromium for various things, he's not in the least. SQLite is used extensively in Appel's iOS and some parts of OSX also. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Divestiture and sqlite3
--- Original Message --- On Sunday, August 20th, 2023 at 11:55, Adam Thornton via cctalk wrote: > My understanding of sqlite (and it could be wrong) is that concurrent > writes aren't supported, and reads should block if a write is in progress > until the write completes. In practice it seems like most things are > one-sqlite-file-per-process and if that process is threaded, one would hope > the programmer understands what they're doing well enough to make it work. If you don't mind my asking, how many simultaneous users are you expecting to read from and write to the retrotech inventory database you've been talking about? The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Good Inventory Program for keeping track of my DEC boards, parts, computers, etc?
--- Original Message --- On Friday, August 18th, 2023 at 13:38, Sellam Abraham wrote: > Not to mention that that could well be a criminal act since it would > constitute unauthorized > access of a computer system. Maybe. Possibly. I'm not a lawyer, I just know what I learned for my day job. That said, 18 USC 1030 can be argued any number of ways. There is the argument that, if you put a web server online and have it serving a website, and you don't make any particular attempt to protect it (e.g., login page, HTTP basic auth), it's open season. You put it up for people (and software) to browse, so it's perfectly reasonable for people and software to browse it. > If anyone has actual evidence of this happening now then please show it to > me, and I'll take > the necessary legal steps to bring Larry and Sergey to justice. There is no law that says that your web crawler has to respect robots.txt. Which is to say, there is no law that says that your web crawler /has/ to comply with a given RFC or standard. Well outside of my expertise, Cornell has at least one paper that talks about the law as it pertains to search engines: https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2681=facpub Again, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like it's salient. Additionally, there's the whole "Google is a multi-billion dollar megacorp" angle, so any kind of court-related pushback is just not going anywhere. Hence, the development of firewall rules. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Good Inventory Program for keeping track of my DEC boards, parts, computers, etc?
--- Original Message --- On Friday, August 18th, 2023 at 12:35, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > Really? It would be interesting to have evidence supporting that, because if > so, they > could be subjected to pain for violating an explicit order not to do so. There are some of us elsewhere on the Net (in Fedi, if you're around) who, for various reasons are pushing back against the big G and Bing due to the generally lousy state of search these days, and so dropped their crawlers into robots.txt (per those search engines' documented entries for said file) to tell their crawlers to go away. It was subsequently discovered that their crawlers (Google's for sure, Bing's less so) spidered and indexed new stuff on those sites anyway. Said new stuff still comes up in search results, just without text summaries. So, we are now looking into iptables and pf rules for blocking their crawlers. That's the extent of what I know right now, because my day job hasn't afforded me as much continuous time to devote to the discourse. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Good Inventory Program for keeping track of my DEC boards, parts, computers, etc?
--- Original Message --- On Thursday, August 17th, 2023 at 13:29, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > On 8/17/2023 2:14 PM, John Herron via cctalk wrote: > > Why would you give all your data to Google? They pretty much have it all anyway. Even if you use /robots.txt to block them, they still spider and index pages, they just don't show any salient bits that reflect the user's search query (which probably drops the search rank to some degree as well). The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Good Inventory Program for keeping track of my DEC boards, parts, computers, etc?
--- Original Message --- On Tuesday, August 15th, 2023 at 09:19, Ali via cctalk wrote: > This sounds like something I have been looking for and was actually thinking > of > learning SQL so I could implement myself. But if someone has already done the > heavy > lifting... One question: how complex are the web pages it generates? That is > can older That may be the rub. The installation and update process is... well, let's just say it gives me fits and I spent a non-trivial amount of time working out the procedure. Suffice it to say that I think quite poorly indeed of composer and yarn, and really don't think that there needs to be a software build process for a webapp written in PHP. > browsers, or even TEXT based e.g. Lynx, browsers also view inventory and/or > edit the DB? > I would ideally love a solution that I can access from both my modern systems > and the > vintage system I am currently working on. TIA I normally interact with PartDB-server using Chrome (on my work laptop) or Firefox (on my personal machine). I don't have any older browsers (and I'm not sure what you mean by that, specifically - old-school Netscape v4.x?) so I can't speak to that. What I can speak to, however, is text mode. Loading my install in Lynx shows a somewhat bewildering version of the UI and the ever helpful message "Please activate Javascript to use all features," which I think pretty much says it all. I'm not able to do anything meaningful with it from Lynx, even after logging in. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Good Inventory Program for keeping track of my DEC boards, parts, computers, etc?
--- Original Message --- On Monday, August 14th, 2023 at 15:47, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: > I'm looking for a good inventory program to help me keep track of all of > my PDP-8 stuff. > > I would like to keep track of physical location, board etch revision, > board modification revision, bus type, where used, etc. I can think of a couple of options that might be what you're looking for. The first is Part-DB-server (https://github.com/Part-DB/Part-DB-server). It was originally meant for managing inventories of parts but I've found that it's also good for managing my inventory of retrotech. All of the item features you mentioned are either first-class fields on whatever you add to the database or can be added to an entry's Parameters tab; I already do this for board revision, current firmware version, and what I bought them for (X units of foo for project Alpha, Y units of foo for project Beta, Z units of foo as spares in case I screw up). The other application, which I haven't had a chance to test yet but am checking out for inventorying other stuff in the house is Homebox (https://github.com/hay-kot/homebox), which is basically a home inventory application. In terms of complexity it's a single executable (written in Go, which means it's cross-compilable if you don't feel like downloading the latest pre-built release from Github) and uses a built-in SQLite database. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Don Lancaster has passed away at 83
--- Original Message --- On Saturday, July 1st, 2023 at 13:10, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: > Don Lancaster passed away on June 7. > I hope his website is well preserved: > https://tinaja.com/ I just set Leandra to mirroring it, just in case. Her mainboard's been a little unstable lately, though, so I don't know if she'll crash again before the copy finishes. Other folks might want to start up their own. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: Paper Tape Reader Needed
--- Original Message --- On Thursday, May 18th, 2023 at 13:19, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: > I have just acquired a number of PDP-8 paper tapes. My reader/punch is > not working at the moment (neither is my PDP-8 but that's another story). > > I am looking to beg, borrow or buy a paper tape reader or reader/punch > (stand alone or PC04) so that I can archive these tapes as they are > getting more and more rare. If you can't find a working traditional paper tape reader, you might want to look into building or borrowing an optical reader. https://hackaday.com/2022/04/16/paper-tape-reader-self-calibrates-speaks-usb/ http://www.e-basteln.de/computing/papertape/overview/ The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: NRAO Data tapes
--- Original Message --- On Tuesday, May 9th, 2023 at 09:36, Dani Werts via cctalk wrote: > As part of our NGVLA upgrades, we are seeking to get rid of old data tapes > from the tape > reel days of Computing. These contain things such as the boot loaders, OS, > specific > collection programs and antenna movement programs. Reach out to the Computer History Museum (https://computerhistory.org/), they might be interested. The Internet Archive might also be interested in copies. The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
[cctalk] Re: websites as subdomains under classiccmp.org
--- Original Message --- On Monday, April 24th, 2023 at 22:48, Tarek Hoteit via cctalk wrote: > I learned today about Dave’s Old Computer website > http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/ which is > listed as a subdomain under classiccmp.org. I wasn’t aware of subdomain > sites. Can any one > list any other ones or is a list of sites available ? >From a quick search: https://online.seranking.com/research.competitor.html/organic/subdomains?input=classiccmp.org=base_domain The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510] WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean.
