I write about the past, present, and future of technology across three sites. imapenguin.com explores retro computing and programming fundamentals, milkcrunch.com covers modern software development and engineering culture, and evadot.com examines commercial spaceflight and the new space movement.
Posts
- Did a full restoration of my wife’s Grandfather’s TI-58C. They are notorious for bad ram and this one needed replacing. Also converted it to a DC wall plug. Now accepts assembly language programs and the built in functions work. Very cool late 70s tech. But .27 amps, yikes!
- These are a few of my fav-or-ite things.
- I managed to enter all 196 Bytes of Lunar Lander by Jim Butterfield (BYTE April 1977) by hand with no errors on the first try. Such a fun game and a great way to learn 6502 Assembly programming the hard way. #commodore #shortcutsareboring
- Got this KIM-1 replica together in a couple hours tonight. Was a fair bit of soldering but now I can computer like it’s 1976. 17 instructions to do a counter. Tomorrow morning we’re playing Jim Butterfield’s Lunar Lander on this thing! #commodore
- My KIM-1 replica came way faster than I expected. Should be awesome. #commodore
- Mentioned yesterday I've been going through this Math for Deep Learning book this week. The examples are all in Python, so I've been reimplementing every one in Julia. This not only gets me to really think about what I'm doing, but strengthens both my Python and Julia chops
- Tearing through this book during breaks this week. Highly recommended.
- The Apple Lisa was released 39 years ago today. While it was a market failure it was crazy innovative. If you think about it, the computer you use today doesn't REALLY do anything more than this computer did.
- This group in my collection contains some really fantastic articles. April 1977 was one of my favorite issues of the whole BYTE magazine run. Never mind that I was 2 years old when it was printed ;)
- Well the fix was to reflow the solder joints around the connector. Must have had a cracked or marginal one. #commodore
- Hmm, getting a fault on my MiniPET 40/80 on the IEEE port. Anyone know if this needs a loopback to pass or is this really a fault? #commodore
- When picking up a new language (Julia this time), I like to solve new problems to get used to it or solve a problem I've solved in another language. Monty Hall will do nicely . Since Julia on an i7 is slightly faster than a 6502, I let the 64 do 1000 and Julia did 2^29 #commodore
- This 1977 game on the KIM-1 is surprisingly playable and really fun. A whopping 196 bytes. The number of things I’ve learned from Jim Butterfield is staggering. Something to think about as I write and try to contribute even a small thing here and there. #commodore
- A visual 100 Door Problem solution in Python · imapenguin
- Always wanted to add a python example the 100 Door problem article I did with the 8 Bit machines last year. Stumbled onthe fun Asciimatics library and then it was a snap.
- I’ve collected something like 30 calculators over the years. Most at least 30 years old. In the “modern” category I have 4 graphing calculators. In theory I should like the HP the most, but in practice the order of most to least used left to right is this. Even I’m surprised.
- Got the offending RAM off no problem but I just realized I don’t have a socket that will fit here. Off to mouser…
- In case you were just sitting there asking yourself “what DOES the inside of an HP-58c calculator from 1977 look like”
- Professionally packed… just like this loose rattling around in a box. Sigh.
- I've been on Udemy for a decade and started but never finished many courses. And this is now the second one I've completed this week. Learn. All. The. Things.