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
RSS- Lunchtime fun "for science". I was playing with Atari Turbo-BASIC XL the 800XL and couldn't resist doing the same tests on a VIC-20.
- When someone asks why you are doing so and so thing... the answer is ALWAYS "for science".
- My next restoration project isn’t a vintage computer, but it counts as vintage. Always wanted a Selectric. Mechanical pencil for scale. It’s huge.
- Autobiographies
- The other book I finished last week was Howard Scott Warshaw's. He contends that most people who say that E.T. is "The Worst Game of All Time" have probably not even played it. I have it, have played it, AND I don't think it's even close to the worst game of "All time".
- Really enjoyed the 10PRINT book this past weekend. Who knew there were at least a couple hundred pages of things to talk about from just one line of code? For fun, during lunch today, I looked at many of the variations of it.
- I’m probably going to hell for this
- New life skill for me: yellow jacket nest removal. They sure are mean.
- For the most part I’ve been sticking pretty close to the plans. Today’s deviation was to add some stiffening L angles to these pulleys. Once this section is riveted they’ll be hard to access and I didn’t like the amount of skin flex I was seeing.
- Working on flight controls again before it gets too hot to be in here today.
- While waiting on my date I worked on the next part of Nick Hampshire's VIC Graphics book. Multi Colored "fan".
- I didn’t go to Blackhat this year. A friend brought this back with her for me. If I had known this sort of thing would be there I definitely would have made the trip :)
- This morning's quick "learn something new every day": Been going through Nick Hampshire's VIC-20 books. 2nd books is on graphics. #commodore
- Lunch shenanigans: Now I'm on a quest to find the slowest machine I have that will run this "benchmark" (I call it the @NoelsRetroLab benchmark). The PC-4 is the current leader.
- Installed BreakIntoProg's BBC BASIC Port to the CERBERUS 2080. On the Z80 at 8Mhz it runs this quick benchmark in around 11 seconds. Pretty neat.
- Trying something different on my Atari 800XL this week. The keyboard on the top has switches instead of a membrane. First time all of my keys have reliably worked :) #atari
- Just for fun, the 100 door problem on several different systems · imapenguin
- Finished the 100 door problem on a bunch of systems. Atari 800XL, Cerberus 2080, VIC-20, PET, Color Maximite
- Last of the 10 machines in the 100 door demo is CERBERUS. Is unfinished. Last because it's the hardest to do (for me). It's WAY too fast for the visual demo. Wasting a couple million clock cycles. Needs the result output and custom characters to be finished. Happy with progress
- Taking a break from the cipher series for a bit. This weeks article will be on the 100 door problem done on 10 different systems. Wouldn’t be complete without a calculator in the mix would it? (PS, the VIC-20 is my favorite solution set so far). Also, TI-84’s BASIC is really fast