Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/27
Just in case I ever need ASCII art in a document again:
[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – cmatsuoka/figlet: Claudio’s FIGlet tree
Via:
FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text
--jeroen
Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/25
Interesting modification: [Wayback/Archive] Embedding a Floppy Emu in a standard APPLE II Floppy Disk Drive – YouTube
STL: [Wayback/Archive] FermuAssembly.STL – Google Drive [Wayback] FermuAssembly.STL
Buttons: [Wayback/Archive] 3/4/5-Bit Independent Button Module MCU External Button Module Micro Switch Button Board Bluetooth-compatible Power Amplifier – AliExpress 502
--jeroen
Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Development, Hardware Interfacing, History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/24
Edit 20260218: added archived links to the July 1988 “USERS’ DIRECTORY OF COMPUTER NETWORKS” and the direct link to the Kremvax article from Piet Beertema himself (in addition to the April Fools on the Net posts that were already there) .
Triggered by [Wayback/Archive] Hillel on Twitter: “Gen-Z programmers are always chasing the new shiny thing like Tailwind and Svelte instead of learning CS fundamentals, like React”, below some links on HEARN, EARN and BITNET Relay: conference system before IRC.
I might amend it later with more information, but for now the list is so that I do not have to re-do the search queries.
Posted in About, BITNET Relay, Chat, History, Personal, SocialMedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/07
Ain’t history extra lovely when someone discovers the original drawings of what her dad had sent to space?
Back in the 1970s, Frank Drake did two memorable things: he helped design the Pioneer plaque (sent to space in 1972 on Pioneer 11) containing among other things pulsar map, and later helped design the 1977 Voyager Golden Record (sent to space in 1977 on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) again containing the pulsar map. In between, he helped designed Arecibo message broadcasted to space in 1974.
And guess what: today is the 50th anniversary of that message being broadcasted.
Almost 10 years ago, in 2016 his daughter Nadia Drake found back the original drawing of the pulsar map: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in History, LifeHacker, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/03
Another few great pieces of history got puglished in full on YouTube:
Via [Wayback/Archive] Memories of Lisa – CHM.
Note that excerpts of the last video were published earlier as:
--jeroen
Posted in 68k, Apple, Apple Lisa, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/30
Wow, 60 years after her birth, the original ELIZA Chatbot got resurrected after a re-discovered paper version ¹ of the SLIP and MAD based source code was found in the Joseph Weizenbaum archives: [Wayback/Archive] ELIZAGEN – ELIZA Reanimated
Back in 1965, ELIZA ran on top of CTSS on an IBM 7094. Nowadays, few of that hardware is still running, but luckily there are emulators.
Back in the days, a large percentage people chatting with ELIZA thought she was a real person. With the dwindling language proficiency, the rise in believe in alternative facts, and THE RISE OF USE IN ALL CAPS, likely that percentage has increased.
Steps to get started with ELIZA are at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rupertl/eliza-ctss: The original ELIZA on an emulated CTSS environment, which carefully got assembled over the course of the last 2 months.
If you want to know about the process, be sure to read the
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, History, LISP, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/23
Not my first BASIC (which was on calculators: The calculators that got me into programming (via: calculators : Algorithms for the masses – julian m bucknall)), but the first BASIC on a machine with a real keyboard was Applesoft BASIC on an Apple II:
Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Applesoft BASIC, BASIC, Development, History, Mastodon, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14
For my link archive: below a series of articles my Raymond Chen on “The AArch64 processor (aka arm64)” in the order of appearance from a few years back and still very relevant today.
It is part of a few more series on processors that (were) supported by Windows. A good reference to find which version supported which processor architecture is the tables in List of Microsoft Windows versions – Wikipedia.
Posted in AArch64/arm64, ARM, Assembly Language, Development, History, MIPS R4000, PowerPC, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01
I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:
In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.
But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.
On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in
I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:
Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: 1, 7 | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/31
A small introduction is the Pentium FDIV bug – Wikipedia article which already has some of the highlights..
Ken Shirriff however went all the way in, and used a microscope to focus in on to the actual cause.
He wrote two Mastodon threads on it watching (most recent first, with a link to his blog post) making a good year’s end read:
In 1994, a math professor discovered that Intel’s Pentium chip sometimes gave the wrong answer when dividing. Fixing this “FDIV” bug cost Intel $475 million. I analyzed the Pentium chip and found the bug. 1/N
…
[Wayback/Archive] Intel’s $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug
…
In 1994, a math professor discovered that Intel’s Pentium chip sometimes gave the wrong answer when dividing. Fixing this “FDIV” bug cost Intel $475 million. I analyzed the Pentium chip and found the bug. 1/N
…
And there is of course this, that predated his microscope work [Wayback/Archive] Ken Shirriff: “I recently saw an amazing Navajo rug…” – OldBytes Space – Mastodon Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 8086, Development, Hardware Development, History | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 