Old Vintage Computing Research
REWIND and PLAY
Saturday, November 16, 2024
One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit
Saturday, October 26, 2024
The unreleased Commodore HHC-4's secret identity
Monday, October 14, 2024
Ward Christensen dies
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated
For those of you unfamiliar with the general world of Lisp machines, they are, as their name implies, workstations entirely designed around the Lisp programming language. That doesn't just mean using conventional processors with a Lisp runtime either: these devices are built to run Lisp from the silicon up with specific hardware support. (Some of these systems could also run Prolog, my personal favourite AI-adjacent language. We'll play with a surprising small Prolog implementation in a future article.) They existed in highly technical environments as workhorses of the first wave of AI hysteria (you crazy kids today with your LLMs) for applications like natural language processing and expert systems. The genre more-or-less flourished from the end of the 1970s to the early 1990s and included some of the first systems to implement advances like bitmapped displays, networking and pointer devices. In turn, those unusual capabilities caused them to also develop distinctive user interfaces for their unique feature set, years before today's GUI and keyboard conventions we almost unconsciously take for granted were even conceived of. Working with a Lisp machine can be a remarkably different user experience from modern computing and the occasionally jarring nature of those differences isn't something present-day emulators fully capture.
Unfortunately, their rarity also makes them the whitest of white elephants sometimes. Besides what I had to do to get it working properly to start with, the hard drive started timing out and it randomly froze during boot or shortly afterwards. (There was also the matter of me never finishing its setup, let alone getting it networked.) I'm not letting this benighted thing die on me after all I've put into it — it's time for a Refurb Weekend.
Saturday, October 5, 2024
So thieves broke into your storage unit - again
All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by nature, and us classic computer nerds probably pick up more hardware than we can (or should) store in our residence — especially if the loves of our lives aren't as enthusiastic about the hobby than we are — and thus have storage units for the overflow. I have two small "cold" climate control units, kept small so that I can be out of one or both relatively quickly, as well as a larger "hot" conventional unit at ambient temperature. The hot unit is indoors and not exposed directly to the sun, so it's not particularly hot for sunny southern California, but I keep working spare electronics, hard disks, tapes, etc. in the cold units as a precaution and use the hot unit for non-working parts units, books, magazines and other household items.
Of course, climate control units cost more, sometimes substantially, and thieves use this as a signal that more valuable stuff is likely to be kept there:
Both times I've been burglarized, they were the cold units. August was the second time. So, with crime being a nationwide topic, let's talk about what happens when your storage unit gets broken into and how to recover from it.
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Programming the Convergent WorkSlate's spreadsheet microcassette future
That's the 1983 Convergent WorkSlate, a one-of-a-kind handheld system from some misty alternate history where VisiCalc ruled the earth. Indeed, even the "software" packages Convergent shipped for it — on microcassette, which could store voice memos and data — were nothing more than cells and formulas in a worksheet. The built-in modem let you exchange data with other Workslates (or even speak over the phone to their users), and it came with a calculator desk accessory and a rudimentary terminal program, but apart from those creature comforts its built-in spreadsheet was the sole centre of your universe. And, unlike IAI and the Canon Cat, I've yet to find any backdoor (secret or otherwise) to enable anything else.
That means anything you want to program has to be somehow encoded in a spreadsheet too. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually programming the device it turns out the worst thing a spreadsheet on an 8-bit CPU can be is Turing-complete (so it's not), and it has several obnoxious bugs to boot. But that doesn't mean we can't make it do more than balance an expense account. Along the way we'll examine the hardware, wire into its peripheral bus, figure out how to exchange data with today's future, create a simple game, draw rudimentary graphics and (with some help) even put it on the Internet with its very own Gopher client — after we tell of the WorkSlate's brief and sorrowful commercial existence, as this blog always must.
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Pretty pictures, bootable floppy disks, and the first Canon Cat demo?
So this entry will cover a lot of ground: first, we have to be able to reliably read, image and write Canon disks on another system, then decipher the format, and then patch those images to display pictures and automatically run arbitrary code. At the end we'll have three examples we can image on any PC 3.5" floppy drive and insert into a Cat, turn it on or hit DISK, and have the Cat automatically run: a Jef Raskin "picture disk," a simple but useful dummy terminal, and the world's first (I believe) Canon Cat, two-disk, slightly animated and finely dithered, slideshow graphics demo!
But before we get to pumping out floppy disks, we first need to talk about how one uses a Cat. And that means we need to talk a bit about Forth, the Canon Cat's native tongue. And that means we should probably talk more about the operating system too. Oh, and we should go down to CompUSA and buy a brand new floppy drive while we're at it.