John C. Dvorak has died

Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery. Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at least 1986. In addition to this and other tech journalism credits, he was on the flagship CNET Central cable TV program in the mid 1990's with his "Buy It, Try It, Skip It" reviews, plus other shows hosted on NPR and then-ZDTV. He was also a regular guest on Leo LaPorte's syndicated radio program and podcasts, and joined former MTV veejay Adam Curry (well known to us in Gopherspace for MTV Networks v. Curry, and an early user of TTYtter before Twitter started to suck) in 2007 as co-host of the No Agenda podcast, a role he maintained until his death. Dvorak hailed from a different generation of tech journalists, far more personal and yet far more technical, and even his detractors (given his political views, which we won't talk about here, there are many) would admit he was at least entertaining. He was 80. Rest in peace.

Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader.

Now, in my case, the fact that it is a MIPS-family system meant I certainly needed one in my unusual laptop collection. And since it can run OpenBSD ...

... it seemed like a good way to get nerdsniped in two ways by one computer: since I mostly run NetBSD as my BSD and server operating system of choice, I figured this was also a good way to learn OpenBSD on a highly portable netbook using an unusual platform. As usual, of course, the whole shooting match turned out to be a much longer journey than I'd anticipated, and my typical insistence on deviating from the beaten path (such as forcing it to run from the SD card slot and trying to build a browser from source) made it more so. But before we embark upon it, let's talk about why there's a Chinese MIPS derivative in this thing in the first place.

Bobby Prince has died

Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81. Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables, which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondingly, his transitional work in Wolfenstein 3D was fine (especially The Ultimate Challenge) but clearly all of a particular genre, and his otherwise solid contributions to Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad ended up overshadowed by Lee Jackson's (exhibit A: Grabbag; exhibit B: Prince's main theme but Jackson's KISS OFF).

Doom, on the other hand ... well. It's not just that these were solid gamer tracks, it's that they sounded good on just about anybody's sound card. We had high quality MIDI on Mac while you schlubs struggled with Sound Blaster Pros and it still didn't sound like a$$. That's talent. While everybody will name At Doom's Gate (E1M1) as his best, I claim it is only merely his most memorable, and solely because everyone on the whole stinking planet has played it at least once. Instead, I proffer I Sawed The Demons (E2M1), Untitled (E3M1), and the reworked Wolf 3D holdover Evil Incarnate (Doom II MAP31) as his heaviest and meatiest, Donna To The Rescue (E3M2) as his funkiest, The Demons from Adrian's Pen (E2M2) and They're Going To Get You (E2M4) as his creepiest (I love the "car going out of control" feel to E2M2, as Prince himself called it), and Sign of Evil (E1M8) as the first track that legitimately had me scared as the doors slide open and the Bruiser Brothers emerge to kill. If that one didn't make you wet your pants back in the day, maybe this remix will. The Doom port for PlayStation didn't want to pay him royalties so they cheaped out and brought in Aubrey Hodges. Good music but hardly worthy of the Master, and to an otherwise excellent port's detriment.

I'd say rest in peace, but given the infernal subject matter that just doesn't seem adequate.

Building a serial and VGA "everything console"

Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY it.

We'll start with this used, slightly abused IBM 1U console that I got for $120 (shipped) from eBay, add a terminal emulator, and put all the fixin's on.

Ahoy, DECmate II! the little PDP-8 that could

In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the only PDP-series mini it happened to, and it wasn't even the first: the PDP-8 actually got the shrink-ray treatment several years before, and not content to merely make it into a smaller general purpose computer, DEC turned it into a word processor.

Thus emerged the DECmates, descended from the 1977 DECstation VT78; arguably the zenith of the line was this one, the DECmate II, which rolled off the assembly line in 1982 simultaneously with the first DEC Professional models and the DEC Rainbow. Advertised aggressively to offices new to computers, take the two floppy disk drives built-in, add a printer, monitor and keyboard, and right away you had a simple office system for basic needs. With a Z80 or an 8086 processor card, you could turn it into an overgrown CP/M machine or a rather limited MS-DOS one. You could stick two more floppy drives in it. You could even add a hard disk or a graphics card, as long as you didn't consider what more powerful system you could have gotten instead for that money.

Now, that's a lot of word processing. But under the hood it's still at least PDP-8 adjacent, even considering its oddities and incompatibilities, and you can make it do many of the things a full-size Eight can. We'll take this basic unit, convert the floppy drives to solid state, tap the video output, and put it through its paces. After all, if we have a PDP-11 on our desk, we should really have a PDP-8 too.

The Tomy Tutor and the state of 1983 home computers

The Tomy Tutor was my first computer, in late 1983. I was seven and we got it at Federated. I've acquired several more since then, but this is the actual one I used and it still works perfectly.

Using a design modeled on the doomed Texas Instruments 99/8, one of several unreleased successors to the TI 99/4A, the Tomy Tutor and its overseas siblings, the Japanese Pyuuta (ぴゅう太) series, promised an easy kid-friendly introduction to computers with a durable case, nice graphics and sound, games on cartridge, and two, count 'em, two internal dialects of BASIC (one on early systems). It had 16K of RAM, though this was entirely tied up in the 9918A video display processor with only 256 bytes of RAM directly addressible by its 2.7MHz TMS 9995 CPU, and of Tomy's promised peripherals only game controllers and a tape deck were ever offered. Still, despite the bowdlerized operating system and bupkis contemporary expansion options, the Tutor was nevertheless one of the first true 16-bit home computers, and as part of the 1983 low-end home system cavalcade, an inexpensive choice as well.

Another thing the Tomy doesn't have much of is history: the story of its development is rather murky, and modern-day Takara Tomy all but disowns it. I don't compulsively collect for many systems, but I do for this one, because it was the first computer we actually had at home. So when a folder with handwritten Tomy marketing notes turned up on eBay, I jumped on it. It turned out to contain proposed names for what would become the Tutor, various test marketing slogans, and even an internal pitch discussing the competition, which I'll reproduce in its entirety as an interesting insider snapshot of the early 1980s U.S. home computer landscape — after we make a quick trip to that scene in its native Japan.

Testing MacOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server, Apple's first through-and-through Unix server (previously, previously). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early pre-production ROMs. However, much to industry surprise, late in its life cycle then-CTO Ellen Hancock announced that the ANS would be able to boot Mac OS and even Windows NT as well using ROM upgrades. Neither ROM was officially released before Steve Jobs convinced Gil Amelio to cancel the line, and for many years they were believed to be vapourware.

But they've started to surface, first with an ex-Apple employee who had both the preproduction ROM and the Mac OS ROM on a flash ROM SIMM, and later another employee turned up with the NT ROM, though sadly more is needed to make it actually run NT. It turned out that I also had the preproduction ROM in a box gathering dust, and a couple months ago we put both the preproduction ROMs and NT ROMs through their paces.

Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM DIMMs for me to test, we can now try the "2.0" MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it.