Old Vintage Computing Research
REWIND and PLAY
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.
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Two tiny 65816 DTV consoles
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
The Living Computers Museum finally isn't
Obviously, while I think it's a crying shame, the estate can do what it likes with its own stuff and I hope the machine, plus the other 149 pieces reportedly to be auctioned off, goes to someone who appreciates it. (Bill Gates himself perhaps.) What's more problematic is the people who donated systems and peripherals with the expectation they would remain there in some capacity, especially since the museum reportedly didn't accept items as long-term loans. (Wikipedia has a substantially complete list of those items.) That's not per se an unreasonable position, and one that helps protect the museum, but it's also one that leaves their prior owners with no firm recourse for recovery before they get liquidated or scrapped in a situation like this. Throwing them away is bad enough but if those items also go up for sale, though doing so may be technically legal depending on how the transfer was written up, it's pretty darn sleazy. Allen's estate, notably his sister Jody who is the trustee and executrix, would then be profiting off items donated in good faith on the understanding that they would be in a museum. That's bad and they should feel bad.
But then perhaps museums aren't what they used to be. On cctalk someone mentioned the now defunct? National Museum of Communications in Irving, TX which downsized in 1998 by taking about five commercial dumpsters' worth of radios and other items to the dump. It looks like one guy ran that shop and it probably became too large for him to handle, a story which is probably more common than most of us know, though it's still bad news for the equipment that got junked — some of which was almost certainly rare or irreplaceable, even if specific items themselves weren't particularly valuable. Every collector has had well-intentioned dreams at one time or another of opening our own museums, not realizing that they turn into massive sinks of time and money and regulatory filings, and they're never as much fun to operate as the private computer room or display case you used to have in your house. Situations like this should also remind us that donating our own beloved items to any institution in the hopes they'll "survive" us is no guarantee they'll remain there either.
We're amateurs, though. Paul Allen, on the other hand, was not an amateur and was an incredibly wealthy man who had to have some awareness of estate planning, and one who knew his cancer was likely to return. It is widely reputed that the LCM was expensive to run and hard to manage even with his sizeable fortune and a lot of diligent volunteers. Now his collection and quite a few artifacts I imagine some folks would like back are in the hands of his sister, who allegedly doesn't have any interest in them other than the price they might fetch. Let that be a lesson to us that no one and nothing lives forever.