- Yeah, THAT made me feel old.
- Correct. Not an electric collection of various generations like the macBU but a lot of Apple gear nonetheless congealed in one place
- I think you're talking about System X. That was actually a bunch of G5 systems, first actual Power Mac cheesegraters and then Xserves. System G was the follow-on and that was indeed made out of Mac Pros, but the Power Macs were the first at VT.
- That’s an amazing amount of mac gear. Reminds me of the Virginia Tech effort to build a super computer of Mac gear in the early 2000s
- Correct.
Not all the 2SB crowd was alive when Gary Killdall he was helping shape personal computing or know that he was a luminary for that era.
- Not magenta, but I did order one. Always wanted to have a QL, and it’s going to support it natively.
- I funded a magenta one, all it needs is a massive heat sink on the right hand side…
Anyone else get one?
- as a speccy user all things clive sinclair were to be oooohed and aaaaahed over in the 80s. even things like the c5 and micro drives which weren't successful they still showed an early attempt at things we take for granted now like usb sticks and tiny electrical vehicles which surround us.
some of the ideas that didn't make it off the drawing board were his transputer to get back into the computer market and his later ebikes which never took off as he hoped.
will just have to rewatch micro men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM to remember someone who helped put computers into the hands of everyone by making them so very cheap.
- It was released nine years ago. Still good to remind people...
- here is a link to the computer history museam discussion: https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-gary-kilda.../
and here is a link to the manuscript : https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-lic.../
- I tried Vibe coding in BASIC using Grok and it went well.
- The honor is all @mmphosis', though. :-)
But I second the idea.
- Oh man. that was an awesome read. I am tempted to post your blog post as a top level post :-)
- On the other hand, there are probably about as many references to BASIC not being just BASIC, but rather referring to a variety of dialects, as there are digitized listings. Moreover, about every of those listings is accompanied by a reference to the specific dialect it applies to. If there was a world model, it should be clear that these are not the same identical reference and those rather refer to a complex set of is-a / has-a relations. The actual outcome illustrates a serious limitation of LLMs with regard to real-world tasks.
(It also seems to hint at a general issue with intersecting partitions and, I guess, the same would apply to JS in the era of the "browser wars", say, something that runs on both Netscape 4.0x and the various incarnations of IE4.x, to make it easy.)
- This is much more like I would have expected this. – Thanks for risking your sanity in the name of sicence!
- @mmphosis @masswork - not really surprised that the LLM doesnt know Applesoft or Atari BASIC. Even if all the print material produced in the pre-internet era was machine readable, it would be dwarfed by the amount of visual basic and VB.NET material that was put on the internet in blog posts, tutorials github. Even the old print material wouldn't always be precise. "Here is this months game - written in BASIC"....only because it as InCider or Analog or Antic would you know by meta inference that it was the specific BASIC.
As a preservationist, it now gives me a motive to start putting retro code up on github to reinforce the nitty details of what we lost in the fire with Commodore, Apple II and Atari 8-bit machines....
- As an experiment, I just tried what you did using Applesoft BASIC and it didn't go well either.
- Nothing I linked to is a kit requiring soldering. It's a fully assembled motherboard (of very high quality - I can personally attest to that), a case, a keyboard, and keycaps.
- While it worked out better than I would have thought, it also points out some crucial problems.
The problem being, if you don't know the answers already, the LLM doesn't fill any gaps in knowledge, you may have. E.g, I don't know Atari BASIC (just that pesky – or is it petcii? – MS BASIC). Accordingly, I have no idea about PRINT #6 or LOCATE, and ChatGPT apparently neither, so the duo of us won't arrive anywhere.
On a slight tangent, I'm kind of surprised and impressed to learn that Atari BASIC lets you use a keyword as a name with LET, something MS BASIC won't do, tokenizing it anyways, LET or not, as there is no such thing as context awareness.
- Cool idea. Judging by the title, I was expecting abject failure. Maybe I am forgiving in my expectation of current state of the art of LLMs. I have no idea what the context prompt was for this. Was was as elaborate "act as an atari 800 programmer, draw on sources such as De Rey atari by Chris crawfor et al and all of tom hudson's game and utility programming listings in analog computing for the years 1981-1989 - using this knowledge please help me write a game that has the following...."
I mean the game shown was far better than some of the early games I wrote in the late 70s on a TRS 80 at computer camp or on my own Atari 800 in the early 1980s during the lengthy Canadian winters.
Maybe I am soft with nostalgia ...
- Nice share. Costs a lot but does a lot. This was something I was mulling in my head - with the new "Commodore" how will these other projects with Commodore IP or Commodore adjacent IP be treated ?
- To add to the discussion, there is also the takeaway (as in flully assembled and functional) version of the C65. One gets the C65 prototype and the C64 compatibility along with a floppy drive. That’s also an FPGA, albeit twice the price. https://mega65.org/
- I estimate that there are only about 32,000 working C64 left in the wild. Anything, even FPGA, to keep the ability for the machine to be alive is awesome. The SID, VIC II are becoming more and more rare by the day. The supply has all but dried up in Canada where I live. Tarrif anxiety is having a chilling effect of sourcing parts from USA
- The novelty is in putting this all together into a whole complete system that I can take home and have it work with the TV I own now. Just like in the 1980s when so many C64s were carted home and plugged into tube tvs of all shapes and sizes. Not everyone wants to build a computer from a kit sourced from multiple vendors. I can bolt, screw, snap, plug but am listed as a fire hazard with a soldering iron.
- Newsroom also had ports for the C64 and, later on, the Atari (after a write-in campaign). I think the C64 version was used more than the Apple II original, at least in my experience; our local users group did their newsletter in it. There was also Newsroom Pro, but only on the PC.
(my article) https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/03/printing-real-headline-n...
- This is cool - I Remember the packaging from the early infocom games being so distinctive. The Suspended box was so creepy. It had blank eyes that followed you. Like it watched me walking around the Computerland in Scarborough Canada.
- It's an Ultimate 64 https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate-64-Elite-MK2
- I don't feel like there's much novel here-- as in, you could have built one of these in 2022.
The motherboard is a rebadged Ultimate 64 in white: https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate-64-Elite-MK2
Transparent breadbin cases have been out for a WHILE: https://www.retrofuzion.com/products/breadbin-case-set
It's got a mechanical keyboard, which could be a MechBoard64: https://www.retrofuzion.com/products/mechboard-64-fully-back...
The keycaps are slightly novel, in that they have a C= logo on the Commodore key. The guy from CBMSTUFF ran a multi-year project to produce new keycaps. For licensing reasons, his didn't have the C= logo on the Commodore key, but it's reasonable to think that they have taken advantage of his considerable work refining and producing the keys and provided a path to legally using the C= logo. Having one new key printed shouldn't take so much work as he put into getting all the legends correct on the others. https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?route=product/category...
Shrug
- FrameMaker never went away. It was just subsumed by a sea of Microsoft Word being used inappropriately. Where I work I think we last updated during the pandemic.
- I'm skeptical about this venture for several reasons, but this is a good first product launch. The bundle seems like a great deal, at least for people who know what they're really buying.
I'm also curious about how many of these kinds of machines the market can absorb. It's more of a replacement/backup unit for serious C64 enthusiasts than a casual "nostalgia" gaming platform, which is to their credit IMHO, but maybe a harder sell. RG's THEC64 Maxi reportedly sold in the tens of thousands but it was roughly half the price.
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