- Does anyone know what games the Unix Z-Machine originally shipped for, if any, and for which machines? There wouldn't have been high demand in 1985 for a Unix version of Infocom games (understatement). There are mentions of the "AT&T PC" in the source, and a snippet of 68000 assembly language.
There's a Fooblitzky interpreter too, but that didn't ship for anything Unixlike.
- It was clearly a very popular machine with users; there was no real business case for producing clones, and yet there were no less than 3 companies that attempted PDP-10 clones -- one of them in the mid 1990's! -- in addition to the one-off clone at Xerox PARC. Ritche and Thompson wanted one at Bell Labs to develop early Unix (and settled for a PDP-11 instead). And DEC threw it completely away in 1983 by stopping development on the successor machines. They could have done one at least more generation, and it would have been at least a modest success and kept some of those users on board the DEC train.
- It needs a 35K memory expansion and a disk drive.
- Did anyone try this? how much memory do you need to run this ?
- That's some way to relive the trauma, add to that at least in my case that the tape was also a hit or miss, wonderful afternoons retyping things in that lovely keyboard. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
- FTA: ZX81 emulator for iOS can emulate the infamous wobbly RAM pack and crash the computer when you shake your phone. Emulation level 9999.
Wow. Just....Wow.
- Nice. A huge treasure trove of info
- This is.fascinating as it was written for machines with ks of memory and maybe megs of storage.
- BTW, here's a link to a more compact overview of the various blog posts:
- Well worth diving into the entire site. Lots 6502 and Atari-2600-adjacent tools. Great spacewar emu and discussion posted here before: https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/index.html
- I wonder what the cheapest alternative to the pi5 is that could still run smoothly.
- The irony of this made me LOL. A break and enter is often called a Bert And Ernie. Here’s an example of a digital one.
- > The Righteous 3D had mechanical relays that clicked audibly when you were using it
Interesting! I assume these had something to do with bridging to the 2D graphics card? I found other references on the web to the relays clicking, but not an explanation of what the relays are doing, or how often you'd actually hear them in practice.
- Yeah, love the int10h font collection!
Already have them all, and also the actual Sun console font :)
- I had totally forgotten this technology was a thing in the PS/2 era.
- TIL, Plan 9 has a Raspberry Pi port. I feel like I need to build up a Pi to run this so I can claim to be a rebel against the sea of Linux.
Also, the fact that they called the thing to playback Youtube video Treason made me LOL.
- I was in high school and university when this scene was at its prime. I was always amazed by the effort that went into composing, announcing, and promoting specific distributions. The PC scene operated on an industrial scale, primarily supplying exotic ASCII and ANSI art in file_id.diz files and titles associated with handles like "Prez" and "Warez." In contrast, the Amiga and Mac clans displayed more panache by incorporating audio and animations.
- The index page is a wild wild ride, can recommend.
- Bravo. I love jump cut from anti-trump, let’s give Florida’s and Texas back to Mexico, to ipv6 delegation on Comcast biz svcs.
- Author's website is here
- Good to know. Concerned it was out of date and just found “alive”. I
- Bought from them relatively recently myself. Old school way of doing business but the items were precisely as advertised.
- Even if not persistent it’s the kind of hack that should give MS a load in their pants. Xbox basically runs a version of hyper-V - same as used by Windows, Windows Server and Azure. While the vector may not exist it’s still flawed code.
Sigh.
- Og title : U.S. Atari parts store still open after 41 years, has spent $100K+ designing new parts — last original Atari hardware launched 32 years ago
Also. Link to best electronics the site mentioned in the article https://www.best-electronics-ca.com/
- This was the Mac's answer to Doom back in the day. Huge during Mac LAN parties of the era.
- There is a narrative thread on Reddit for this https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberrypipico/comments/1h6hb3l/gb.../
- The font sample in the link takes me back. Spent a lot of time looking at that font watching sparc stations boot.
- Holy moly. I didnt know that there were so many of them. I knew only y2k problem and 2038 Unix Epoch sign overflow.
Anyway, I think that making Unix epoch signed was one of the biggest mistakes in that case. When you design stuff that cannot live for at least 100 years, you do it wrong imo.
Having Unix TS unsigned 32bit, problem would surface in 2106. Probably most system would be 64bit by that date and so the Unix TS itself.
I recently had to fix this bug in my software. Now I store file TS as 48bit unsigned unix TS. Should be enough for livespan of that civilization ;)
- If you're a fan of serif terminal fonts, you may also like Corona/Cordata PPC-400's font.
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?cordata_...-
- More
Probably nobody was buying a special VT220 edition of Beyond Zork, I think that version was used by the developers working at Infocom, who did their work on a minicomputer and terminals. I believe it was a VAX, rather than a Unix minicomputer, but it wouldn't surprise me if the Unix Z-Machine interpreter had a similar story behind it.