- It's my homepage.
Thank you so much. :)
- First stop in the morning and the last stop before I log out. Thank you for creating a space where nostalgia meets technology and for all the fascinating links and comments.
Wishing Two Stop Bits many more years.
- Dear Mr Kurtz.
I suspect many here, as I did, encountered your BASIC as a means to make their micro play games or build a program to unlock the power of their new fangled computer. Graphs, tables of numbers or even juvenile electronic vandalism in Sears, Radio Shack, or other shops that sold micros in the 70s and 80s. Your language was a gateway that allowed me to begin my journey into computing. Simple enough that I could learn at computer camp but powerful enough to simulate a nuclear reactor (SCRAM). Some even built an empire using your creation.
Thank you.
- As an owner of a ZX81 at the time it's difficult to explain what it was 3d Monster Maze at the time, first it was rare/unusual to have a computer at home, 2nd what they did with the game as simple as it looks today , graphics, gameplay etc .. was incredible.
- Don't be fooled by the word “trial” and general shareware aesthetic. Free serials are here: http://www.file-ex.com/freereg.html
- A lovely little machine, it would've been nice to see how things had proceeded, had this been successful enough to warrant a few more revisions. Certainly, it had relevance to the music-making computer users of the period. I wonder if its MIDI was ever used for productive purposes ..
- Dude. The article from your site. “ The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development” was awesome.
- I really appreciate it when tech companies make an effort to preserve history and share it.
However, it's important to also share Nintendo has recently launched a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks on the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, this was largely limited to stopping piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement, both of which are appropriate and understandable.
However, the greatly expanded and all-encompassing scope of their recent legal actions now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark abuse. Their senior management also seemed to appreciate the retro community is some their most active current customers and brand fans. Over the last year that restraint has vanished, making it all the more ironic Nintendo is now funding a new museum to celebrate its past while funding lawyers to threaten the non-profit historical preservation and non-commercial fan communities passionately keeping Nintendo's storied past alive for future generations.
While I'll always love Nintendo's rich historical legacy, until they again exercise reasonable restraint in their now-abusive legal tactics, I can no longer in good conscience support the company or its products.
- The most important preventative measure in my experience: don't lay CDs upside-down in the name of “““protecting””” them! I know it's counter-intuitive, because I used to do it myself, but take a look at a cross-section of a CD and you'll see why it's the worst possible thing you can inadvertently do. The data layer is directly under the label, and the bottom of the disc is relatively well-protected in comparison: https://www.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/fig2-3.jpg
This is also the reason why all-over-print CDs are better survivors than discs whose obverse design integrates the raw silver. Note that this is specific to CDs — DVDs and BDs have polycarbonate on both sides!
- I remember seeing these very computers, and even using some of them, in the Living Computer Museum only a few years ago. How sad to see this collection and the history it represents being auctioned off piecemeal to individual rich guys. Such a loss.
- This was a thing with the Amiga 500 computer too. I worked at a company which had a corporate field deployment of over a thousand Amiga 500 systems and some of these computers would start crashing intermittently due to the A500's "Fat Agnus" becoming unseated in its square socket, especially during shipping and thermal expansion/contraction. The chip got its nickname because it was a square packaged upgrade version of the earlier rectangular Agnus chip in the Amiga 1000.
These 1,000+ Amiga 500s were leased as complete systems including a 13" monochrome composite video monitor and an Okidata 182 dot matrix printer. All these Amigas only ever ran a single, highly complex and extremely valuable custom software application which auto-booted from the internal 880k floppy, was never publicly released and has remained unknown to this day.
This program was protected from being pirated with hardware in the form of a custom-designed and manufactured 1MB RAM + Real-Time Clock expansion board pre-installed in the A500's "trap door" slot on the bottom. This unique board added the same functionality as the standard Commodore A501 board but was customized by swapping the real-time clock data lines around, which the software checked to confirm it was running on an officially leased A500. The software application was written in C by myself and two other devs and we also doubled as the support, service, training, installation and shipping staff for this fleet.
Since we shipped them to each field location and they tended to be in locations which weren't well thermally controlled after hours, we got a fair number of these errors. Since the vast majority of our users were older female office workers who'd never touched a computer before, any error would trigger a support call. It wasn't easy to convince these nice ladies on the phone to lift the computer 6 inches and then drop it! But it did always fix the problem. We called it a "technical drop" :-)
As a very early Amiga 1000 owner and enthusiast, I'm the one who primarily convinced this small company that the newly announced A500 was the best low-cost option to run field deployments of their niche application and, aside from this occasional error problem, the huge fleet of Amigas performed admirably for many years. Especially considering the machines were individually shipped to each field location and these tended to be pretty hostile environments like temporary mobile offices, sometimes powered only by gasoline-powered generators subject to constant surges and brown-outs (think construction trailers).
I'm proud my unorthodox recommendation ended up working out so well since, despite my obvious bias, the A500 really was the perfect fit for this unique application in early 1987. The software app itself was related to real estate financing, so it had to have a 10-key and the entire system had to fit on a small side desk used by constantly rotating staff in a crowded temporary office. It had to be self-booting, self-maintaining and dirt simple, since almost none of the users had ever touched any computer before. It also had to be reliable because they frequently got moved around in the field between desks and buildings entirely by these novice users. So being all-in-one really helped since every extra wire and component was another thing to lose and/or break. I learned the hard way that talking to a nice lady on the phone who'd never seen a computer in person through reconnecting this "newfangled contraption" which someone else had disconnected, moved and left on the floor in a random pile the day before, was a rapid education on how to communicate physical instructions clearly! I always just pictured them as my sweet elderly aunt which helped keep my cool :-). Finally, the system had to be super cheap because they got stolen fairly often (no security after hours in these isolated remote offices).
Although entirely unknown at the time or after (since there was no reason for this small company serving a narrow niche market to do any PR) this was, as far as I know, the largest ever corporate deployment of Amiga computers.
One interesting note: the application was written to only use the keyboard, mostly just the arrow and Enter keys plus a few function keys we labeled with custom color-coded stickers for navigation such as Go, Back, Menu and Print. Usually we never even supplied the Amiga mouse with the systems, however I was optimistic we could show the users how to operate the mouse so they could run other apps if they wanted to. I conceded defeat after trying to teach the first half dozen users I did installs for how to use the "Bonus Mouse". I thought some would eventually get it but the necessary eye-hand coordination completely eluded these nice ladies circa 1987.
- It's funny seeing "Learn how to use a mouse". I had to help some parolees recently who now have to do "criminal thinking" classes after they get out. These are done on a PC with a bunch of multiple choice questions (You see a man drop his wallet in the street. Do you... a) keep the wallet..).
The problem is, some of these guys had been locked up since pretty much the invention of the mouse and had never seen one except in a movie, so you have to start at the beginning...!
- I'm sure if the tapes they found contained some form of evidence against the founders of SciHub or Anna's Archive, they would have found a way to play it back /s
- If you want to hear about Xbox hacking. I can’t recommend enough the two part series on the dark net diaries podcast.
XBOX UNDERGROUND (Part 1) https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/
XBOX UNDERGROUND (PART 2) https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/46/
- While I love the idea, e-waste is too good for these infernal machines. I expect them to rot for all eternity in the pits of the far reaches of hell, but enjoying life far more than the executives who came up with ink subscriptions.
- Yeah, that's the version this post actually links to. I don't see any links to newer versions of GW-BASIC. It's weird, as the post title refers to GW-BASIC, but everything else is about DOS 4.xx
- Is this a different version of GW-BASIC? The article mentions MS-DOS 4.01. Perhaps it is the version of GW-BASIC included with that? I thought a version of GW-BASIC had already been open-sourced a few years back?
- I tried it for a short while. Its not bad. But I found AntiX Linux to be even more lightweight compared to Q4OS. It doesnt provide XP feel tho.
- Reminiscent of SNES DOOM, where the coprocessor on the cartridge is basically doing the work.
- Relevant Old New Thing: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...
Compare to Connectix's RAM Doubler for Mac which was not only legit but is so good that it's often worth installing even with compression disabled:
https://macintoshgarden.org/search/node/connectix%20ram%20do...
- A while back I found copies of a CAD add on program I wrote called Ez-Shapes. Two disks, 3.5" style. One had bad blocks. I had made multiple compressed archives of both source code and object code.
Lost the object code archive for some of the project, despite having two copies.
The source code was fine, and after getting a copy of the software via (those places online), I was able to compile and run the thing as if it were 1992!
I have a USB floppy drive that seems to work well.
For grins, I plugged it into my Samsung Note 9 phone, and it WORKED! I saw 1.44Mb storage device. Hilarious!
- TL;DR The Računalniški muzej (Computer Museum) in Slovenia is celebrating the 55th anniversary of Radio Študent by broadcasting a ZX Spectrum game called "Kontrabant 2" over FM radio. This nostalgic event allows owners of the original ZX Spectrum to load and play the game via radio waves, reminiscent of how games were distributed in the past. The broadcast will take place at 89.3 MHz around 21:30.
- Everyone. Do yourself a favour and click the link.
1) Yes the console looks dorky and odd, but the animations of the terminal sessions is a piece of magic.
2) There is a map of the ENTIRE internet circa 1977. The whole banana in one spot.
- I bought an ihome dock last year but my ipod has rockbox on it and it just didn't really work like I wanted it to. I know it probably would if I just put it back to stock firmware but that's just not really worth it for the trade off
- that's actually the cover from the Shadowrun 2nd edition core rulebook :)
- I got one of these from a co-worker. Really cool little device! I wish I had one back in 89 that would have been awesome
- seems there's a project to create a drop in open source replacement.
- The ATM hacking scene in T2 was very iconic. It was almost a meme at the time, as witnessed by the cover of Shadowrun for Sega Genesis. The image which depicts a person jacked into an ATM while their friends stood watch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0926221/mediaviewer/rm385149184.../
- More
https://obsolescence.dev/pidp10.html