Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a working 8-bit computer, with 256 bytes of program memory, six general purpose registers, a writable program counter, an instruction decoder, an ALU and a condition decoder, with a provision for external I/O:
@antonieconsult
"Turing Complete". You can buy it on "Steam". It's a circuit simulator and designer capable of generating VHDL, cleverly disguised as a game with a series of circuit design challenges / courses.
@polotek
"Developers" are not engineers, they have never been engineers, and they will never be engineers unless they actually have formal education in engineering, but those who do are not "developers".
They self-styled themselves engineers, but that doesn't make it true.
Digging through my archives for the picture of my very first laboratory, the one which birthed the building blocks of my private datacenter a few years later, I found a couple of jewels, like my first SGI Indigo system, and my Octane:
My 8-bit computer has cracked a three digit pin (0 - 255) in maximum of 165 CPU cycles.
The code to find the pin by brute force is 15 bytes. Implemented my own mnemonics so I wouldn't have to toggle the bits every time.
(Backward labels aren't my doing.)
@borglord1
I'm not autistic, just trying to teach myself how to design my own hardware because there is a very specific type of a computer which I would like to build, and I'd also like to be able to design other hardware in the future. Learning something new versus wasting one's life away.
What an awesome job
@CommodoreLad
did refurbishing my NTSC C=128D!
First he replaced the 110 V, 60 Hz power supply in the system with a modern 50 Hz, 220 V on which runs cooler and draws less power, then he built me this C=1581 power supply.
I thought for sure this would choke - one of my HAM6 converted videos running on my 68000 7 MHz A500 with 2 MB FAST and 1 MB CHIP RAM - A570 CD with SCSI and a SCSI2SD. It actually plays! A bit slow, but I can chang some settings. Next - playback from CD!.
Ah, those were happier times as far as IT and computers went; that thing down there on the left is an Amiga Technologies PAL A1200 with a Blizzard PPC 603e at 180 MHz and a SCSI controller, with a NEC MultiSync monitor. Selling that kit was a big mistake.
In case anybody is interested in Blitter programming, this is all the 68k code I've had to render the sky using the Blitter as shown in the previous Stunt Car Racer video tweet. 😀
Finally the loading works correctly, and the code is now POSIX compliant, too.
Thanks to
@Iggi76123640
for spurring me onto this journey of getting the Protracker clone working on
#Solaris
.
Danko of
@Fairlight64
's "Complications" seems very appropriate to play:
And believe you me, Linux dearly needs ZFS. I've seen way too much downtime due to silently corrupted data, misconfigured RAID controllers, hardware RAID, and storage administration mistakes on Linux-based operating systems. All of which could have been easily prevented with ZFS.
Last week
#FreeBSD
#ZFS
merged into
#OpenZFS
Up until this change, sync
#ZVOL
writes were done serially. But with the new code, ZVOLs are processed concurrently with sync writes in parallel.
"The result is that the throughput of sync writes is tripled."”
@DougDeMuro
You've become such a brand that even my family members know who you are and what you do, and they couldn't care less about cars (or have anything to do with them).
I remember logging into a VAX once or twice. One system where none of my UNIX®️, Amiga, Commodore or MS-DOS knowledge was of any use. Nothing made any sense. The system might as well have been designed by aliens, as far as I was concerned.
Good old Jörg Schilling. You were a beacon of sanity and intelligence when GNU/Linux idiots thought they knew everything better. Every time optical media is burned, your code rises up to the task.
We lost you too soon. Gone but never forgotten, you are sorely missed, dear friend.
The C=1571 is back in his place, after the long journey to the United Kingdom and back, after having the power supply replaced with a modern one, right where it left from and where it belongs:
Right, that's sorted then: latest version of DOSBox compiled, packaged and running Eye of the Beholder on Solaris 10. And my oh my, it's a lot faster than on Microsoft Windows!
That time when the last replacement power supply in the Sun T1000 firewall dies, you determine all your other servers only have 2 net interfaces and you have to break out your old Sun Ultra 5, only to discover the TOD battery has died, so Forth reprogramming to 08:00:20:c0:ff:ee
So many fond memories copying disks on my C=128 with "Renegade" and "Maverick". It has to be 30+ years since I've seen this. Those were happier times, when doing something on and with a computer was joy.
When the cracked copy is multiple times better than the original software:
- completely loads from cartridge;
- uses less space;
- enhanced documentation;
- ten optional trainers built in.
🎵OOOHHH, IT'S A PIRATE LIFE FOR MEEE...! 🎶 🏴☠️
That's the Sun X4100 M2 ready to go, but it ain't quite time yet; its Sun V240 counterpart has to be ready too. The two of them host Solaris zones, one zone for NTP and one for DNS each, and are cross-configured for redundancy. Who needs VMware and Docker when one has zones?
@BMW
New looks yes, ugly looks no.
You clearly need a hint: look at the flowing, beautiful, clean, elegant lines of the 1st generation mazda6 or Alfa Romeo 159 wagons. We were past cut-out shapes in kindergarten. You should be too by now.
This is just too cool to pass up: did you know
#Solaris
and by extension
#illumos
has syseventadm(1M), which lets one register one's own scripts & programs to respond to arbitrary, generic events?
Sun IPX, the little machine which could. With Solaris properly tuned and running on just 64 MB and a single QuadFast EtherNet card, it was turned into a router / firewall appliance which just and ran and ran its little SPARC ❤️ out at 50 MHz. Just served and served and served.
And nothing has changed since - quality, reliability and performance-wise, GNU/Linux is still just a hobbyist's operating system.
You want something high performance and paranoid about the integrity of your data?
#FreeBSD
or
#SmartOS
are both valid choices.
A Commodore Amiga with a Raspberry Pi emulating a Motorola 68060 running at 2.2 GHz?
Linus Torvalds can keep getting pissed off because "Amiga just won't die!", he he! 😁
@theLionary
@culturaltutor
That is neither true nor correct, at all: not only is brutalism the most utilitarian, it is also the safest, producing the most robust buildings. It is the closest humanity has ever come to the futuristic building depicted in science fiction.
That feeling of delight and joy, when one thinks that all of the espresso in the cup is gone, and discovers that there is still a little bit left for one more swig.
@BreakIntoProg
You ran into someone ignorant. Happens often in interviews.
Game programmers are the best in our industry, and I've long maintained that they would make for the best enterprise software problem solvers.
Like in "Cool Runnings", they are the Jamaican sprinters of bob sledding.
@wrenching_wench
That engine probably seized and caused a chain reaction failure. What would be really interesting is to find out what the root cause of this failure is...
@aka_pugs
Seeing that "digital" logo warms my heart... so many nice moments, and a profound sadness that the company now only lives in our memories. At least its legacy soldiers on in technology like this one.
@SaphireLattice
@CendyneNaga
@chigbarg
@homphs
No; the correct way, which will work on every UNIX®️ and UNIX®️-like platform is:
xz -dc blabla.tar.xz | tar xf -
whereby xz(1) can be replaced with any decompressor.
tar is a tape archiver, and implementing a decompressor (-z) in it goes against "do one thing and do it well".
awk -v boot=/var/run/dmesg.boot 'BEGIN{while((c="kldstat -v")|getline>0){if(NF>2){m=$5;d=0}if(m=="kernel"&&++d>3){for(n=split($2,x,"/");--n>=0;)avail[x[n+1]]}}close(c);while(getline<boot>0){if(sub(/[0-9.]+:$/,"",$1))probed[$1]}close(dmesg)}$1!="device"||$2 in probed||$2 in avail'
Jörg is gone. Such horrible news. He was one of true UNIX®️ sages, often hard and opinionated but very rarely wrong. He knew good technology when he saw it, and thus he loved Solaris and OpenSolaris with all of his being.
"Friends of
#illumos
" podcast episode
#1
, and personally I think it's great Allan Jude decided to participate on behalf of our
#FreeBSD
friends. We love you guys!
@aka_pugs
SPARCstation 1+ was the first UNIX®️ workstation I owned ❤️
I paid literally the last 40 bucks out of my wallet for it with nothing to eat for the rest of the week.
I bought Solaris 7 boxed set for $50 from my next pay check, directly from Sun & promptly ditched SPARC Linux.
Got fed up with compiling tons of code on the T2000; I'm a now proud owner of a Fujitsu M3000 SPARC64 system. Compiling should be orders of magnitude faster now. 16 GB RAM, 2 x 146 GB SAS 2.5" 15k RPM drives, rack mount kit, rack cable management arm. $641 USD.
Finished
#Sun
Type 7 keyboard! Bought for a few euros, removed all the keycaps, gave them cleaning in the ultrasonic washer and cleaned the keyboard itself manually. The Eusmilus will use it as a period-correct keyboard for Sun Blade 1000.
#EusmilusBuilds
#Solaris
#RetroComputing
And if you look all the way to the right, you can see the side of my PowerChallenge; I must have torn and put that thing together about 20 times, studying it. Eight MIPS CPU's and eight GB of memory back in the early 2000's, it was a beast. So was my electricity bill.
For those of you who ran Sun servers this will be unsurprising, but for the rest of my followers: ever seen heat sinks on hard drives? A lot of Sun servers had them, since they ran Seagate Cheetah hard drives, and those spun at either 10,000 or 15,000 RPM: heat. Sun high quality.
@fintanr
@monkchips
Netra line was the best: everything one needs and nothing one doesn't.
Shove into the rack, hook up ttya to the console management switch and power on so that Jumpstart™️ can flash it, thereby turning it into a fully configured system, ready to serve.
Bliss!
At work, writing some C++ code while a group of cows are milling around on the hillsides and having the morning chit-chat, mooing to each other. Who needs background music? So idyllic. I love it. Always did.
Hello, meet inst(1M), a software packaging and management subsystem in SGI IRIX, a SVR4 UNIX®️. inst(1M) is so advanced that it is still unmatched by any other packaging system out there, even though IRIX®️ hasn't been in development for more than a decade.
Somebody overwrote /usr/bin/vi with a symbolic link to some 3rd party vim package which of course didn't install in a sparse zone when provisioning it.
No problem: I simply used ed(1), the original, line oriented editor.
Oh how I love you
#UNIX
®️!
Unreeeal Superhero 3, ATARI ST conversion in maxYMiser tracker; technically brilliant, converting a 44 KHz, 16-bit, 16 channel MODule to Yamaha YM 2149, 8-bit, 3 channel tune. Approved by Kenet & Rez, the original authors. ❤️ for m0dmate who pulled it off!
My Amiga 500++ lives! Over 300 components and goodness knows how many hours and solder joints later.. Big thanks to
@PeepoUK
for reverse engineering the main board and making this possible
#amiga500plusplus
#amiga500
Internal DNS servers up and running, internal NTP servers up and running, DMZ DNS servers up and running, DMZ NTP servers up and running, firewall switched over to the new ISP and the rats' nest of cables is sorted.
Another project brought to a successful close. On to next phase.
@1856601
You get off on intentionally making it look blocky, or what? Back in the day, we were working so hard to NOT make it look blocky, because it looks bad.
The AmigaOS 3.9 installer was nagging about protected files, so for the 1st time in over 30 years, I had to pull this book from my shelf to see how to use the PROTECT command to make all files readable, writable and deletable, and the syntax is...
PROTECT DH0:#? +rwd ALL QUIET
Saturday morning breakfast is served. Afterwards it's off to wash the car and get some shopping done before the 2nd lockdown. I'm hoping my village butcher will have made some old fashioned smoked pork sausages with garlic... if I'm lucky.
@PCzanik
@OpenSystems_
@HWadrr
@jpmens
@fosdembsd
@dgoodkin
I'm a Solaris 10 / SmartOS system engineer myself, but I've nothing but love and respect for our FreeBSD friends who always unselfishly help us out. Everybody should be so lucky to have friends like those. Good people.
@CommodoreBlog
There hasn't been a cool time like the rave / techno/ euro dance time back in the 1990's. I remember killing Gössers with Westbam and hanging out with Marusha and DJ Tanith while they were playing their sets in front of 10,000 people. Hell there's even footage...
Red Devil of
@Fairlight64
was an old C=64 scener. In this logo, he successfully fused the C=64 logo aesthetic with the advanced capabilities of the Amiga platform. So it wasn't enough that he was a talented SID chip music composer, he was also a talented painter.
#MastersOfOld
Thursday night sitting down with a glass of wine and Sun Microsystems nroff and troff manual from the early 1990's.
Yes, I'm a pervert. I know. And proud of it, too.
The legend of Silicon Graphics indeed! Roger Faulkner of Sun Microsystems (the father of /proc) might have considered them "incredibly arrogant", but Silicon Graphics engineers were so far ahead of everyone else, that some of their inventions like inst(1M) are still cutting edge.
And yet, even after 14 years of battle-hardened production use in the most demanding, enterprise mission critical environments, there are still people out there who've never heard of Solaris / SmartOS zones technology. Sad and demoralizing.
@VictorStinner
Your argument of "development burden" is counterpointed by the NetBSD project whose team is tiny compared to yours, yet they regularly build and support many architectures. Because of these two facts and that you're a redhat employee I question your argument and your motivation.
@rienn9999
@Fish_CTO
Actually it is, as regular expressions were invented based on the research paper written in 1939 (if my memory serves me) by a neuroscientist who was a medical doctor.
So regexes are as human as one can be human, an identifying trait of humanity, in a sense.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I find the housing of the ATARI ST personal computer incredibly pleasing, the industrial design platonically erotic. I could put it on a pedestal in one of my libraries and just stare at it like one appreciates a masterpiece sculpture.
Success! But also failure as well as the battery on the accelerator only has two contacts.
@edu_arana
, could I get away with cutting off one of the legs, or do you have a different battery holder for the Phase 5 Blizzard 1230 MK IV accelerator?
Grab your favorite beverage, strap down and let me take you on a crazy, cookamamie adventure of connecting a Commodore 64 with the outside world according to "make do with what you have" and "son, you got more problems than a squirrel on an eight lane highway!" principles.
Well, that was no fun, but it's hopefully done and over with. If the Amiga 1200 motherboard survived the replacement of all of those, it'll be a miracle, especially so since I tore off one solder pad and had patch it with the solder... we'll see soon enough.
I guess I better get cracking on replacing the capacitors in my Amiga 1200 with
@AMIGAstore
capacitor kit, and
@bcantrill
and
@ahl
keeping me company with their "Surviving the Dot-Com Bust" podcast in the background. It's not going to recap herself, you know.
Managed to mount my home directory on my Solaris 10 workstation as an AmigaDOS drive on my A1200 connected over NFS. W00t!
Does anybody know how to make "EasyNet" automatically start from S:User-Startup during boot?
A hacker news opines on AWK, something she or he obviously know very little about in favor of Ruby (!!!) or Python (!!!) and Perl (!!!) This is why "Hacker" "News" has become such a disgrace of the IT industry. Ryan strongly rejects. I strongly agree with him.
@JohnKennedyMSFT
@6502nerd
As much as I love you dearly people, that'd mean I'd have to pack up and leave, since I often write about Solaris,
#illumos
and
#SmartOS
, which are cutting edge, so there'd be no place for me.
@mjg59
Do you understand people pushing back on Rust because the syntax of the language is insane?
Also you neglect that for us assembler coders, C is fine inasmuch as we don't have issues with understanding how buffer overflows work, how to avoid them and memory leaks. Beats insanity.
@BelfastCol
@harrismonkey
There's nothing wrong with the way the Scimitar looks; if anything, the Scimitar could look more agressive and not suffer for it.