Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Painters have arrived...
Painters have arrived ... and they went right to work. I'm still surprised every time a workman shows up on the day and time they say they will. They're working to some songs I haven't heard for many years: Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, etc. My mom would feel right at home...
“Cosmic copyright law”...
“Cosmic copyright law” ... underlies a new “theory of everything”...
When I read the headline, my first thought was: “Oh, no! The lawyers are extending IP to the entire cosmos?!?!?!”
When I read the headline, my first thought was: “Oh, no! The lawyers are extending IP to the entire cosmos?!?!?!”
Aleck, this is a teletype...
The teletype that I owned (affectionately nicknamed “Ralph”) was a different model than this one: it was a Model 28 Baudot code (five bit code) machine, and not the eight bit Model 33 shown here. Consequently it couldn't read the 8 bit tapes that Microsoft sold their Basic on – so I built a 8 bit tape reader based on photo diodes (instead of the mechanical pins used to sense the tape holes on the teletypes). When I received my paper tape of Microsoft Basic, my first attempt to read it was a complete failure – the tape was semi-transparent, and my tape reader couldn't distinguish between the holes and not-holes!
In sheer frustrated desperation, I unrolled that entire paper tape into a large bucket, and dyed it with black fabric dye. The next day I pulled out the tape (now nicely blackened) and let it dry for a couple of days. The next attempt to read it worked flawlessly :)
There was another, more technical issue as well: the checksum loader (referred to on the video) was designed to work with hardware I didn't have: an Altair or an IMSAI computer. My computer was a home-built Z80 based computer with completely different serial IO. So I had to reverse-engineer the checksum loader, and write the equivalent to work on my own computer. The first step to reverse-engineer it was to read it (by Mark IV eyeball) from the paper tape, generating a hex machine code listing. Then I manually reverse-assembled it, then actually figured out how it worked. Ah, those were the days! The equivalent would be a lot more difficult today...