Halt and Catch Fire

“It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.”

I feel the same way when I work on older cars.

I'm not a slave to my computer. Stop using bad services that are designed to manipulate your behaviour. There's still the good old Internet out there with genuinely interesting content.

IPv8 and it's (eventually mandatory) device-attestation-auth-at-protocol-level will end all of this pseudoanonymous free thinking information exchange. It was good while it lasted.

One thing i found very interesting over the years is that when people seem to abuse systems ( key activation, share netflix accounts, vpn, torrents) it’s considered a serious crime, but when companies openly abuse systems ( unsubscribe maze, addiction, fraud ) it’s frowned upon.

That should be the other way around. Until then systems will always try to rule over people and people will adapt for better or for worse.

Computers still do the exact same thing they did back then, which is to read opcodes and do binary math. That is all. It is people and corporations that found a way to monetize them which is hostile to us users. But I think that with time, this too shall pass and computers will still do what they always did. You can still enjoy designing a small PCB, working with microcontrollers and building something fun.

Time is running out to do something effective about that enslavement - well, there are other very effective things that can be done to 'cure' people of electronic enslavement (EMP and/or other disaster) - but the point is, if we want to do something effective, we must be teaching new generations, old technology.

Technology doesn't get old - users do. However, users getting older 'feel better about this fact', often ignored, by upgrading to new technology - and into this very slippery wheel of consumerism has been deposited a great deal many traps, by operating system vendors, to keep us in the wheel.

The solution is to promote, among as young a generation as can tolerate it - immediately - the idea of using old technology to do wonderful and new and interesting things.

>Everyday user

Yes, a majority of every day users do not need this kind of backwards-focused thinking, to get work done. It is, very specifically, about the kids.

We have to make sure there are still hackers in 10 years time.

In 1978 I built a single board computer with a 6800 uP and a 6845 to drive the display. Made a keyboard for it, and it worked.

Unfortunately, in my many moves it has disappeared, though I still have the schematics for it.

Somehow I missed the boat on being a billionaire!

The IBM MDA also had a 6845, and since it was driving a fixed-frequency monitor of extremely simple design, any deviation from the standard timings could definitely let the magic smoke out of the flyback transformer.

https://marc.info/?l=classiccmp&m=119637265107100

That was definitely a defect of the monitor, not a serious mistake of the programmer. Any damaged monitor should have been paid by whoever had approved such a monitor design, even in the case of a monitor integrated in an all-in-one computer, which was not supposed to be disconnected from the computer.

I have also seen some monitors designed so badly, like the IBM MDA monitor mentioned at the link provided by userbinator, but all the TV sets that I have ever seen could only be synchronized to the desired scanning frequencies by the "sync" pulses, but they would oscillate freely in the absence of sync pulses.

The cost savings by not having relaxation oscillators or PLLs that would drive the raster scan in the absence of sync pulses, and which would limit the range of acceptable scan frequencies to safe values, have always been negligible, even by the time of the vacuum tube TV sets, and much more so by the time of computer monitors. The elimination of physical safety devices is not an acceptable way to reduce costs, especially when the savings are so small as in this case.

The more likely risk with a 6845 is creating a way out of spec vertical sync that can cause the monitor's frame flyback transformer to fail. Although how you describe the PET monitor's beam being "parked" suggests it's actually the same effect.

It really starts strong too. The first couple of episodes are fantastic.

Same showrunner is doing the current season of The Terror (a/k/a "North Pole Bear Show" in my review notes; that first season was excellent).

Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas and then computing moving to California. It both shows mainframe, personal computers (the C64) and then beige PC taking over.

Great intro too:

https://youtu.be/yD_kCKiSkoI

It's a shame that it is such a niche show in practice. The acting of Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis in particular are so good across all 4 seasons.

I recommend it at every chance I get, but few people ever watch it. They're more likely to give Silicon Valley a try.

Yeah a truly fantastic show all the way through the end. One of my favorites by far.

I still have it downloaded somewhere as wanted to watch it again. It was great

Agreed. This was one of the few shows that advanced the storyline quite a bit threw the seasons without jumping the shark.

I don't get why it's so praised. Everybody says it's about the rise of computing, and all I got was a shoehorned romance story with computers in the background.

Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.

I have worked on systems that have a thermite charge under the RAM and EPROM chips, wired up to GPIO for 'terminate and stay that way' instructions. It is not an urban legend - just a highly protected secret. Those products which require this feature are not usually discussed in consumer circles ..

>The cryptographic module shall contain tamper response and zeroization circuitry that shall continuously monitor the tamper detection envelope and, upon the detection of tampering, shall immediately zeroize all plaintext secret and private cryptographic keys and CSPs.

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.140-2.pdf

Some more discussion here: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

Well, data centers catch fire all the time. And it stands to reason that an infinite loop could increase power draw and trigger a fire.

Though that still wouldn't really be the machine itself catching fire, but the building and/or wiring.

Have they been removed? I’m mostly seeing comments from established accounts.

I mean, it is the thing that made me go down this rabbit hole. Need to watch it now!

Modern OCR is amazing. That image is full of noise and ChatGPT did it without any errors that a I can see.

I compared it to another OCR of the same image, using http://ocr.space, and ChatGPT was correct in all the small number of differences, even preserving misspellings in the source.

When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon

You'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.

I didn't even notice that bit.

What broke the show for me was some hot peroxide blonde doing what was really done by a slightly dumpy guy in an isolated office.

I just can't watch shows that fictionalize history from my field of work. My dad's a musician and he's the same with his field.

I'm fine with that. I read the history book or watch the documentary instead.

It may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others.

Most actors and directors put a lot of thought into small details like this, so when you see something like this it’s often intentional.

> World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.

Vladimir Horowitz very famously played a televised concert back in the 80s where, for the first time, a few cameras stayed focused closely on his hands. He had horrible technique. It was horrible by his own professed standard: for most of the fundamental things he himself taught to his students, he was doing the opposite! This was broadcast to millions of people. Piano teachers everywhere were pissed.

While that bad technique isn't particularly noticeable in the resulting sound for that concert, there's an analysis somewhere that shows the damage it did as he aged. You can hear certain problems he was having in his later recordings, and video from the same period confirms that the bad technique (like straining the wrist on octaves) was the culprit[1].

In any case, all kinds of world class people do all kinds of fucked up shit.

Edit:

1: In other words, when he was middle-aged he could play octaves accurately with a strained wrist, but he couldn't do that in old age. However, if he had been leveraging the weight/power of his entire arm for the octaves, he would have gotten accuracy in both cases.

2: IIRC, he didn't realize what his technique looked like until someone showed him the video. :)

That feels entirely realistic for the time to me. It would certainly’ve been realistic to my formative years in the industry (a little later - turn of the century).

I still can’t ‘properly’ touch-type.

Keypunch operators learned to type with just their index fingers. I saw this with some older operators of the airline ticketing system at the airport years ago.

My dad was a great programmer... who typed with a terrible two finger peck technique. It was infuriating to watch as a kid.

Typing was not a core skill. He had secretaries for that. A lot of the early typing he did was on a keypunch when an operator wasn't available; "proper" early mechanical keypunch technique was index fingers only because of the high forces involved.

My memories of the early 80's have a lot of "computer people" -- both older mainframe types like my dad, and younger people -- typing like that.

At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.

You are looking for the wrong badge.

My dad was a programmer in the 70s and 80s and, to this day, he types with both middle fingers and that's it.

Lots of people were typing like that. As far as typing today, different layouts, hobbies with ergonomic keyboards etc we see far more people touch typing today than were in the 80's. I wouldn't call it abnormal, I was pecking - very quickly for a long time before I ever knew what vi was. I found vi on my first unix login in '85 and still pecked at it. I also know that today, with far more people typing, less of them probably gain the same knowledge as we did hacking back then. Good typing can't replace your computer knowledge. Today I never look at my keyboard, it's 36 keys and its no use looking as no symbol represents what happens when you press the key. I am a better typist, not better at software though.

I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.

Mario teaches typing hadn't been invented yet!

My father is a journalist and learned to type by himself on typewriters using his index fingers. He writes a lot and he is really fast. I don't have any issues with that.

The only reason I learned to touch type was out of boredom and the fact that the only “game” for the TI99/4a system (it had an “extender” with floppy drive and ran some spreadsheet) that my dad brought home from work at weekends was a touch typing tutor. When I started CS, I was in the tiny minority in my class that could touch type. During an introductory lecture for the course, one of the tips was “learn to touch type”.