satiated_grue

I'm surprised by the existence of \n\r line terminations!

\r\n was how lines were terminated on the wire for many early devices (for example, the Teletype ASR-33 seen in the famous photograph of Thompson and Ritchie at Bell Labs).

If the carriage is very far to the right, and an LF is sent followed by the CR, then the carriage will still be returning when the next character arrives, which will print at some random location along the return path.

CR followed by the mechanically much faster LF operation gives enough time for the carriage to be fully homed and in proper position for the printable character to be struck.

They'll pay for it for their private collections, though.

https://www.artsy.net/feature/the-algorithm-auction

I took the city bus to kindergarten, alone, in the U.S. Things have changed here since, and we have given a name to this specific issue: "Stranger Danger". Neighbors discuss vans cruising town, looking to abduct their children. I've not seen any actual arrests and trials, though.

This event is not mythical. That is why the log entry says "First /actual/ case of a bug being found".

It's a humorous pointing out of "We've called them bugs for a long time, but this time it actually was a real, physical bug, and here it is - ha ha."

The myth is that people for some reason started thinking that was the first use of the word "bug" in this context.

I remember running live and then installing from Yggdrasil in the early 90s on 486 with 8MB RAM and 250MB hard disk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

Really liked Knoppix for a lot of things, though. Used to take it to the county used-sales office and boot the PCs they were selling to test for functionality and Linux compatibility.

I was fortunate to go to a high school that got a single Apple ][+ in the science department for physics, and a grant to pay a student programmer to develop educational physics software. I was further fortunate to be the student programmer, which was amazing after spending the past few years punching FORTRAN IV and COBOL on cards using an IBM 029 and batching them to the school district's IBM 360 overnight.

From what I've seen, it's the other way around - computers are still fun for the old nerds.

I go to events like vintage computer festivals, and old folks are having a party with computers.

I look at younger people with computers, and for the most part they are just commodity tools for hosting apps and watching media. Even younger people describing what they are doing for fun with computers are building "home labs" of application hosting systems.

Yes, and the order is important.

Sending a carriage return and linefeed to a TTY 33 and then printing works fine. Doing them in the opposite order, if the carriage is to the right of the page, will result in a linefeed (platen rotation) happening quickly, then the carriage starting to move left to the beginning of the next line, and then the next printed character will print wherever the carriage happens to be at the time - not yet to the left. So you will be missing a character at the beginning of the line because it's in between the two lines in an unexpected column-ish.

I have run into (in my mind, "hipster") code where the programmer for some reason reversed the order of CR and LF.

How the world has changed, repeatedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax

There was at least one non-identical ISA slot:

https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT_Syst... https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/understanding-pcxt-slot-8/

That's exactly what happened in Ashburn. Loudoun County VA is currently meeting pretty much its entire operating budget with data center tax revenue, and property tax rates have been going down for years. More importantly, Loudoun went from being the fastest growing county in the US, borrowing money and building roads, schools, fire stations, etc. at a fierce clip, to a much more maintainable population growth curve (= more compatible with residential sprawl).

If one were to release an AI app - what would be an appropriate license? Genuine question.

This would be something neat to do with a core memory array, just like this but bigger:

https://www.core64.io/

You'd be surprised to learn how many people fell out of airplanes because of lack of seat belts.

And a flying field was established at College Park, MD where Orville Wright began teaching Army officers to fly in 1909.

That airport is still operating and is the oldest continuously operating airport in the world.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/college-park-airport.htm

FWIW, I think there are 5 surviving original Wright bicycles, so they are outnumbered by the airplanes.

Super common technique. Aircraft cockpit videos usually exhibit stroboscopic effects because of the scan rate of the camera and the refresh rate of the displays, and those are very expensive devices. Short shutter time photos are just not a case I think most displays are designed for.

There was also the 8089 I/O co-processor designed for the 8086/8088 that I have never seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8089

ASCII was started in 1960. A terminal then would have been a mostly-mechanical teletype (keyboard and printer, possibly with paper tape reader/punch), without much by way of "circuit logic". Think of it more as a bit caused a physical shift of a linkage to do something like hit the upper or lower part of a hammer, or a separate set of hammers for the same remaining bits.

Look at the Teletype ASR-33, introduced in 1963.

I certainly remember magnetic media being referred to as "disc".

For one quickly Googled example, the Sperry Univac 8433, may its heads never crash:

https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/univac/1100/brochure...

FL180 is the floor of Class A airspace, "the flight levels", where airliners etc. operate.

Relevant chapter from FAA "Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge": https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/17_phak_ch15.pdf

In the "Flight Levels", altitudes are referred to not in feet above sea level but as "FLxxx" where xxx is a nominal altitude in 100s of feet.

Altimetry is done using barometric pressure. Since this varies with weather, airplanes at lower altitudes set their altimeters to the local barometric pressure for a reasonably accurate reading. In the flight levels, where planes are typically covering ground quickly and there is very little chance of your path conflicting with the surface of the Earth, every plane sets to an agreed-upon reference of 29.92 inches of mercury as the altimeter setting.

In a world where Burroughs/Unisys MCP still exists, I have to believe there is still production code written in Algol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP

This seems to be a bit of an echo of the 1980s and the power shift brought about by the introduction of the IBM PC - the decentralization of control over data and processes from the walled garden of the computer room to the people at their desks with VisiCalc and BASIC, and then the explosion of productivity software.

There's solid representation of Boston and DEC in particular, for example, as well as IBM, so not all /that/ "Silicon-Valley-legacy-centric".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston#Co...

There are a great many modern modifications available for the 8-bit Ataris, many of them from Poland where the machines saw good sales quite late compared to the US.

Using modern electronics (FPGAs etc.), processors, and high-density memories, you can imagine the processing, graphics, and I/O improvements that can be made for relatively low cost.

Many hobbyist machines at this point are highly modified, with much new software taking advantage of the new features, so specifying "classic unmodified" pretty much means a system into which you could have slapped a ROM cartridge purchased at your local computer store back in the day. XL/XE sounds like it rules out the original 800 and 400 models.

Here's some context on the RCA 1802 (COSMAC) Membership Card, also by Lee Hart at the same website, which is the real star of the lineup:

http://www.retrotechnology.com/memship/memship.html

The Udvar Hazy is being expanded to hold more stuff.

The downtown location has more interpretation of artifacts - sometimes at the Udvar Hazy it's hard to really appreciate what you're looking at without a docent-led tour or other context.

It also doesn't hurt that the docents include people like an SR-71 pilot.

The Henry Ford has tons of cool stuff. A running Apple 1. The working Wright Experience replica of the Wright Flyer that was flown at Kitty Hawk for the 100th anniversary. So much amazing

They have not only the actual Wright Brothers Cycle Shop building and their house from 7 Hawthorn St. Dayton (Ford moved the buildings), but Ford hired their mechanic Charlie Taylor to set everything up as it was in Dayton. Taylor re-acquired the original tools; not the same kind, the exact serial numbers. When you walk outside, there's even a Dayton manhole cover on the ground.

If you can, combine the NSA visit with a visit to the System Source Museum: https://museum.syssrc.com/

A great museum in its own right, and some overlapping with the NSA Museum (e.g. Crays, TEMPEST Macintoshes).

A fun telling of the story of that boat by the Fat Electrician.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s-ZY0lnGeI

Remember the trademark fights between Apple Music (Beatles) and Apple Computer? Interesting history.