It’s been over two years since my last classic computer kit build and I was getting that itch to add more blinkenlights to my collection. Chris Davis’ Altair-Duino kit has been on my radar since last December when I saw it on episode #797 of Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcast (which also introduced me Oscar …
Three and a half years ago I built my PiDP-8 kit and it’s been happily blinking away on my desk ever since (it also runs my Pi-Hole). Earlier this year, on episode #698 of Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcast, Steve mentioned that Oscar Vermeulen had come out with a new kit, the PiDP-11! I loved …
I’m a computer guy, and while I’m not quite old enough to have first-hand experience with classic golden age hardware like the PDP-8, I spent a good deal of time in college working on the VAX, still own my first computer, and have an appreciation for those forefathers of the amazing PCs and servers we use …
Doom, the video game in which you navigate a dungeon in the first person and messily lay waste to everything that crosses your path, represented a milestone in many areas. It was a technical landmark, in that its graphics engine delivered brilliant performance on ordinary PC hardware. It was a social phenomenon, with individuals and …
If you owned a personal computer in the 80s and played computer games, you probably played at least one Infocom text-based adventure game like Zork or (my personal favorite) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Known as interactive fiction, or IF, these games used the most powerful computers on the planet for their processing engines …
Continue reading ‘Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7’ »
Today IBM is celebrating its 100th birthday. From bar codes, to the floppy disk, to the IBM PC, to Watson, there’s no shortage of contributions IBM has made to the world over the past century. I was an IBMer for just over a year, part of the Global Services division when they purchased PwC Consulting …
Wow, Pac Man is 30 years old. To celebrate, Google put up a logo Doodle that was an actual playable Pac Man game, sound effects and all! What a blast from the past … I sank quite a few quarters (or tokens) into Pac Man machines back in the day. I also had the Pac …
I found, via slashdot, this great article on the history of Rogue, a character-based dungeons-and-dragons computer game from the early 80s, originally developed for UNIX. While I had been playing paper-based RPGs with my friends and computer-based D&D games (like the Alternate Reality or Ultima series on my Atari 800XL) all through high school, I …
Continue reading ‘You hear maniacal laughter in the distance …’ »
I’ve imported all of the posts (about 50) from my old TechToys blog into this one, so any post older than my first one (on March 25, 2008) is from there, dating back to 1999! It’s fun to look back and see some of the old tech I’ve gone through over the past 10 years.
I was sad to hear (on TWiT episode #188, via Ars Technica), that the University of Virginia has decided to dismantle their student computer labs. Apparently there’s not much of a need for them now that just about every incoming freshman has a laptop. I have lots of fond memories of my college’s computer labs. …