I didn't even have a class with this teacher! But anyway I bought it and now I have made you think about it which is probably more than most people have done about Billy Thorpe today. And really, that's kind of beautiful in it's own stupid way.
PIcked up a small stack of records including Billy Thorpe's "Children of the Sun" which caught my eye only because I remembered a HS teacher *really loving* this album. Why do I remember this? WHY DO I FORGET SO MANY THINGS BUT REMEMBER THIS?
I took a trip on my lunch break Friday to check out what may now be my favorite record store: a local dude who just sells records out of his garage. He's done so for decades. Boomer all the way but in the best authentic hippie way and I love it. The world needs more shit like this.
don’t forget to destroy your clocks tonight, walk away from your mortgage, just start driving, you’re free
14 such sheets cover the entire microcode, which implements the entire PDP-11 instruction set as well as front panel operations. (With a lot of help from the hardware, of course.). Each box in that diagram describes what a single microcode word does when executed.
FLOWS 9 from the 11/70 engineering drawings, which describes the microcode related to integer divide operations.
The 11/70 is a fun system to work on. The service documentation is excellent and you get to work thorough fun diagrams like the one below, which traces through all execution paths of the microcode (all 256 words of it).
Photo of my laptop running Tera-Term, displaying a successful boot of 7th ed. Unix.
Traced it down to a faulty microcode ROM (one of several early bipolar 256x4bit PROMs in the system). We had a spare ROM board so we swapped that in; chip-level diagnosis will happen at some later date. The system boots 7th ed. UNIX once again!
Photo of "Miss Piggy," ICM's (formerly LCM's, formerly Microsoft's) DECsystem 570 (PDP-11/70) system. The processor chassis has been pulled out of the rack and a KM11 diagnostic board is plugged into the left-hand side. A laptop sits on top, displaying microcode flow diagrams.
A shot of the 11/70's processor chassis showing the card cage.
Went down to ICM today and fixed the PDP-11/70 system I used to help maintain at the Living Computer Museum back in the day. Any instruction that touched memory would wedge the processor (front panel accesses worked OK). Brought along my KM11 diagnostic set (left pic) to help diagnose the issue.
The two quotes from the front matter of C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters" altered to read: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and own him, for he cannot bear scorn." -Luther. "The devill... the prowde spirite... cannot endure to be corncobbed." -Thomas More.
A photo of an album entitled "PERSONAL POWER through CREATIVE SELLING" by ELMER G. LETERMAN, who is apparently the World's Best-Known Insurance Salesman. The cover features a nuclear explosion in the background. Convincing.
This was the secret behind the Akira project, I am told.
One thing the ongoing LLM vibe-coding discussion seems to assume is that what the world needs is more software, faster. What my post presupposes is: maybe it doesn't?
It's 2026 and if you back up your iPhone too many times it will fill up your mac's internal hard drive and there's no reasonable way to specify an alternate location for the backups. No, the backups are not incremental. Enjoy.
I have family there and I visit on occasion :)
I'm fine with Highway Gothic, and I was annoyed when MI started replacing their signage with this abomination.
In that case, yeah. It's not DEC, something third-party, and I have no idea.
it's just a hunch.
Hard to tell. Do you have the source image for this?
It should be much more at the forefront of our minds, the extent to which the most politically activated and politically empowered segment of the authoritarian American cult calling itself "Christian" see the apocalypse as something to hasten, not prevent.
Yeah, I'm the same way, but I've been slowly doing this over the past few months and it's been nice to finally have it organized. Cathartic, maybe. Plus it's given me an excuse to listen to albums in my collection that I've overlooked or completely forgotten I had...
HS debate club logic
Oh hey, this sounds familiar encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/t...
I really value what Mike does in general but his takes here on gen-AI are just incredibly naive; even if "big tech" wasn't involved it's still an incredibly destructive technology based on mass theft. Its only real use is disenfranchisement.
Now with Funky Mode!
The good news is the head mech on the Diablo (mostly) prevents the heads from crashing into each other during shipping... unlike your average RK05.
The other is a Fortran interpreter (not compiler!) done as part of a master's thesis (PDF here https://
ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstreams/a5ceda4a-db2d-405b-a5ee-5d608da560a3/download/). I'm working on transcribing this next...
BUS-II is a very primitive monitor system. It can be used to edit memory or registers, and can dump memory to/from tape or the teletype. That's about it. It's also one of only two pieces of real software I know of for the SPC-12.
Screenshot of the emulator running BUS-II; it has dumped a few dozen bytes of memory to the teletype.
Finally had time this week to work out the remaining kinks in the emulation. Behold, BUS-II in action for the first time in who knows how long:
Over the holidays I started work on an emulator of the General Automation SPC-12 minicomputer (a computer I've become lightly obsessed with over the past few months). I transcribed a listing of "BUS-II" (Basic Utility System) from the manuals.
