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Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair Home Page
- computator 6y agoI don’t know if people are upvoting this page because of the cool retro look of his home page, but I’ll mention that he’s well known for his TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook. Everybody who was into digital electronics in the early 1980s had them. More than once visitors to my place took the “cookbooks” from my shelf expecting to see some delicious recipes and were sorely disappointed.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoAlso notable for his library of hand-coded PostScript used to manually generate his newsletters.
- Turing_Machine 6y agoYeah, he was also doing print-on-demand books using a fleet of dedicated Apple II machines sending PostScript to Apple LaserWriters. This was a Big Deal because the standard setup at the time was a Mac connected to a LaserWriter, but it occurred to him that you didn't really need to tie up a Mac if all you were doing was sending the same PostScript file to the printer over and over again.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoAnd the amazing cheap video cookbook! Given that it uses the 6502 as a glorified state machine it is a good model for building FPGA based CRT controllers.
- koalahedron 6y agoI had that book too, I just recognized it when I looked it up. I don't remember it as well, but apparently it was the display circuitry only.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI still have it on my bookcase, and I was not remembering correctly, it has only TTL type logic devices! So now I need to figure out which was the 6502 book. Found it: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/socv1.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/socv1.pdf "Son of Cheap Video" :-)
- koalahedron 6y agoThanks! I noticed "PAiA" electronics sold kits of these--I remember that name from back then. Did they sell parts or other kits? Looks like they are still in business. Also noticed "Scungy Video" :) (Do NOT search for this term in your favorite search engine.)
- koalahedron 6y ago> delicious recipes Ha ha He also did the TV typewriter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter which allowed people to have something to hook their bare board micro to. I had money to buy his green book, but not the computer or the TV. :)
- sehugg 6y agoWhich used the same technique as the Apple 1 video terminal, though Woz claims not to have known about it when designing it. Probably true, because there weren't many inexpensive options for RAM besides shift registers! https://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1.htm https://www.willegal.net/appleii/apple1.htm
- djmips 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't come across it and perhaps forgotten about it. Nevertheless simultaneous invention happens all the time.
- koalahedron 6y ago> Nevertheless simultaneous invention happens all the time. Try telling that to Isaac Newton. :) Or better yet Edison or the USPTO.
- djmips 6y agoAnd this technique was also used for video output on the Sinclair ZX-80 if I am not mistaken.
- jecel 6y agoHe later had books mentioned in other comments: "The Cheap Video Cookbook" and "Son of Cheap Video". In these he added just a few TTLs to a Kim-1 computer and generated video using mostly software. The Sinclair ZX-80 was much closer to this than to the TV Typewriter (which was 100% hardware). Some other computers that used this technique back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aamber_Pegasus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aamber_Pegasus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer) And here is a recent project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigatron_TTL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigatron_TTL
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoDon't forget the Incredible Secret Money Machine :-) He also corrected my pronunciation of "tinaja" when I called him.
- wrycoder 6y agoI remember one of his books - perhaps the one on Apple assembly language - described an organized way to disassemble executables. It involved first going through the printout using colored pencils and color highlighters in a particular way to develop visible structure. I remember being quite impressed with his methods. The website is an amazing labyrinth. It’s rather like a higher dimension toroid full of dusty wonders from a simpler time. Very much old Arizona.
- ddingus 6y agoI used that method early on after some magazine published it. Was either BYTE or Creative Computing. Was a teen at the time. And it worked! Back then, one could either display to screen, or dump to a printer, or file. The paper was where this method shined. And the beauty of it was having a plan and compartmentalizing the problems. Start with program flow. And on 6502, 6809, which were the chips I was learning on, that was branch, jump, jump to subroutine, and a few other tricks, like pushing addresses on to the stack, then returning from subroutine. RTS. I used colored pencil though. Highlighters were too big of a commit. Otherwise, yeah. Just start finding where program flow changes. Structure just kind of happens! You are going along and insight hits. Early on, it hit over and over too. Small programs printed and in a binder became a sort of library. Examples, snippits, notes, tricks. From there, one just peels back the onion. Loads, stores, program, data, math, compares as math... Was very empowering frankly. Also learned about the power of commenting. Many attempts other peers and I did before checking out Lancaster, boiled down to literal descriptions. LDA sprite, X 'Load A with contents of address, plus X STA (screen), Y. 'Store A to address pointer, plus Y The better way was to talk about what was happening! LDA sprite, X 'get sprite data STA (screen), Y. 'write to display After a time, things like the Apple ROM listing made sense. Soon after that, our programs made sense to one another. The other benefit of these two things combined was coding on paper. Thinking through printed out listings helped when writing programs out. And often, I would start with an ORG statement, some EQU (equates) to define important values and addresses and then just write the comments. If it reads well and each line contains one action, it translates into assembly language pretty well, maybe taking two or a few instructions. No big. Just work the problem a line at a time and before one knows it, a routine is done. On the more fancy computers, we had sprites and sound chips. Writing values in places did a lot. On the Apple 2 computers, there was none of that. But also pretty much everything needed software. People made bits. Blitter, math, sounds, etc... That simple (well, screen memory excepted) system, coupled with how Lancaster tended to think and communicate, proved effective. I left High School in the 80's basically fluent in 6809 and 6502 assembly and machine language and able to write non trivial programs, and or use them in tandem with high level languages to make applications. I am not saying Lancaster's work was responsible. We all had magazines, teachers (who varied in what they could speak to), mentors, books and one another. But, how he approached problems was a definite influence and I would argue a definite multiplier on progress. Good times. Interesting character. Great influence.
- squarefoot 6y ago> he’s well known for his TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook. Those two books were my best purchases back in the day, they helped immensely to grasp the technology. I see they're now free for download at Don's page, and they're still relevant today. I would highly recommend them to all newcomers to electronics.
- ddingus 6y agoSeconded. And I am about to take a trip down memory lane. Good reference!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wglb 6y agoI've been reading his stuff for decades. Lately, I stumbled on his documentation of the canals built centuries ago. In addition to pictures, he has a video describing some of the research on the canals. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XAEuZJETYPknGMhtXkUEGkbZBExKcI4y/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XAEuZJETYPknGMhtXkUEGkbZBEx...
- dang 6y agoIf curious, past threads—small but good (well, two are good): Don Lancaster's “Guru's Lair” Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457501 - March 2020 (8 comments) Think of "using dollars" as "spending gasoline" [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700546 - July 2009 (7 comments) How to Bash Pseudoscience - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514491 - March 2009 (1 comment)s
- jpm_sd 6y agoWow, a 90s internet classic. "Santa Claus machines" indeed. https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml His "unauthorized autobiography" was an entertaining read. https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf
- jeffwass 6y agoRon Lancaster’s “tinaja” webpage was my dad’s browser homepage for years, I think starting back in the late 90’s. Maybe it still is. My dad loves it because it has links for just about everything he’s interested in.
- FlyMoreRockets 6y agoI was a big fan of his flutterwumpers. His site tought me how to make a high torque, low precision stepper motor from a car alternator. https://www.tinaja.com/fwsamp1.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/fwsamp1.shtml
- datavirtue 6y agoMagazines have no use whatsoever? I hit back. I recently ordered some magazines from a neighborhood girl. As they arrive I flip through them and notice how perfectly currated and edited they are and this makes gleaning new, valuable information from them very easy. I flip to the back and see the ads from reputable companies making me aware of their innovations. So much valuable information so quickly about a deep subject (home building). After that I realized how chaotic the internet still is and how horrible search engines and websites are in general. Almost completely screwed up by data tracking, weak writers, SEO, noise, FUD,and just plain dilution. We have along way to go before we write off magazines as useless. I'm sure there is good, no great, information on that site. Have fun reading every last word to find it. Pick up a good magazine and see how it feels to consume it. You can even submit comments and if they are worth anything they will be published and replied to. Long way to go indeed.
- dpedu 6y agoIf you click through to his Ebay page, he has quite a few interesting things for sale. https://www.ebay.com/sch/abeja/m.html https://www.ebay.com/sch/abeja/m.html
- djmips 6y ago0 results?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoWorks for me
- computator 6y agoIt's because Don Lancaster refuses to sell outside of the United States, not even to Canada. He says in one of his articles that he had too much trouble with foreign orders, so he decided to never take a foreign order again. He set up his eBay store to reject IP addresses outside of the U.S. I tried connecting to his site from both a U.S. IP address and from a non-U.S., and I can confirm that outside of the U.S, you get zero results.
- ddingus 6y agoOne thing I remember, that seemed right out of left field was Don basically compiling books. Postscript printers could often deliver more pages per minute mechanically than their processing could deliver. Lancaster showed how to basically compile and pre-process a book into a big postscript file that minimized the printer compute requirements. Load up an Apple //e machine with some respectable storage and it could deliver books on demand, printing at near max print speed. Damn cool.
- kragen 6y agoLater Adobe productized this. Originally it was called "PostScript Distiller", but then they introduced some incompatibilities with PostScript and renamed it "PDF".
- throwitaway1235 6y agoI see a lot of those Don Lancaster ads in my Byte magazine collection from the late 1970's.