kabdib

17 ms·

181.
by kabdib 4y ago
It was a mix of great and awful. I wrote tons of assembly and C, burned EPROMs, wrote documentation (nroff, natch), visited technical bookstores every week or two to see what was new (I still miss the Computer Literacy bookstore). You got p
182.
by kabdib 4y ago
The +999999 bit in my own script automatically goes to the end of the file. There's probably a cleaner way, but that works fine. I'm not sure if your setup does that. It's the minor creature comforts that really matter someti
183.
by kabdib 4y ago
It's far, far faster. I can edit multi-gigabyte files without thinking much about it, my last attempt to open a 10GB log with Emacs did not go well. I also think it's got much better integration with Windows, though I can't p
184.
by kabdib 4y ago
Proud to have worked on one of the failures in this exhibit :-) I also had a number of the products I've worked on land in the Weird Stuff warehouse (and, oddly, another surplus hardware warehouse near Seattle). Badge of honor :-)
185.
by kabdib 4y ago
Well, if you're running Epsilon (a really great commercial Emacs clone), you can use this macro: new-day: macro "<EscapeKey>>----------------<EnterKey>A-xinsert da <EnterKey><EnterKey><EnterKey&
186.
by kabdib 4y ago
Brutal simplicity is the key for me. I use a single flat text file, and use it for years. I have an editor macro that adds a new, timestamped entry at the end of the file, which looks something like this: ---------------- 27-Oct-2
187.
by kabdib 4y ago
My favorite dd(1) story: Back in 1979 I was an intern at NBS (now called NIST), in their computing standards division. Amongst other machines, we had a couple PDP-11 systems running v6 Unix (it was glorious). The smaller system had removabl
188.
by kabdib 4y ago
Just because you've paid a lump sum doesn't mean that terrible servers aren't involved every time you start your car -- they could just be checking the perma-status of your purchase every time ("for security purposes&quo
189.
by kabdib 4y ago
You can use numbers to extend the range a bit (0=O, 1=L, 6=G, 5=S). I used "0xdebac1e" as a magic number for a (terrible) file format once, no one noticed. Probably helped that my constant was declared byte-reversed...
190.
by kabdib 4y ago
... fond old memories of replacing a dud 4K DRAM on a Vax 11/780, all on my own (the company I was working for was too cheap to pay for a DEC service contract). Unfond, more recent memories of being asked by the Dell support tech to re
191.
by kabdib 4y ago
Yeah, the clock speed of an 8008 (200Khz to 800Khz) was such that you could probably do a software emulation on just about any modern microcontroller and get all the pin timings correct. I don't have a good sense if you succeed at pin-
192.
by kabdib 4y ago
Yeah, some chips had ESD protection, a lot of the early ones did not. You treated bare chips with care, used an ESD mat when working with boards, grounded yourself with a wrist strap, and were realllly careful in non-lab spaces (where there
193.
by kabdib 4y ago
Ted Hoff worked in Atari Corporate Research (before Atari broke up / was purchased in 1984). This story was told to me by a friend who worked in ACR: Ted had a pad of conductive foam with a number of 8008 processors (a few dozen, perha
194.
by kabdib 4y ago
This is completely untrue.
195.
by kabdib 4y ago
Go read _The Hubble Wars_. It will make you angry. Aside from the mirror fault, there were a number of operational issues that Hubble ran into that the TLAs knew about (e.g., solar panel flapping, radiation around the Southern Atlantic Ma
196.
by kabdib 4y ago
Years back, I received quite a few contacts from Google recruiters about interviewing to work on an unannounced gaming product (which was Stadia, of course). Google's reputation for canceling projects was bad, even back then. Never gav
197.
by kabdib 4y ago
I bought a DX so that I could read PDFs and whatnot. It went unused; it was VERY slow and most papers still required (slowwww) scrolling when viewed at a readable scale.
198.
by kabdib 4y ago
The Kindle Paperwhite uses a USB-C connector. (It probably still uses USB 2.x for data transfer, though -- I'm not sure why that would matter to anyone).
199.
by kabdib 4y ago
I'm 62, and having a blast. Helped do some system bringup a few days ago that brought back memories of "lab time" in the 1980s, though we get firmware onto boards with tens-of-megabit downloads now, instead of burning (litera
200.
by kabdib 4y ago
I used slide rules a bunch when I was in high school, just before calculators killed them forever. I felt that I had a better grasp of what a particular computation meant . The need to keep track of orders of magnitude and so on helped me
201.
by kabdib 4y ago
I moved to the Seattle area about 20 years ago, and my first encounter with a Giant House Spider was pretty unsettling. Those things are big and fast . I mostly leave them alone now (though often they become cat toys).
202.
by kabdib 4y ago
Anything goes, when you're made of meat :-)
203.
by kabdib 4y ago
One of my early favorites was Donald Alcock's Illustrating BASIC https://books.google.com/books/about/Illustrating_BASIC.html... It's entirely hand-lettered. The author's afterword remarks that an
204.
by kabdib 4y ago
I was taking a VLSI design course in 1981, and the professor teaching it proudly showed off some 432 chips (embedded in plastic) that he'd been given. He waxed lyrically about them, how the big boys were doing silicon in Silly Valley.
205.
by kabdib 4y ago
I have spent linear weeks looking at dialog box errors no more descriptive than: Error -1 These could come from anywhere. If there had been a cute message associated with the error, I could have cracked open the binaries in questio
206.
by kabdib 4y ago
That's precisely what the carriers need to solve. They're not interested.
207.
by kabdib 4y ago
I never, ever get legitimate calls from overseas. Just turn those calls off for my phone. Well, perhaps callbacks from helpdesks located in other countries, in which case give me time-boxed control over foreign calls, and perhaps a passcode
208.
by kabdib 4y ago
You have an extra 8 bits in the PIA's I/O port direction register. If you're not using inputs right now you can use that as temporary memory. It's not like the joystick cares if it's getting a little backwards cur
209.
by kabdib 4y ago
I have lost whole consecutive weeks to WebPack. It made me wish I could go back to something wholesome and healthy, like template metaprogramming in C++. "I'm making progress, boss. The error output from the build is smaller than
210.
by kabdib 4y ago
If you like Nick Lane's writing, I also recommend David Dreamer's Assembling Life . It gets a good deal more technical (chemical?), and has more depth about possible ways that membranes were "invented". Paul Falkowski&#

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