eiZen @eiZen@mastodon.social

"To follow in the way of karate is not an easy journey. It is a test of the body and the spirit."

#atari8bit
#retrocomputing
#karate

"You've made a mission to the moon, but so have the deadly SPACE INVADERS".

Man, these manuals were rocking!

#atari8bit
#retrocomputing

Character Generator Datavision D-3000:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tt-gN-cIpxs

#retrocomputing

Character Generator Inc.

Atari 800 (CGI-800):

https://www.atarimax.com/technfo/cgi800

and 800XL (CGI-800XL):

https://www.atarimax.com/technfo/cgixl

#retrocomputing

Character generator: device or software that produces static or animated text (news crawls, credits rolls) for keying into a video stream.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_generator

#retrocomputing

Woah, and a #VAX based #totalisator "Atlas 2000" in the 1980s.

#retrohardware

Later, the "Brisbane computer based #totalisator" was running on a #PDP11 running #RSX11M in two mobile vans/trailers, each one hosting a twin PDP11 running in hot standby mode.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bconlon/tote.htm#memories

#retrohardware

TIL the term "automatic #totalisator" - early transactional (electro-)mechanical parallel computation machine used at horse races to calculate biddings in the 1920s.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bconlon/index.html#index

#retrohardware

If your choice is still that chicken or a coup, please chose the chicken.

#retrohardware

When I once programmed in #PostScript (executed by ghostscript), does that count as #Forth programming or is it as blasphemous as saying I have #Lisp experience when I actually used #Scheme?

Life can be complicated.

#Forth and #PostScript
a side-by-side reference sheet

https://hyperpolyglot.org/stack

The Vertigo book.

#vertigo
#movieposter
#riscv
#book

"If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."

-- Lewis Carroll (Quoted in The Letters of Lewis Carroll, 1979)

Maybe the cliché that programmers were bad in UI design was wrong in the first place.

It got worse since you could actually study it.

Even that once famous-for-usability shopping site from The Jeff is a modern mess.

Today I have to play whack-a-mole with scrollbars, borders, buttons -- with EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT.

It doesn't matter whether it's an application or a web page.

This mess is interoperable, platform independent, and highly available 24/7, but no one planned for disaster recovery.

#retrohardware