DB25 #NaN -- fourth wall

You know how sometimes actors just turn towards the camera and speak directly to us in the audience? I don't know if you noticed, but the computers on camera are doing that constantly. They just look straight at the camera and talk to us. Well, to me anyway.

We're just hours away from the New Year and I don't think I'm going to finish the series of 25 articles about the DB-25 connector for 2025. Let's leave it at 18. I don't feel like I have seven more stories to tell about it anyhow and we've covered everything from fireworks to spacecraft along the way.

Instead, I'll express my gratitude for the online resources big and small that make it possible to write series like this. Most prominent on that list is Wikipedia. The printed encyclopedia I grew up with was (and still is) the New Book of Knowledge, printed in Great Britain in the early '50s. It jumps straight from Compass to Concrete. There really wasn't a lot of accessible reading material about computers for this kid (except for an old college textbook on FORTRAN with WATFOR maybe for the IBM 7040). Wikipedia has made it possible to reconnect with every half-remembered, half-understood blurb or photograph about computers that filtered down to me as a child in the 1980s. It took me only a minute just now to find the wikipedia page for the terrible Commodore 64 joystick I picked up from the Service Merchandise counter in the 80s.

Wikipedia is hardly alone but like anything that's created value from the act of curation, it's at particular, and paradoxical, risk from both AI systems and a generalized war on knowledge.

The most visible curators of Wikipedia are the Wikipedians, but there would be no Wikipedia without an earlier and more tedious generation of internet curators. These are the sites old enough to have maybe used the <blink> tag early in their life and were often little more than a collection of static HTML files. For these authors, full-stack development may have meant that you wrote the html, and the Makefile that generated the index, and maybe a couple of emacs macros to make it all easier to edit.

Finally, let me thank all 23 online newsletter subscribers and other readers for your thoughtful comments and your subtle and terrific suggestions. Some of you have been reading, and improving, this kind of stuff from me for thirty years!

For this issue of DB-25, let me highlight James Carter's 'Starring the Computer', a curated archive of computer appearances in television and film. Like IMDB, where the computers are the stars. Here's a DB-25 connector that is captured in James' collection for each of the 7 articles I didn't write.

1. Commodore Amiga 500, from the Turkish film 'Sevimli Hirsiz'
2. Compaq Portable, from 'The Price of Vengance'
3. Epson PX-8, from 'Night Court' (the PX8 used a mini-DIN for serial, the DB25 provided here by an expansion card)
4. Toshiba Satellite 430CDT, from 'Primer'
5. Toshiba T4600C, from 'Alien Species'
6. Winbook XL, from 'The Art of War' (for my Paper Tiger / Sun Tzu crossover readers)
7. Zenith Supersport, from 'Her Alibi'

If you're looking for something to do on New Year's Day, I bet you could find a dozen more. As for 2026, Paper Tiger is going to take a break from the (year % 1000) theme. I have no idea what we'll do instead.