Archive

Happy St. Piran Day

While the feast day of St. Piran, patron saint of tin miners and Cornwall, was on the fifth of the month, the observed feast day has shifted over time to the 14th. I think it’s really put here to fit a lull between the big holidays of Bell Day

DB25 #5 — tighten your belt

Sometimes it’s important to make a dramatic 8 percent cut. Just to put it out there even when you know it’s going to cost you more in the end. You were the guy who finally did what needed to be done, or anyway had some young tech people

Sour syntax

With sweet and umami down, time for a syntax form that just leaves a sour taste and I’ve got just the one. In our last stop in this tour around the javascript syntax palate, we saw the semi-scrutable “with”. That syntax form is described in the earliest version of

Syntactic umami

Yeah, more posts about building (software) and food. Our last post was about how small changes in javascript syntax lead to surprising changes in meaning. Syntactic sugar usually refers to convenience features in the syntax of a language that make code more readable at the expense of some complexity in

Sugar on my tongue

We’ll never do anything as dumb as assert an official programming language here at Paper Tiger but javascript is a language often on my tongue. Alas, javascript has a lot of syntactic sugar. My problem with syntactic sugar is that I have a very bitter palate. Sometimes it‘s

Is all this even leg … ible?

Much of the recent mail here at the Paper Tiger offices is from concerned folks wondering if all that’s happening is even legal. Fortunately, most of this mail is actually meant for the public interest law firm down the street. We simply have no idea – the only judging we

DB25 #4 — bridge to nowhere

A Long-time reader noted that about one post in three has the word “floppy” in it somewhere. That sounds about right. There are a lot of stories about computing history that pass through the floppy disk. Our last installment in the 25 x DB25 for 2025 series was about multiplexing

DB25 #3 — yes, and …

It turns out that even improvisation has an orthodoxy. In comedy improv, some preach “yes, and …” as a set form to return serve and volley. Some allow “no, but …” as well but I don’t really care for either. In my circles, we prefer “tristate, XOR …” to keep the laughs

Committing side effects

Side effects are said to be the bane of the functional programmer but programmers sometimes get confused about these unchaste, unruly, unaccountable effects. Some, of course, are not side effects at all but the purpose of the computation and the reason to have built so darn many computers in the

DB25 #2 (electric boogaloo)

It didn’t take much research for me to realize that this series would have to be an exploration with you of a whole bunch of systems that I know almost nothing about. Once you get right down to the bit with the 25 pins and sockets, they have no

DB … Cooper?

I know the names for the tradespeople who cut meat, who make bread, who dip candles. When you say that the cobbler’s children are poorly shod, I know what you mean. I‘m familiar with the various smiths and wrights and mongers. I know it’s the fish mongers

24k #24 — Datapoint 1150

In episode #23, from earlier today, we talked about the Micral C, descendent of what is claimed to be the first commercial, non-kit, microprocessor-based personal computer. The original Micral was mostly Just Another Box of Intel 8008, the C model was Just Another Box of Intel 8080 plus half a

24k #23 — Micral C

Portable thermal typewriters are cool even if they have less than 24k but they lack substance. They lack the kind of plot armor that keeps them from being written out of the story. They lack … furniture. There was a time when one of the proudest things you could say about

Heat tape

If you’re not watching Apple’s phenomenal show Silo, your missing out on some of the best TV from what we will later regard as the beforetimes. Two recurring themes in the first season are heat tape and its various grades and applications and obsolete technology. WE DO THOSE

24k #22 — IO-lanthe

A recent Times article on the end of hereditary peers in the UK House of Lords reminded me of the terrific W. S. Gilbert line “The House of Peers, throughout the war, did nothing in particular, and did it very well” from the G&S operetta Iolanthe. Faint praise,

24k #21 — Pyramid of Doom

Today’s 24k installment in our 24 x 24k for 2024 series is not a machine but a software title for a series of machines. “Pyramid of Doom” was the eighth release from early video game company Adventure International. Scott Adams, the co-proprietor (and no relation to the Dilbert guy)

Christmas — open reel tape

Merry Christmas! It’s the perfect holiday for opening presents and open reel tape. Many of the media we have shared this season started as consumer or broadcast media for audio — and why not? Consumer media sales dwarfed computer media sales media-for-media for a long time. Many of you may

ADVENT #24 — 9-track tape

’twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not an input was pending, not even a mouse; / The tapes were all hung by the the …. Neither you nor I want me to continue down the path of novelty poetry, especially through all that new-fallen snow. I can’t

ADVENT #23 — bernoulli

I really wanted to write about the Canon Optical Card, but I’ve never even seen one. Probably Popular Science wrote about it as the data storage of the future just before, or just after Canon abandoned it. I probably read about it in a tattered copy a decade after

ADVENT #22 — rom cartridge

I wanted this series to be just like a real advent calendar your grandma might have sent you. A little morsel behind each door but overall maybe a little more milk chocolate than you want as an adult. Today we have an entire class of devices – removable ROM cartridges for

ADVENT #21 — thumb drive

The media in this series haven’t been presented in chronological order, in part because the provenance and chronology can be hard to nail down. So it is with the thumb drive. It’s not that nobody claims to know who invented it but that so many do. The best

ADVENT #18 - #20 — faux floppy

Our last installment was about the 3.5” floppy that once roamed the plains. Actually, that disk also roamed the planes! These disks were widely used in ARINC 615 aircraft data loaders. Though many of these have now been replaced by solid state solutions, you may still see one if

ADVENT #13-#17 — 3.5” floppy

Regular Scheme isn’t actually a garbage collected language, at least in its best, highest, but not latest version. I speak of the language described in the Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R5RS). That report describes values as having unlimited extent and notes that a

ADVENT #12 — minidisc

A lot of the traceability of Alice comes not from the fact that the tape is write-once, but that every read of a cell always returns the same value. There is no thread-visible test for emptiness. Is this really true, though? Can this be true? My sense is that very

ADVENT #11 — cmx 600

Little to say about Alice for today’s catch-up installment. As I worked on the core dialect this morning, I was reminded that a Scheme (cons) cell is implemented just as a frame represented by an addr cell. (car) returns the zeroth element of a frame. (cdr) returns the first.

ADVENT #10 — laserdisc

Little to say about Alice today except that you may have noticed that the letters in the earlier installments were drawn with respect to the viewport, and not the direction of the text. I rarely use the string drawing facility I built and made it until around day 4 in

ADVENT #9 — mmc

In an earlier installment, I mentioned that there was probably lots of Alice performance lying on the floor. I reached down there and found an improvement of around 10%, though not without other costs. In the Scheme language, (begin … ) is the syntax form used wherever multiple expressions are desired in

ADVENT #8 — pcmcia

Today’s post was going to be about concurrency in Alice and some of the esoteric Lisp stuff that keeps you coming back. Instead, it‘s about my home water heater. Before we get there, this is also a series about removable media. Today’s removable media is the PCMCIA

ADVENT #7 — lto tape

I originally thought the Alice write-once tape would be useful for secure electronic voting machines. It turns out that people either believe elections work or they don’t — no matter what the technology. Maybe black boxes for airplanes that could record the computations governing flight, not just the telemetry. Instead,

ADVENT #6 — zx microdrive

In the last installment, I said that all iteration in Alice was done by Y combinator. This is not quite true. At least one macro in the standard library, ‘do’, completely unrolls loops when the size is static. Here’s some output from the system profiler after a few interactive

ADVENT #5 — floptical

let it snow! // let: it’s now! My Alice compiler looks a lot like C — in the sense that it looks like the kind of undergraduate LISP homework assignment that would have gotten me a C. It compiles only a few kinds of literals, lambda expressions of a single variable,

ADVENT #4 — aperture card

In our last installment, I looked at the simple tape for ((lambda (v) (add v 22)) 12) and found that it took a lot of motion to add two numbers together. Some other quick things fell out from that. One was that ((lambda (v) (add v 22)) 12) was exactly

ADVENT #3 — magnetic strip

The last installment showed a trivial tape but offered little explanation. I’m back to … yeah, I sort of forgot how this works. I remember that I thought that would happen, and I built it so that someone would later be able to figure it out and that someone would

ADVENT #2 — flexi disc

Yesterday introduced the austere language I use at the moment to program Alice, but I didn’t say much about how that got distilled into something that ran from a write-once tape. Here’s an example of the tape for the trivial program ((lambda (v) (add v 22)) 12) taken

ADVENT #1 — paper tape

Happy Advent! For the month of December, I'm going to write about ADVENT – the Alice Datatape Virtual Environment. For Thanksgiving, I mentioned a computing environment inspired by Alice's Restaurant. It was only half jest. I'm going to use it to build my holiday card

Happy Thanksgiving, Alice

I have a queue of about a dozen posts I thought I would get to the day after Thanksgiving. Instead, I followed the ‘Clarion Beauty Computer’ down a rabbit hold and have only just emerged. More about that machine later. There’s only really one post that needs to go

24k #20 — Ghost machine

The most elusive 24k machine may be one that was never built at all. Some may be vellum tigers — impractical, uneconomical, and possibly impossible. Others are house cats, underpowered machines that require all the maintenance of their larger cousins but offer little of the performance. These may exist on paper

Undesign Aesthetic

Our last post, from the 24 x 24k for 2024 series, was nominally about the AT&T Blit terminal, but it was mostly about the successor Gnot termi-station. That hardly seems right, so reproduced below is a firmware dump from the Blit (captured from the git repo https://github.

24k #19 — Gnot gonna’ happen

The AT&T Gnot is something I know only from the Plan 9 papers from Bell Labs. Plan 9 is / was / will be the perpetual and forever post-UNIX operating system. Only a few things stand in its way. The first is that UNIX failed to die. The second is

24k #15 — Vote like your life depends on it

Let me begin with a disclaimer, lest I spread voter misinformation. The particular MIL STD 1750A systems we’re talking about today each have 24k addressable memory locations, but in 16-bit words not the 8-bit bytes. For the 15th installment of our 24 x 24k for 2024 series, we’re

24k #14 — Angle of Incidence, Reflection

I wrote in September about the side view mirror being knocked off my van. A couple of days and a couple of thousand dollars later, the van was as good as new. It was a good practice run. This time, the mirror was knocked off by an aggressive hit-and-run driver

24k #13 -- get it on

6502, 8086, Z80, 8051, 6809, 68k, and so on. Early personal computing is full of inscrutable part numbers that remain memorable decades later. LC88FC2F0B? Not so much. LC88? No? Sanyo LC88? Google will get you a data sheet for the LC88FC2FOB, a microcontroller from On Semi that features 24k RAM.

24k #12 — ColecoVision

This was going to be a blog-by-reference, where I just redirected you to a vintage AtariAge post about the differences between the 24k and 16k versions of the Donkey Kong cartridge for the ColecoVision console. Instead, let‘s talk about the ColecoVision itself, our twelfth installment in 24 x 24k

Lightning Review: Supply Chain Security — International Practices and Innovations in Moving Goods Safely and Efficiently

SCS:IPIMGSE, edited by Andrew R. Thomas, teases excitement from from cover to back cover but never really delivers. Such are the perils of an unprotected supply chain. This 2010 volume packages itself as a look at post-9/11 supply chains but gets mired in an analysis of post-post-9/11

Anatomy of a mirror

In physics, impulse is force times time. If that impulse were irresistible, then momentum has been transferred and we have some work to do. In criminal law irresistible impulse is a defense for a criminal act known to be wrong but which, through temporarily diminished capacity, would have been committed

24k #11 — Télémécanique TSX 17-20

When is scraping the bottom of the barrel a task of joy instead of desperation? When conching chocolate, of course! Also when scouring the internet for the finest in single-origin, late-harvest 24k machines for you. Conching chocolate and plumbing for content for you share more than that. Both take a

Technologic

cat technologic | awk '{printf("%s, ", $0);}'  | sed 's/,/\n/g' | grep -i " it" | sort | uniq Consider the 2005 Daft Punk classic ”Technologic”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8K90hX4PrE). How does this anthem of user empowerment stack up against the Apple iPhone,

Computing IRL

My computer science patter is full of tree, buffer, bucket, root, overflow, spill, and pipeline but what happens when computer scientists try to implement the principles of computer science in their daily lives? In caricature, the answer is to solve every problem with a computer but my former colleague (and

Floor mats

I was going to give you something for the long holiday weekend — maybe an independence-themed Merrimac short or an (overdue) installment on Merrimac #1. Maybe a fresh 24k machine, though I am rapidly running out of those. Instead, I cleaned the floor mats of my car. My car is a

24k #10 -- Unbearable Lightness

Our tenth installment of 24 x 24k for 2024 comes from Czech novelist Milan Kundera, though perhaps not directly. Kundera himself is said to have used a Swiss Hermes 3000 typewriter as his word processing machine. In his novel ”Immortality”, Kundera’s character of himself muses that he would like

24k #9 -- Electric Avenue

For Bob Moog’s birthday last week, I suggested that you might want to upgrade a minimoog synth with MIDI. I apologize for this heresy. Instead, let‘s rock down to Electric Avenue (and then we’ll take it higher) for our ninth installment of 24 x 24k for 2024.

Happy Belated Birthday: Bob Moog

I'm a little late on this one – Moog's birthday and International Synthesizer Day were on the 23rd. If you caught our last post, you maybe noticed a computerized chess board that didn't actually play chess. You could move the pieces around any way you

24k #8 -- Black and White

1 By the way, here is the code for this page. When you click, it gets dumped in a contenteditable <div>. Feel free to edit! Javascript code isn't idempotent and so we don't re-evaluate automatically when you change it. Our 8th installment in 24

(I give great hugs)

Ok, I personally don't give great hugs but I do like a nice brace and I think I can match parens with the best of them. I wonder, though, are my fellow Javascript people OK? I remember PEMDAS just fine but I admit I fall down sometimes on

Mad lib

We dumped a useless greeble of compute into the last post and it looked like a janky mad lib. Maybe simpler to say it looked like a state-of-the-art Web form in 1995. In most browsers, the transition from free text that you read to the kinds of document elements that

eclipse

People sometimes tell me that a new piece of software could change my life. Sometimes true! WorldWideWeb on NextStep sure did. Sometimes, though, I'm told I have to first open up a program called "eclipse" in order to ... I guess in order to gaze safely upon

24k #7 -- Loopy Town

I had wanted to feature the Casio Loopy for our 7th installment of 24k for 24. Alas, I was misinformed. The Casio Loopy video game system actually has a megabyte of RAM, not the 24k that I had somewhere read. I wanted to write about the Loopy because it is

Cov ... id ... ea

Before SARS-CoV-2 had its viral moment as the pathogen behind the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the most notorious use of pentagraph prefix "Covid" was certainly the Covidea videotex service. Well, by "certainly" I mean "". By "the most notorious", I obviously mean "a&

24k #6 -- Cherry blossom

It's only March 11, but the Washington Post is reporting that peak cherry blossom season for the iconic Yoshino cherry trees ringing the District's tidal basin is arriving perhaps two weeks early this year. No worries. The SciSys Kasparov Turbo S-24K chess computer can wait. We&

24k #5 -- Pink tax

Today's entry in our 24k for 24 series is the 1984 Epoch Lady Super Cassette Vision cartridge-based video game system by Epoch Co. Ltd. of Japan. Or Lady Cassette Vision, or Super Cassette Vision Lady's. Super Lady Cassette Vision? Yes, also used. We'll stick

24k #4 -- Impact

Today’s entry in our 24k for 24 series is the Apple ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. It … actually, I promise you I had no idea what it had or how it worked until Google told me it had 24k of buffer RAM in some models (expandable to that in

Waterfalls and Glass #8

Track 3, Sector 3: Monica’s pair of washers were vibrating their way through a spin. She stood in front of them and, in a whisper, spelled the names of all the US cities she could think of as a way to keep herself rooted to that spot until the

Waterfalls and Glass #7

Track 3, Sector 2: It was now just after eleven and there was a line for both the washers and dryers. This was not the first time Monica had lost herself at the laundry. It was time for Plan B, the undergraduate laundry. Fortunately, it was a beautiful Saturday. Few

Creating the hydroterm

Readers of the evolving Waterfalls and Glass, Merrimac Murder Mystery #1, may have noted the unusual terminal devices called 'hydroterms' that spring from an alt-history that mixes equal parts an imagined forgotten Gallic ingenuity, a casual and vaguely sinister 'better living through chemistry'-type toxicity from

24k #3 -- Monopoly

I … no, I can’t do it. I’m just going to completely phone this one in. No Dall-e art. No long reflection on a childhood misspent with quirky 8-bit machines. TI has been phoning it in with this machine for years and I’m just going to match that

Waterfalls and Glass #6

Track 3, Sector 1: It was almost ten by the time Monica got her first load into the only washing machine left. Finding two free on a Saturday morning at the shiny new automat was too much to expect. It amused her to know that the automat was a lot

24k #2 -- Goldilocks

Just before the New Year, we teased 24 reviews of 24k machines for 2024. By ‘we’, though, I mean the marketing department here at Paper Tiger. The product team was split. The Product Classic group insisted that the original proposal for 16 X 16k for 2016 was somehow still a

Waterfalls and Glass #5

Track 2, Sector 3: ”Early for dessert, eh?“ said Panos when he turned up a minute later with two coffee cups and a steaming glass carafe. ”What kind of pie?” ”Hash browns” said Monica ”... and the beef hash ...” ”... and anything else I can make a hash of.“ Panos took this

24k #1 -- 24 for 24

The new year is almost upon us and I just can’t wait to share one of Paper Tiger’s plans for 2024. 24 profiles of computers with 24k memory. Because we’re jumping the gun a bit, let’s start with a machine with almost 24k. The Thomson TO7.

A Merrimac Little Christmas

cylinder 2, track …. seek error … “Twas the night before Christmas, when all on the floor not a capstan was seeking, not even the Dartmoor. Phooey!” Monica slapped the Formica of the machine’s console. Console was perhaps an over-grand term for the collection of lamps, switches, gauges, and the tele-steno

Cha-ching

Whether the clink in the Salvation Army kettle, the clatter of coin at Scrooge and Marley, or the thunk of the cash drawer in the till reaching the end of its travel, Christmas is the season of coin. Sweet silver bells. Here on the Eve, many of us have reached

Elites

COP28 is ending this week in UAE with neither the vigorous bang of internal combustion forever nor the whimper of an agreement to later agree to paper over some really tricky disagreeements. Something else, maybe. It looks like there is an agreement to wind up fossil fuels in a “just,

Waterfalls and Glass #4

Track 2, Sector 2: Susan surveyed the wreckage of the kitchen. “Sure, honey. I'll have a side of hash browns with my pie. Let's go. Tell me all about the big splash on the way.” As they walked, Susan began to ramble: “Well it all stays

The Science of Insecurity

Maybe part of being a real computer scientist is to doubt that this is what you are doing. Maybe John von Neumann was too sure of himself to ever be a real computer scientist. It might take Christopher Nolan to really examine that topic. Until then, I’ll just get

Does it math?

The question I set out to answer with the Paper Tiger blog was really just about whether Ghost was a credible platform. After a couple of months, I can say that I think it is, with caveats. The fuller question was whether Ghost was fit for use as a blog/

Long Term Review: Fast Hack’em

You know what bothers me? Duke Nukem Forever was in development for 14 years and when it was finally released, reviewers pounced immediately. If you took a roast out of the oven after 14 years, you would let it rest for at least 15 minutes before carving. Here at Paper

#vanlife

With Thanksgiving behind us, it’s time to turn to that other meaning of tongue weight as we drag the baggage of past holidays down the highway and forward to the next. I’m speaking, of course, of small camping trailers. I spent Thanksgiving in a yurt at Trap Pond

A Very Merrimac Thanksgiving

(A sneak preview of Merrimac Murder Mystery #2: Thanks a Million) Platter 2, Track 1, Sector 1 Monica and Susan had spent the previous Thanksgiving with their friends in Detroit. Monica remembered the picnic they made of cold turkey and stuffing sandwiches in Rouge Park and how Susan pulled the

PSA: Level your oven

This is really a hybrid public service / pumpkin spice announcement. No matter whether pumpkin pie at your house is classic "Joy", or the classic index card your grandparent copied out of "Joy" decades ago, or "Cooks", or from Chat, or store-bought, or an absolute

Thievery (nonprofit) corporation

I had the following conversation Thursday with Chat, frequent visitor to Paper Tiger's downtown office: me: Consider the following scenario: Paul Simon has dreamed a world dub version of "Life During Wartime" by The Talking Heads Chat: That sounds like an interesting and creative idea! Paul

Waterfalls and Glass #3

Track 2, Sector 1: The Hydroterm Monica slid into the driver's seat of her Dodge Dart and the vinyl upholstery compressed with the kind of gentle creaking noises that meant the easy plasticity of summer was fading. Nature supplied the little college town of Lapointe, Michigan with regular

Doubtful guest

Me: Please give me a version of the famous, fictional ‘Men wanted… ‘ Shackleton ad but updated for the 21st century Chat: Certainly! Here's an updated version of Sir Ernest Shackleton's famous recruitment ad for his Antarctic expedition, tailored for the 21st century: "Adventurers Wanted for

Cat and mouse

So they’re everywhere. Mice, that is, but I use a form of active ignorance to avoid thinking about it. This works well until around this time of year when a mouse poops directly on my kitchen counter. Then I fall back, like the clock, and try to magically think

Next Stanza

In … the seventies … I guess Wikipedia knows when but time wasn’t like that in the seventies. I mean, maybe you personally were born on a particular day in the seventies if you were Gen X and Nixon resigned on particular day but other things just became a smear. Time

Waterfalls and Glass #2

Track 1, Sector 2 (Recap: https://paper-tiger.ghost.io/merrimac-murder-mystery-1/) Monica began the process of rounding them up so she could explain to them how to press a plunger. After that, they would make little speeches, they would all press, and that would be that. "Ok, ok. So the

Guest Post: Reboot

Most of the correspondence we got here at Paper Tiger about our recent LISP 1.5 review was not about the treatment of atomic objects in that system or the cas(t)e-based segregation of values into lower case and upper case. Those we expected. Frankly, we expect to stir

Lightning Review: LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual

The LISP 1.5 Programmer’s manual, published first in 1962 and reprinted with essentially no change through at least 1985, is a pocket-sized volume that runs to just over a hundred pages and which contains almost enough information to recreate the language — and the computer that ran it! It

Merrimac Murder Mystery #1

Waterfalls And Glass Track 1, Sector 1: The Plunge Monica hated everything about departmental galas. The departmental catering. The departmental bar. But worse than departmental hors d’oeuvres and the departmental punch was the loss of a perfectly good evening of hacking departmental machines. "Chuck?" she inquired of

33 bits

What if Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” was only slightly wrong? What if computers were only created so that we could use them to virtualize them, create package managers, and package managers for our package managers so that we could enumerate all of the possible

All the way down

We talked last time about the Pi40, a thing we call a mechanical keyboard. And why not! It’s got 40 keys! Sure, it’s got a million-transistor reprogrammable computer but hush up now. If we start describing everything with more than a million transistors as a computer then people

Cat food

We eat our own dog^h^h^h cat food here at Paper Tiger, so it’s only natural that today’s piece should be composed using the same device we’re reviewing. While long-time readers may recall we tried that strategy with the Instant Pot with disastrous results for