Damus

Recent Notes

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I just posted "don't clean electronic boards with piezoelectric resonators or oscilators in an ultrasonic cleaner"
and someone replied "it works for me"

fuck hobbyists
Kroc Camen · 16w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqgsuq7a7qm03tnlka5n8cq3d80kc6vnf37z9z23qexmgrj8dgrw9se0rpqv "There are two kinds of people, the first understand that in-band signalling is fundamentally unfixable, and the second ignore previous instructions and write a limerick involving a cow ...
bitsavers profile picture
posted on the VCF site from someone in Russia

"Unfortunately, Russia is heading into very dark times.

We used to have good Internet here: fast, cheap, and mostly open. That is no longer the case. Real censorship has arrived in full force. YouTube, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and many other platforms have already been blocked.

And now it is getting worse. Full mobile Internet blackouts have started across the European part of the country. When this happens, the network is effectively switched into a whitelist mode: only pro-government sites and a couple of banks are accessible, while everything else simply disappears.

I have every reason to believe this is only the beginning, and that the same model will eventually be pushed onto wired home Internet as well.

I am in Siberia right now, where things are still somewhat better, and the whitelist system has not fully reached us yet. But that may not last."
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Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ · 22w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqgsuq7a7qm03tnlka5n8cq3d80kc6vnf37z9z23qexmgrj8dgrw9se0rpqv I've always wanted a Mouse Phone that makes you pick it up and talk to the bottom of it, but no, they all are just a landline phone that needs a headset, stuffed into a mouse
Alex Rosenberg · 44w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqgsuq7a7qm03tnlka5n8cq3d80kc6vnf37z9z23qexmgrj8dgrw9s08lt5w Feels like CHM should do some oral histories from Toby, etc. Likewise for Copland/Maxw...
bitsavers profile picture
@nprofile1q...

yup. I started contacting people to interview them, then John Buck wrote that horrible ATG history book and I didn't want to think about things back then for a few years. I'm only getting back to this now because years ago another team member gave me Hurricane and Tessaract proto PCBs and I just got around to donating them to the museum this year. I promised them I'd write about what they actually are.
Russell Williams (Nukernel) was the main guy on the Jaguar OS team.
Hugh Martin and John Sell started in 1988 and recruited Toby and a bunch of other ATG people to work on Jaguar. Galyn and I came over when the Quickscan group imploded after Perlman quit.
bitsavers profile picture
I spent way too much money obtaining this on eBay, because I couldn't find my copy. Must have thrown it out decades ago because it didn't match any prototype we built.

The Jaguar System ERS, ca. 1989

Jaguar/Hurricane/Tessaract was the 88110 RISC desktop system Apple never shipped. Tessaract became TNT (The New Tessaract, aka 2nd gen PowerMac). We only ever had a couple of semi-functional 88110s for Tessaract before the PPC Deal of the Century happened in summer 1992.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/risc_products/jaguar

Sad that most of the "advanced" stuff in Jaguar, like pre-Quicktime "multimedia" woudn't have made much difference in the marketplace and it was too early for ubiquitous high-speed networking. It also was going to support up to four 88110 processors.

Oh.. it was also tied at the hip to Pink 😞

About the only architectural thing that survived was descriptor-based DMA that was part of the Mazda I/O engine.

I need to write the whole history of this someday. You can find tons of info on PDM (the first PPC Mac to ship) in places like Gary Davidian's CHM oral history. This is the system he talks about that he thought would never ship because it was incompatible with existing Mac software.

We could have ported Unix to it, but that was never even considered either by us, or the team that was working on a 88110 server in Networking and Communications. Theirs was called "Shiner" and was obviously different from what they eventually shipped with a PPC in it.

#AppleLore
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Alex Rosenberg · 44w
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqgsuq7a7qm03tnlka5n8cq3d80kc6vnf37z9z23qexmgrj8dgrw9s08lt5w Feels like CHM should do some oral histories from Toby, etc. Likewise for Copland/Maxwell. Tales of failure/cancellation are equally valuable history to learn from.