Get Off My Lawn

Old friends, now obsolete

Ah yes, New Years’ resolutions. Gotta love ’em.

However, I have too much stuff. There. I said it. I mean, I firmly believe in the William Morris quote,  however, times have changed.

This collection of Elektor magazines I grew up with — obsolete.
A collection of GE Ham News that someone spent money on to have nicely bound — obsolete.

Byte magazines? Obsolete.

Creative Computing? Not quite yet obsolete.

And even if I can’t find it online, scanning and dumping* is better than storing the originals until my container is auctioned off one day.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m still keeping mountains of stuff. Just not… this stuff.

 

* Yes, Jason doesn’t like dumping. I’m not dumping anything that’s even slightly rare, so chill.

Boat Anchor

Well, almost. In Ham Speak, a boat anchor is an old, large, probably obsolete piece of radio equipment. I have more than one.

However:

The Heathkit HW-32 only qualifies if you have a tiny boat. At about 30cm wide and 15cm high, it’s actually quite small for a 14 valve transceiver rated for 200W PEP output. OK, it only does this on a single band, 20m in this case (the HW-12 and HW-22 covers 80m and 40m respectively).

Frequency coverage is 14.2 to 14.35 MHz, for mobile SSB operation. There’s no provision for CW and no coverage of the CW portion of the band.

At 5 1/2 kilos, it’s also too light to be a boat anchor — but that’s because it doesn’t have a built-in power supply. You need to supply 800V DC, 250V DC, and -130V DC bias, as well as 12V for the filaments.

We’ve come a long long way in 50 years.

 

The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing

Moore’s law, the speed at which technology moves forward, means that the digital past gets smaller every year. So this is what is left are the tracings of hundreds of people, or thousands, who, 20, 30, 40 years ago found each other and decided to fabricate all this…digital stuff. Glittering ephemera. They left these markings and moved on.

Who wouldn’t want to go back 20 years—to drive again into the office, to sit before the whiteboard in a beanbag chair, in a place of warmth and clarity, and give it another try?

Go read.

NIGHTMARE #6

One of the disks that came with my Apple ][ clone contained a little game called Nightmare #6. At the time it completely stumped me, there seemed to be no way to beat the game. I’d worked out that a move consisted of two letters, no more, no less, and that it was possible to lose points quite quickly, and also possible to not lose points, but I never worked out how to actually gain points.

For some reason I thought of this game again the other day, tried to find it. This was not easy, but plenty google later I found it in the Apple Software Bank Volume 1.

Of course my BASIC is better than it was in 1980. I learned that:

  • You get eleven moves
  • Each move consists of two letters
  • Using the same letter twice gives you a “nightmare #6”, which doubles the amount of points you lose on the next wrong move
  • Re-using the first letter of a previous move gives you “super zonk”, which quadruples the amount of points you lose on the next wrong move
  • Any other move gives you no points, except when the value of the two letters (A = 1, Z = 26) add up to a multiple of ten.
  • If the letters add up to a multiple of ten, you score that value, and the score associated with the second letter is set to this same value.

So, NZ (14 + 26 = 40) is a valid move. So is OY, PX, QW, RV and SU. After playing these, you can’t re-use N, O, P, Q, R or S, but U, V, W, X, Y and Z are all set to 40, so UV, WX and YZ are legal moves for 80 points each, and leaves V, X and Z set to 80.  VZ and XZ give you 160 points each, finishing the game with 1880 points out of a (claimed) possible 2080 points.

So I thought about it some more. Realised that while NZ is a good place to start, XZ (24 + 26 = 50) is better. Of course this means that PX is no longer a legal move, you can’t play the first letter again. OY, QW, RV and SU are still good for 40 points each, and YZ, WZ, VZ and UZ give 90, 130, 170 and 210 points (because the point value of Z increases every time). But this is only nine turns, and we need eleven. Fortunately we still have J (= 10) and T (= 20) to play TZ and JZ, for a total score of 2280 points.

I still don’t know how the author got to the “possible 2080” points.

Screen capture of end of Nightmare #6, with 2280 out of a possible 2080 points.

 

Oh yes, and this is why I’m with Jason Scott — we’re not huge Wikipedia fans because they delete perfectly good information.  Someone took the trouble to write something about Nightmare #6, and noted that it is possible to get more than 2080 points, but the editors decided that “WP is not a videogame guide“.

 

 

 

 

The $25 Network

These days one can network a bunch of computers for $25 without breaking much of a sweat, since most if not all computers these days come with a network port right there on the motherboard, and if it’s a notebook there will be wi-fi right there as well.

But back in 1987 networks were a big deal. Arcnet came out in 1982 and Ethernet was standardized in 1983 — using almost-a-centimeter-thick coax cables with the delightfully named “vampire tap” connecting stations to the backbone. Yes, we’ve come a long way.

So being able to network two or three machines for $25 was a Big Deal. At around the same time you could get two Ethernet adapters and a cable from LANtastic for $699.

How? Point-to-point serial cables, with one machine acting as a hub in three-machine installations. According to the documentation, this is good for 80 feet at full speed (115 kbit/s). This and some very clever DOS software from D. Jindra and R Armstrong, calling themselves Information Modes and operating from a drawer in Texas. All drives (which in 1987 meant 360k to 1.2Mbyte floppies, and maybe a 20Mbyte hard drive somewhere) and printers could be accessed from all the machines in this network.

It was magic, I tell you. Kids of today, they don’t believe a word of it.

 

  • Link to the files I have (Time has not been kind. There’s some bitrot in the filenames I think)
  • The Data Packrat has a disk image of a different version of the $25 Network and delightfully odd ideas of how the internet works.