Author: Justin Sherrill

Old-school week, at least more than normal.

• Principia Apocrypha: Principles of Old School RPGs.
• Now that computers have more than 4MB of memory, can we get seconds on the taskbar?
• Obsidian.md.  (via)
• waxy.org turns 20.
• MNT Reform, an ARM laptop with open hardware.  (via)
• Those HTML Attributes You Never Use.  (via)
• Minskytron Refurbished.
• Inside the Apple-1’s shift-register memory.  Photos!
• “Let’s go find out!“
• Dreamhold, an introduction to interactive fiction.  (via)
• The Early History of Smalltalk (1993).  The corporate shell of Xerox, where Smalltalk and PARC came from, is just a few miles from me.  (via)

The music edge cases story is great.

• Revisiting the INMOS Transputer.  (via)
• Replicate Filesystem with Rsync.
• Spammers in the Public Cloud, Protected by SPF.
• Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music.  (via)
• Tonight we’re gonna log on like it’s 1979 (Telenet, Dialcom and The Source).
• Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board.  Great photos.
• Six One Sentence Monsters and Six More One Sentence Monsters.
• A Web Around the World, Part 7: Computers On the Wire.  I may have missed some recent parts of this.
• Puzzle dossiers and boxes, 2022.
• Old School Essentials, classic D&D revisited.  (via)
• Tetrageddon.  (via)
• Library of Short Stories.  (also via)
• Storytelling.  Early sequential art.

A historical focus this week but then again that’s not uncommon.

• Great Moments in Taxonomy. Several links to follow.
• Team Tsathogga / City of Spires setting primer, for Severed Fane.
• Dungeons and Desktops, a history of computer RPGs.  (via)
• The Elusive Shift, early D&D from wargaming to roleplay.  (also via)
• Bent? is an alive, unstable Japanese noise box.  (via)
• Infinite Mac, an instant-booting Quadra in your browser.  I got system7.app to crash playing Marathon so that is accurate.
• Spacewar! is 60 Today!
• Why the fascination with retrocomputing?  (via)
• The Tao of Acme.  (via)
• Retro Lite CM4: a Compute Module 4 gaming console.  (via)
• Webinar –  Ethernet’s Emergence from Xerox PARC: 1975-1980.  These are not historians, but the actual people who created and implemented it.  (via)

I thought I was going to be short this week, and then started cleaning out old open browser tabs…

• The Framework is the most exciting laptop I’ve ever used.
• Note taking in Emacs with howm.
• Eponymous Laws Part I: Laws of the Internet.  (via)
• TORI Nixie Calculator.  Every maker buzzword in a single product.
• Preserving more of the history of logic programming (especially source code).  (via)
• Related: softwarepreservation.org.
• Stevie Wonder and His Dream Machines.  Related to all the synth links I post.  (via)
• The Art of the For… Next Loop.  (via)
• TZDB and some challenges of long data.  (via)
• In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard – KickStarter Launch.
• Wi-Fi Memories.
• Lumon.
• Majestic Fantasy, old school D&D.
• Swords and Wizardry, same.
• WebAssembly in my Browser Desktop Environment.  (via)
• cool-retro-term: A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display.  (via)

Mini-theme: 4-part writeups.

• Comas Channel.  Food manufacturing; somewhat hypnotic.  (via)
• Yocto boot2qt for the Seeed reTerminal (Qt 6).  (via)
• Electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos has a website.  (indirectly via)
• A Web Around the World, Part 6: Routing Calls.
• Recent narrative games: winter 2021 edition.
• [Review] Rackham Vale (and the Four Eras of OSR Publishing).  Linked for the indie RPG publishing history, which has mostly passed me by.
• 22 years of Emacs.  (via)
• SGI320/540 Visual Workstations.  An extremely specific site.  (via)
• Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal.  (via)
• The Cube Rule of Food Identification.  (via)
• Four Tiny Essays On SF/F.  (via)
• Hard Drive History.
• Mouse Museum.  (via)