I'm really enjoying my old #penplotter but I only have one roll of paper left. It's a weird 9" pinfeed roll ... does anyone out there in #retrocomputing land know where I could find more?
Today's lunchtime hack was the Hilbert curve on the #penplotter, which was fun to write (I needed an explicit stack because BASIC only has global variables). I really love the flickering lights. #retrocomputing
Real retro-veterans of course know that the first console war was between Atari 2600 and the Philips Videopac, known in the US as the Magnavox Odyssey.
Later, the Mattel IntelliVision was the arch-enemy of the CBS ColecoVision.
I owned an Atari 2600 and later a CBS ColecoVision. Precious childhood memories. 💚
To fully understand the #Atari takeover of #Intellivision, imagine a hollowed out corpse, piloted from within by a #French armadillo, devouring the dessicated remains of its former rival.
Anyway, the shitposts on Atari Age should be a sight to behold.
i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.
i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982
i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H
happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.
when i was a kid, buying a new game was serious business. it meant saving up my weekly farm-chore allowances of $2.50 for six to eight months, before I could afford a brand new computer game. this usually meant about one new PC game a year, along with whatever I got for christmas.
among the lost pieces of canadian computing history are the retail prices for computer hardware and software we swallowed in the 1990s
buried in the archives was this Softwarehouse catalogue from 1994 - an Edmonton-based computer retailer from the 80s and 90s.
enjoy skimming through the eyeball-gouging prices we paid back then, like an $80 copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Adventure for DOS. this was mostly due to a crushing US-CAN exchange rate at the time.
ps: anyone else remember visiting Softwarehouse in YEG? it was at 102 ave and 108 st :D
before these all go to ebay, are there any TRS-80 enthusiasts who want a massive collection of Radio Shack/Tandy Rainbow magazines, from 1984-1990?
will pass them on for a fraction of the ebay price. shipping from canada will be uncheap, but far less than shipping individual issues. would like to see this go to someone in the retrocomputing/archival community!
Hate those fake updates from USPS where their computer sees that nothing has happened for a couple of days and inserts some generic "oh, we've totally put it on a truck and it's heading to you!” It has been sitting there for 3 days! Definitely not arriving today. 😔
Sometimes those impulse purchases turn out to be pretty handy. Bought this endoscope several months ago and it has just been sitting around. Can see the labels without having to tear all the components off. #electronics#electronicsrepair#RetroComputing#VintageComputing
This is my rough roadmap for #Macstodon:
(no guarantees on ANY of it though, depends on how long I keep interest without burning out or getting bored, and what's technically possible with MacPython)
Note: development is very slow at the moment because I am doing a lot of coding at my day job and don't want to also do it in my free time.
1.1
pick what to display in each of the three columns
show lists, hashtags, bookmark feeds
support for viewing polls, MAYBE for creating them
MAYBE filters for notifications?
MAYBE support multiple servers?
MAYBE support calckey?
At that point, I would consider it "feature-complete" and a finished project.