My childhood dreams for 40€

As a kid I used to read and re-read a book titled Choosing and using your home computer (Slovenian translation published in 1984). It contains photographs and descriptions of a lot of contemporary home computers, including the EPSON HX-20. This little device is described as the future of portable computing - it's amazingly small case includes a cassette recorder and a printer and you can even work with it while you are traveling since it has a rechargeable battery. According to this book this is the first truly portable computer, a first sign of what we can expect in the future.

Of course back then I really wanted to have one. The Spectrum we had looked just clumsy compared to it.

This weekend they were selling them at VCFE for 40€ a piece and now I'm wondering why the hell I haven't bought one.

Posted by Tomaž | Categories: Digital | No Comments »

Vintage Computer Festival Europe 2007

02.05.2007 0:16

Internet connectivity wasn't very good at VCFE, so here's a late and condensed report from my visit to München. (Organizers did give us internet access, but they said we should use it as little as possible because they only had a limited amount of net traffic allowed)

My general impression was that for a Computer Festival Europe the whole event was surprisingly centered around German visitors and exhibitors. When I asked why all announcements and speeches were in German they said that they do not want to force English language to the 95% of Germans there. I can understand that, but I don't think that adding a single English sentence would hurt their feelings too much. It would at least give me some idea what that last public announcement was about - even if that meant I would have to go to the nearest native speaker and ask him for a more detailed translation (everyone I spoke to was fluent in English). If CCC in Berlin got the right mixture of English and German language so that I didn't feel pushed aside, I don't see why they couldn't also.

Other than that, I was impressed with what I saw at the festival. I've never seen or heard of a lot of computers and equipment that was on display. It felt a bit strange to walk around and not recognize names on computers (and I thought that I have some knowledge of this field).

Then there was also the tour of the Cray-Cyber collection, which was awesome and deserves a post of its own.

MyCPU was in my opinion the most impressive exhibit of the VCFE. Its author created his own CPU architecture, implemented it with 74HC discreet logic circuits, built a complete computer around it (IDE interface, VGA board and all), wrote a DOS-like operating system for it and on top of everything ran a C64 emulator.

I'm definitely going to have a look at how he managed to implement a PS/2 keyboard interface with logic chips. Perhaps I could make a similar interface for Galaksija to replace that weird keyboard I made.

This Apple eMate laptop looked surprisingly like the OLPC laptop. It has similar size and a similarly unusual user interface. It is also 10 years older and sold for 8 times as much at the time (i.e. it was meant for USA, not Africa).

Yes, not all exhibits were digital! This Dornier DO-80 analog computer draw a ball that was bouncing inside the edges of the oscilloscope screen. I haven't studied the papers I got that describe how they managed to do that, but it sure was an impressive thing to see a box of operational amplifiers draw a nice animation like that

Last but not least, here's Cyberpipe's Museum with my Galaksija. Our exhibits attracted more attention from visitors than I expected. Galaksija was in fact so popular that there are good chances that next year I'll prepare a workshop where anyone will be able to built one.

In conclusion it was a nice experience. As always I really enjoyed being once again among friendly hackers where everyone is prepared to explain what is that weird thing on his table and/or try to help you with a particularly strange hardware problem you stumbled upon.

The World’s Smallest Color Laser Printer - Samsung CLP-315K

The South-Korean consumer electronics giant, Samsung has introduced its new color printer - CLP-315K, which the company claims as the world’s smallest color laser printer (20% smaller than the previous model - CLP-300), operating at 45dB, along with a resolution of 2,400×600 dpi and 32MB of internal memory. In addition, this printer has an ability to print up to 16 pages per minutes in black and 4 pages per minutes for color.

Continue reading The World’s Smallest Color Laser Printer - Samsung CLP-315K » » »

The Internet Visualized

I was stuck for a couple of extra hours at the airport in Dulles and I noticed this amazing visualization of the Internet from AT&T Labs and a company called "Lumeta". Yes, I know these have been done before, but rarely with any sense of aesthetics in mind. Alas, some extensive searching revealed no aditional information on this monstrosity (it is rather large). It is one of those things you'd really like to get a copy of, but for some reason, a company smart enough to map the Internet is not smart enough to put an URL on the poster to follow up on their creation. Something this cool deserved a "How We Did It" type of explanation somewhere. Oh well. If you are in Dulles or Reagan airports, be sure to check it out. It color codes major nodes and networks, and that faint gray "haze" is actually thousands of labels for major servers in the network. A great marriage of science and design.

And apologies for the quality of the picture. It was taken with my phone.

A central processing unit

A central processing unit (CPU) :

is an electronic circuit that can execute computer programs. This broad definition can easily be applied to many early computers that existed long before the term “CPU” ever came into widespread usage. The term itself and its initialism have been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s (Weik 1961). The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed dramatically since the earliest examples, but their fundamental operation has remained much the same.

Early CPUs were custom-designed as a part of a larger, sometimes one-of-a-kind, computer. However, this costly method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of mass-produced processors that are suited for one or many purposes. This standardization trend generally began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has rapidly accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers. Both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of these digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in everything from automobiles to cell phones to children’s toys.