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The 50% Canadian show

Prince Edward Island (The Retro Desert) welcomes you.

You'd get more people to show up if you announced going live to your 900 followers on X, instead of just to your 200 followers on Mastodon. Any reason for deprecating the X account except political?

Ah, I missed Intellivision talk. My favorite system.

I think Starcastle was the first vector graphics game, right?

Not that it has anything to do with anything in this video, but if anyone is interested in what can be done using TTL logic and a lot of PROMs, please consider looking at Professor Matt Regan's TH-cam channel. Here's a link to his TTL based (i.e. *NO* 6502 micro, but lots of PROMs and a bit of TTL) Apple II system: < th-cam.com/video/hxEEfSayRNo/w-d-xo.html >

Everything you guys talked about in networking is part of the IEEE ethernet standard except for the Apple stuff, however AppleTalk protocol can run over ethernet.

For some reason, during the board game discussion when 'Turtles' was mentioned, I immediately thought of the programming teaching tool. Probably since I was unfamiliar with the video game.

Thanks alot for mentioning the Apple2CoCo emulator on your show and i'm glad you guys found it cool! Alot more features including disk emulation are coming soon! 😊

the "creepy teenager" misunderstanding had me balling

FP! The Intellivision came out in 1979 and the Aquarius came out in 1983. I've never seen an Intelly overlay worn, dented, creased or lost but never worn. The art was on the inside...

I really should know better than to listen to the Roundtable's members inane prattle, but this video showed up in my TH-cam recommendations for some reason. FWIW, here are a few comments from someone who is familiar with Univac and TV teletype writers: First, WRT to Quinn's comments about Univac, it became part of the Sperry Corporation and so was referred to as "Sperry Univac" until the Company decided change its designation to "Univac, a division of the Sperry Corporation" and then simply "Sperry" to emphasize the Sperry name. Burroughs took over Sperry in 1986 and the result was renamed "Unisys". Unisys still exists today. Both predecessor companies made significant contributions to the history of computers and I find it annoying to hear someone who openly admits to not knowing much (if anything) about computers before the Apple II (most notably mainframes) taking pot shots at either of them for having been around back when computers used vacuum tubes ... as if that's where they stopped developing. And, no, the Apple IIGS did *NOT* do in the Univac or Sperry Univac or Sperry or even reel-to-reel tape drives. Again, Univac/Sperry Univac/Sperry continues on to this day in the form of Unisys, although the "mainframes" they "produce" are emulators that run on Intel servers. As for the tape drives, I recall shooting rubber bands at the buttons on the control panel of such drives (a U36N?) to get the window to slide up or down long after 1986. I used to be very good at it. And I would note for the young ones in the audience that the World is *STILL* reliant on "dusty deck" programs (often times written in COBOL) written to run on mainframes, especially in the banking industry. Second, WRT to Don Lancaster and his series of TV Teletypes (TVT), he made a series of TVTs, not just the one described in the book (which IIRC was the TYT-2). The last one IIR was the TVT-6 in which he replaced a lot of the logic with a 6502 which just happened to be a part of a KIM-1. You can still find the schematics and code (including the original "Popular Electronics" articles ... there were three IIRC) online. To the extent that he used old chips that you can't find today, about the only thing that might fall into that category is a character generator ROM chip which when fed in a scan line number would return a bit mask of the bits set in that line of a character. This can (relatively easily) be reproduced with a little programming and an EEPROM (and programmer) as Ben Eater pretty much did in his breadboard computer project. I *THINK* his TVT-2 was only TTL and CMOS (a couple of Lancaster's other books being "The TTL Cookbook" and "The CMOS Cookbook") except for the character generator chip or chips. Certainly, generating the signal chain for a TV signal can be done using just TTL chips as was shown by in the April 1977 issue of "Radio Electronics" which featured the construction of a single board micro based on the Signetics 2650 (not 6502 as is occasionally incorrectly stated elsewhere). Except for a roughly 14MHz crystal whose frequency might be odd today, there was nothing special about the chips in the signal generator. And since a VGA signal is relatively close to a TV signal, there's nothing particularly problematic about making a TVT today. If you want to save yourself some logic, you can probably get there from here using a Parallax Propeller chip which I'm pretty sure is still available at Digi-Key. OBTW, I think that the chip that Quinn is thinking of is the Motorola MC6845, not 6851, which was a popular *CRT Controller* chip. I don't recall it being at the heart of any of Don Lancaster's TVTs. I suspect that a TI TMS9918 would have been a better fit as it was supposedly intended for an NTSC display although it wasn't used either. As for the use of a TVT, yes, it could be useful to talk to a mainframe if you had an acoustic coupler, but even more important was to use it to talk to your homebrew micros which began to use a serial TTY-like terminal instead of switches and lights. It is simply fucking amazing to hear people who are supposedly into retro computing talk as if the beginning of (micro) computing sprang into existence with the Apple while apparently being completely ignoring the fact that there micros before the Apple II (e.g. the Mark-8 and Altair 8800 not to mention any number of homebrew systems) and not everyone had a Teletype 33 laying around to talk to them.

"One wants you to forward this on..."

🙂

This Aussie says yay for the return of Michael 😊

Sump pumps are also used for high water tables: the basement floor is lower than standing water in the ground. The water always exerts pressure on the basement floor until it finds a crack in the concrete. That under-the-floor drainage pipe to the sump pit just constantly drains the rising underground water, and the pump gets it out of the house. My last house in Illinois had a sump pump that ran consistently (5 minutes off, 30 seconds on) even in the driest of droughts.

I listen to these through the audio pocast during my commutes. That means I won't get to listen to this one for another couple of years.

I'm sure it's been mentioned before but the rcr podcast website is at episode 270 and April 4th 2024...I really must be missing something

Just spotted my Apple Podcasts had stopped your feed then on your site found your changed hosts. But after deleting the old feed in Apple Podcasts and searching there I can’t find the new one. Where am I going wrong ?

General question. Why is this really great show not published as a podcast?

9:18 Believe it or not, a friend called me to help him network a bunch of Macs in the 68040 days, we did an all nighter and finally the chooser in each Mac could see one another. We just kept at it until it worked. Luckily I was in my youth in those days or I would be desperately tired. The good old days right?

What a great episode! I fell asleep listening to it after way too long of a day and had to start over this morning, Thank you for the entefomingtainment!

The first computer I ever used, my high school’s Ohio Scientific Challenger II, had disk drives that constantly spun. Floppies would always be very warm when removed. I’ve never known if that behavior was normal; Ohio Scientific was back in the day when everything was mostly an amateur hack.

The talk about having two sector 0's on the same track, and it booting differently depending on which one passed under the head first reminds me of the multi-ending flexi-disc record that MAD magazine put out in the 1980 - "Super Spectacular Day", which I had back in the day. The first part of the song played the same, but the second part of the song was a random one from 7. Like the sector 0 you mentioned above, it had multiple paths the needle could follow, so which ending you heard depended on which groove the stylus landed on.

Quinn, look into pi1541, or for a zero fuss c64 (and others!) solid state solution, look up the Backbit ...

how do we know when they are live?

There is a Commodore IEC Fujinet that shares the same dev board with the Apple II. There is a partnership between the Meatloaf project & Fujinet to bring the Meatloaf functionality (in large part) to Fujinet. The Commodore Fujinet is still under development but it does (mostly) work. I think they're still ironing out some details around IEC timings.

On Christmas Eve, 1972, my dad brought home an Odyssey console. White squares on black background with plastic cling overlays for TV screen. A few separate “cartridges”, not bundled, were available: add on Shooting Gallery and Handball (I think). Fantastic Christmas.

Aw! Missed the livestream. This is the best retro tech podcast out there.

"I got your haptics right here nerd!" (shaking fist) Thank you Quinn.

This arrived on my Apple podcast feed today. The 5 month delay threw me off!

My father coined the phrase "precautionary off-site backup" to descibe the copies of software i would share with friends.

Why aren’t you one Apple Podcasts anymore? 😢

Great podcast :)

57:40 Pressing space to speed up chest opening was a feature. You could also shoot at chests to sometimes drastically reduce the time left to open a chest. And, in one of the opening screens of text it says "now, I wouldn't go shooting at a chest full of explosives....." which in my impatience I actually did a few times as I "shot down" the time on a chest. BOOM!

1:28:00 And now we know why in the early days of the telephone it was sometimes called the blower....

Somebody needs to dial back Quinn's know-it-all monopolization of the podcast. Especially his smug entusiasm when talking to fellow-travellers.

Audio needs tweaking. I can barely hear Paul and Quinn is blowing my speakers out...

Episode 265 didn't appear on the (podcast) feed yet, am I looking in the wrong places?

I had one of those Sanyo computers. A company I developed software for used them for a Point Of Sale system.

For those who complain the show runs too long...

I've never caught a live episode before, how do we know when to tune in?

Best episode of RCR ever.

1:38:05 Cringely was also the narrator / interviewer for the "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary made in the mid-1990s where he tracked the history of the PC revolution and interviewed many of the key figures. IIRC it starts out at a Portland Trailblazers basketball game with Cringley saying "Paul Allen is richer than god, and Bill is richer than Allen"

I love "Yak Memory Systems - Holds a Grudge" 🙂

Chat GPT reports that regarding regular expressions: "Keep adding backslashes till they work."

Mini vMac works fine on my Macbook Pro running Monterey as does Basilisk II.

All of my computer science bachelor degree classes were done on a PDP-11/34A.

Quinndow, Portpaul, Carriface (ok the last two were stretches)

1:56:10 - I recently asked Chat GPT to program a RPG for me in 6502 Assembly. It knew what assembly language was but gave me some lame excuse for why it couldn't program a game. I guess I still have a 'job' 🙂