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The presentations from FOSDEM 2020 are online. FOSDEM is an annual, non-commercial conference for Free and Open Source software developers and takes place for two days every year in Brussels, Belgium. This year it was the first weekend in February, Saturday the 1st and Sunday the 2nd. It is organized by volunteers and aims to promote the use of free and open source software. One beneficial aspect is the many developer rooms where various projects can meet and exchange ideas, plan, discuss, and hack. Participation is free of charge.
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FOSDEM 2020 Presentations Available Online
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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by DannyB on Monday February 10 2020, @06:47PM (2 children)
Download old BYTE magazines from here: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm [americanradiohistory.com]
Or higher quality scans here: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine [archive.org]
Or Popular Electronics: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm [americanradiohistory.com]
Creative Computing: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing [archive.org]
The technology was shockingly primitive.
Looking at old BYTE magazines it's amusing to think about 'active' cables that we use today.
We use cables with tiny IC chips that negotiate the charging current from the wall wart (with tiny switching power supply), to fast charge the high-tech batteries in our always-on pocket computers with gigahertz, gigabytes, high resolution true color flat panel displays, high quality stereo sound, speech recognition *that-works*, fantastic speech synthesis, lots of sensors.
(Looking for wiring diagram to build adapter for Tesla Supercharger to charge an iPhone at 275 KW.)
BYTE magazine, April 1980, page 115.
NEW HIGH-SPEED COMMUNICATIONS BUS: Xerox Corporation recently made a public announcement of a new concept of processor-to-processor communications intended for an office environment. This novel concept is called "Ethernet", and is a result of some of the work being done in their research labs. In this concept, a single coaxial cable is used as a high-speed communications bus between all processors; communication protocol is handled through software or software supplemented by special-purpose hardware. Rumor has it that an Ethernet processor is now being developed by some form of joint arrangement between Xerox and Intel.
(I would re mind the reader that this is referring to thick coaxial cable, not plastic RJ-45 type plugs with cat6 cable.)
BYTE 1978-July, pg 42
Conversation overheard in local computer store:
Customer: What's the difference between static and dynamic memory?
Salesman: Static memory works, and dynamic memory doesn't.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @07:18PM (1 child)
> The technology was shockingly primitive.
But the performance was great, people actually cared about performance, optimized their code, etc.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 10 2020, @07:32PM
Performance was pretty terrible. 1 MHz. Maybe a couple few MHz a few years later. Memory was horribly lacking for a long time. So you couldn't do anything very exciting easily. To do anything cool with, as Spock would say, stone knives and bearskins, required a tremendous amount of effort. That perhaps makes something cool even colder, but is a huge waste of human effort. Today's interactive high level languages might beat assembler code on these primitive 8 bit underclocked processors.
BASIC was the language of the day. (1976-1978) What we now think of as mere utility functions were what was called a "program" back then. Celsius to Farenhiet, or Roman Numeral conversions. Floating point had no standardization, other than standard compliance with horribleness.
Before the "holy trinity" of 1977 (Apple, Pet, TRS-80) there was no standardization for software developers to market for. Every system was custom and unique. Articles focused on getting the most trivial of things working.
Now I admire the efforts people made. I'm sure it wasn't easy or cheap to get, say, keyboards. And then get them to somehow work. Requiring both hardware and software skills.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.