A Little More Web Kipple
The British Geological Survey has an interesting article on the moving alignment of true, magnetic, and grid north and how it’s about to leave England for the next several hundred years.
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Abort Retry Fail has a really nice post on opening and installing a new old stock Red Spine release of OS/2 Warp 3.0.
Now, while I’ve played around with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and 4.52 as part of Period Sites in Period Browsers, Warp 3.0 is not one I’ve yet reached.
And how uncanny it looks! Familiar but alien. Windows 3.1 but not. I should really get an instance of this up and running just so I can really feel – rather than just see – the differences between how I expect it to work and how it does work…
Anyway, I strongly suggest going and having a read of the article and a look at the pretty pictures.
It’s the start of the month and over at Retro Computer Adverts there’s a rather lovely brochure for the Cray Y-MP C90 in all of it’s early 1990s glory.
Quanta Magazine has a nice article on a question I’d not even thought about – can all shapes pass through themselves? And, apparently, the answer is ‘no’, but only for a very limited number of shapes.
The article is pretty good and breaks down the problem and its history quite nicely. Go read!
And now for something really rather fab to start your day off with – ICT 1301 resurrection project! Their goal is to restore the UK’s oldest 2nd Generation Electronic Stored Program Computer to functioning order.
They also have a lovely set of digitised technical manuals up to view!
Fab!
Another one that (currently) doesn’t seem that easy to Google (even though it should be!)
And here’s a rather nice pair of Doctor Who-themed adverts for the Prime Computer range of minicomputers. There are so fairly obvious hints that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are phoning it in but the shoutout to their current – but brief – marriage is rather nice.
Imagemagick (available from all good package managers) has the ability to split a .pdf file into a set of numbered images via the following incantation…
convert -quality 100 -density 200 -colorspace sRGB <PathToPDF> -flatten <PathToOutputDirectory/>Page-%02d.jpeg…where, of course, ‘%02d’ represents the auto-numbering element of the incantation.
Whilst trying to track down the cost of memory for a PDP-11 I stumbled across The PDP-11 FAQ and it’s rather excellent collection of early 70s PDP-11 price lists. It’s a fun little list, rammed through of interesting little nuggets – today it’s hard to imaging it but in 1972 a line printer would have set you back at least 12,000 USD. That’s almost 92,000 USD in 2025 prices!
Continue reading “The cost of a PDP-11 circa 1971”So apparently the firmware for a number of of the old PPC Macs had Easter Eggs embedded within them and, with the right combination of woo, you could get the firmware to spit these Easter Eggs out for you to view.
