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.
The Cray Y-MP C90
Tag: Geekery
First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself
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!
The ICT 1301 Resurrection Project
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!
Cover art from a UK release of Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver
Another one that (currently) doesn’t seem that easy to Google (even though it should be!)
The Doctor Shops for a Minicomputer…
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.
Converting PDFs to JPEG sequences using imagemagick
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.
The cost of a PDP-11 circa 1971
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”A 27 Year Old Easter Egg
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.
‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’
Another aide-memoire so that I have the link kicking around…
There used to be a somewhat famous ThinkGeek teeshirt called ‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’ that, even now, gets periodically referenced on the more tech-ish end of the internet. With ThinkGeek now lost to the mists of time, it’s not as easy to Google for as it used to be.
