asciilifeform: ffa/p-tron as a dos boot disk would imho rock.

asciilifeform: ( for nitpickers -- 8bit won't work, you cannot represent the ~length~ of a crypto-useful integer in 8 )

asciilifeform: ( i deliberately wrote ffa in such a way that it oughta work on under 32bit or even plain 16, supposing somehow enuff ram )

asciilifeform: i'm looking forward to the hero who pulls off a msdos gnat port btw

asciilifeform: ( if yer writing even so much as a tetris, even on dos box you needed a bit more than simply fb to do it without 'tearing', you need some way to insta-flip the 'pages' , possibly ioctl ? )

asciilifeform: if you have a working /dev/fb0 you can theoretically have x tho, neh

asciilifeform: have nfi how well it worx and what exactly it takes to get a picture

asciilifeform: i admit that i've never actually plugged a display into rk

asciilifeform: i expect if you bake sumthing on 'horsecocks', it will be simple to rewrite on new item, will simply shed a few lines of coad

asciilifeform: ( uses system.address internally to turn yer mmap into a 100% transparent 'as if you had declared it on stack' variable that is backed to/from disk via mmap )

asciilifeform: phf: the early ver that was actually posted is http://btcbase.org/log/2017-06-06#1666647 . however there's a clean/rewritten one, in a 90% state of completion, not yet genesis'd ☝︎

asciilifeform: there's also the 'is it really ~the~ tapes' aspect. as in the old thing with the gold bars that nobody wants to drill for tungsten. consider for instance how nikola tesla was able to live in the waldorf for years, with the loan collateral being a trunk containing 'great invention of much dangerous power'. when died, turned out to contain a whetstone bridge. ☟︎

asciilifeform: whichever way -- there's apparently a set of people who find it moar satisfying to sit on a trunk of rotting tapes, than to see the idiocy of computing 1990-present cured

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: there's at least a little bit of the healthy dynamic where 'why should i throw the pearls before swine', iirc mircea_popescu expanded on this

asciilifeform: it's almost like folx revert to the condition of the alchemists when given half a chance.

asciilifeform: the way i understand it, bolix macsyma was largely a free ride on the public dollar one

asciilifeform: a

asciilifeform: literally erry other ic on the 'ivory 3' board is stock ( save possibly for a GAL or 2 )

asciilifeform: i wouldn't consider ever to put floatism in a new design, but for compat with the vintage soft one would need it ( fortunately unlike 'ivory' the weitek is documented to death, i even have a copy of the datashit from ancient ru stash )

asciilifeform: even ivory had a buncha similar ugly, iirc it still used external weitek thing (same as in yours and mine 486) for arithmetics

asciilifeform: ( if you were to start today with two tonnes of 74xxx, you would end up with something that looks quite a bit like cadr )

asciilifeform: cadr was a horrendous thing because designed around two tonnes of 74xxx

asciilifeform: i'm even ok with a roll of b&w fujifilm, if too big for xerox.

asciilifeform: phf: if the thing is a paper scroll etc, feel free to xerox and post it to my postbox if that's easier than scans

asciilifeform: ave1: c. d. smith, 'the zx spectrum ula: how to design a microcomputer' btw

asciilifeform: ( iirc i read it as a scan, rather than actual b00k )

asciilifeform: ( and later x60 is pretty much a physically shrunken version of that box, with slightly faster cpu )

asciilifeform: even a coupla from after they turned sad

asciilifeform hopes to live to write a b00k like that ☟︎

asciilifeform: ( i actually have a b00k by orig designer of z80, where he actually walks through the die, transistor by transistor, as if it were picasso ) ☟︎

asciilifeform luvvvs laboratory glass, at one time had a fairly large collection, prolly enuff to be jailed for 25yr in new york or wherever it was

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you may find it interesting that there's a shop selling items like that thing on ~erry street where i live. and some are quite elaborate, over a metre tall, and clearly hand-made, very ornate. possibly the last major handicraft remaining in this here orcistan.

asciilifeform: ( decorative ? or they have a mechanical function ? )

asciilifeform: http://trilema.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/unicorn-4.jpg << lol there's a 'valve' like that in washington also ( iirc gift from jp in 1930s! )

asciilifeform: same document will work for assange, for BingoBoingo , asciilifeform , etc., can print a crate of'em, wainot

asciilifeform: iirc qatar, with $maxint, also 'could not absorb a piddly coin'

asciilifeform: banks died as a rational concept, we're sorta back to the old days of buried treasure as storage

asciilifeform: ( even if it is 'custom' in the sense of being a write-once rom . these, too , saleable, i'd buy a whole crate right nao if anybody were selling )

asciilifeform: as for 'resist', the only sense in which it does is that the scheme has very little (tho not zero) reward for custom irons, any storage device that is good for 'proof of blox-on-disk' is also a good general-purpose random access store, and is saleable commodity

asciilifeform: btw i was going through my ffa notebooks and found a margin note that was actually about this, that prolly oughta go in the l0gz : if yer 'pow' is a walk-through-storage, 1 problem is that initial state of the system gives too little material to walk. so 1 interesting answer might be to include a 'ballast', consisting of, say, the first 9 yrs of classical btc blox, 1...N, that is part of the luby'd set (as raw bytes, rather than as m

asciilifeform: just once i gotta go to some place that's moar of a shithole than here, just to see what it feels like.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: other thing -- i have a vague sympathy for the 'asic-resist' perpetuum-mobile folx; i dun particularly see what's so great about chinese monopoly on mining in classical btc. but it is tempered by the fact that they're some admixture of outright scamola and dumb-as-rocks -- consider, we described a perfectly-usable 'disk-hard' pow algo, http://btcbase.org/log/2017-03-01#1620665 , and they're still derping with 'ram-har ☝︎