asciilifeform: in that last pic, the gluelogic loox to be a mix of su and ro
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this item is similar to the last gasp of su comp makers, the iskra 286 , 100% orc except for the intel chip ( last su-indigenous clone was afaik 8086 )
asciilifeform: sov mil-grade caps are still prized ( tantalum-niobium , go and buy these in usa for any price )
asciilifeform: ideal cryptotron would have simply empty socket, bring yer own z80, specificityofdiddling, hah.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you'd be surprised at what survived untouched in some dusty shithole
asciilifeform: aside from rom/ram all it needs is a uart , of which there is also a good '80 supply .
asciilifeform: ( for some conceivable applications, z80 remains more than adequate, and will remain so 50y from nao -- e.g. otp crypto, lamport, potentially -- btc walleting, etc )
asciilifeform: ( asciilifeform , incidentally, is eternally on the lookout for anybody selling crates of eprom-window microcontrollers, they are gold standard for auditable/non-surreptitiously-rewritable iron )
asciilifeform: the 1980s variant was '16c84', exactly same device aside from the glass window / uv eprom
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ( and lulzily i had the very same serialport programmator described in your link )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aaaa you meant the ~actual~ taiwanese pic16, not orcistani micros
asciilifeform: cuz in ye olde su the closest thing , afaik, were straight clones of i8051 , with eprom , i.e. the glass windows
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: do you happen to recall exactly what you had ?
asciilifeform: with moar, and better-polished routines published for maths, i/o, whatever, than for just about any pc thing
asciilifeform: there is apparently still a subculture around that thing
asciilifeform: ftr, prolly the most enjoyable programming asciilifeform ever did as adult, was on a device called 'pic16', a microcontroller with 68 addressable byte ( and 1k of program rom, it was a 'harvard arch' )
asciilifeform: z80 was an unfathomable luxury, from the pov of the calculator folx
asciilifeform: folx would write, on paper, what was initially an impossible-to-run 300-500 bytes, then work, whittle.
asciilifeform: picture, game in 104 byte, and with 7 numeric digs as sole output.
asciilifeform: imho there's something to the hypothesis that the almost absurd minimality of the earlier boxen, encouraged careful thought and experimentation
asciilifeform: ( granted at the point of mk85 , troo micros were already beginning to spread, and the set of folx willing to play games with grid paper, began to thin )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: very tellingly, there were afaik 0 great gamez made for mk-85 , despite the latter featuring a pdp11-compat chipset ( in, forfuckssake, a pocket calc!! runinng on , what, 20 milliamp ) and rom basic
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: believe or not, mk61 was a troo breakthrough, a computer (of sorts) that could be actually mass-produced in orcistan. buncha folx did their physics dissertation models on the thing, even
asciilifeform: the i/o device consisted of, what, 40 buttons and a 7-digit vacuum flask display.
asciilifeform: subj was built by people who had to hand-draw erry transistor.
asciilifeform: could just as easily say that e.g. leibniz's calculator 'not so great machine'
asciilifeform: re 'manifest matter at will' : in early 2000s asciilifeform grasped the mega-problem , that programming ain't actually hard, except for stripping away the monkey shit produced by 50 yrs of monkey. 'i want a sane emacs' turned into 'sane prog lang' and quickly 'sane os' then 'sane iron' , and afaik this actually the inevitable correct cut, rather than caprice
asciilifeform: ( 'you wouldn't download mercedes!' -- idjit usg copyrasty poster ; 'i would if i could, motherfuckers' ( answer ) )
asciilifeform: same thrust as the fritz/cr50/etc nonsense.
asciilifeform: the heathens know this, and so they specifically put mega-effort into making 'get the text out via awk-like' as painful as possible.
asciilifeform: www tools are in a sorry state, the choice is roughly 1) lynx 2) ipadism
asciilifeform: iirc there is a wwwtron , of a kind, built into emacs; it is in roughly the same condition as climacs.
asciilifeform: dunno, i have graphical e.g. logic analyzer, happily purring along via x11 pipes.
asciilifeform: and what's to stop you from diddling the strings in a http proxy. ( prolly easier, really, than making a 'greasemonkey' kludge for erry possible www browser )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what, 'greasemonkey' no longer worx on 'modern browser' ?
asciilifeform: e.g. graphical emacses, complete with frames, arbitrary windowshape, and orcograms, running on other end of planet and displaying in arbitrarily-shaped windows on my console.
asciilifeform: dunno about other folx, but i use it -- in the sense described in linked threads -- ~all day, erryday.
asciilifeform: i fully expect that linus will eventually sell 'his brand' so craig wright or whoever can make an Official 'linuxcoin' or whatever garbage.
asciilifeform: the tunneling behaviour of x11 makes it practical to use a box with no video card, no kbd, etc. as a full-bore workstation ( and this was used as early as the bolix lispm )
asciilifeform: ( e.g. for an infinite loop in sbcl, to not hose emacs )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: on account of 40 yrs of os braindamage, folx often confuse what they want , in that they think they want multithread, but really want nonblockage☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: same way errybody loses ancient arts. by overwriting the parchments and wax tablets, by neglect, by 'surely won't need this again', lol
asciilifeform: phf: now i'm curious, what you build on that dos ( i.e. do you have gnat for dos built ?! major asciilifeform-wishlist item )
asciilifeform tried last yr, on a purpose-made box, to replicate it, and failed, lost the ancient art
asciilifeform: trinque: believe or not, at one time i had a patched msdos to do 120 column txtmode
asciilifeform: ^ asciilifeform's preferred wm, since early 2000s
