zamp: I’m pretty sure it was Lars Brinkhoff Oops, let me edit my post! Thanks for the video - from the description I converted the algorithm from floating-point and trigonometric calculations to use a few integer additions and table lookups. Still, it’s not running fast enough under a PDP-10 emulation to animate smoothly. The video lists the code - could be transcribed easily… (Edit) but now I notice @larsbrinkhoff has already commented upthread… and the source is already published in his repo here ..read more

I’m pretty sure it was Lars Brinkhoff who wrote the PDP-10 version of the Bubble Universe program. Lars and Oscar have worked closely together on the PiDP-10 and continue to do so. Here’s Lars demoing the Bubble Universe program running on ITS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIU7iYWZWSY ..read more

There is a nice series of blog post (4 parts, as of writing), I Was a 1980s Teenage Programmer, which is highly recommended, by the way. It’s in part 3 that we find this passage: My father had switched from Microsoft GW BASIC to Microsoft QuickBASIC around this time on the Olivetti M24. This did away with the need for line numbers and introduced named locations you could GOTO or GOSUB from. Wild stuff. But not on my MSX-2. This had the conventional line-number based BASIC. Inspired by this, I first added a proprocessor for “.qb” files to the PET 2001 emulator. However, we really shouldn’t be ..read more

Trying to get my head around this - @oscarv seems to have written a Bubble Universe program for the PDP-10 (just 7 pages of assembly code) which seems to run incredibly fast. (Admittedly it’s a PiDP-10, so that’s the SIMH emulator running on perhaps a Pi4 or even 5, but still.) See the 24min mark of this video: Oscar's new PDP-10 replica (and PDP-8 and PDP-11 too ..read more

I prefer the form exp(πi) + 1 = 0 because then you have all of π i 1 0 ..read more

ceptimus: spell it ‘three halves’ rather than ‘three halfs’ OT, but there’s a series of comedy shorts which covers this - all depends on whether you follow JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis ..read more

Finally I found some code for a printout (reading the mnemonics table) and a pointer list, code and IOTs for the 7 control keys (write, read, delete, copy, sim ,test, control) or at least parts of their (error ?) handling. Like the previous pointer list of the units there’s a list of pointers here with 7 values (0-6). If AC (only last digit here) is 7 (else) it continues after that, so I thought that there are 8 values. But when continue there will be 360 (E0) 5 written to the LCD (40/41). And that is a wrong key error having a control key what is not allowed after a previous key. 7 is also th ..read more

I now found a card from Siemens (SIPART line) with coated short modules. I think from 1994. 3 horizontal ones on top (coated dark red) 3 non coated ones in the middle and 2 vertical coated ones below. I found similar non-coated thin plastic modules on Siemens SIMATIC probably S5 PCBs (1987?) white/red alternating ..read more

See, no niche. Already 2 bids and 9 days to go. And the price was right ..read more

Nice find! (Advertised as 2CPU, as seen in the video… because dual purpose and “perhaps because the Z80 wasn’t sexy enough”) Also from the video ..read more