Halt and Catch Fire(unstack.io) |
Halt and Catch Fire(unstack.io) |
There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..
Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)
That should be the other way around. Until then systems will always try to rule over people and people will adapt for better or for worse.
Also, the EU and other jurisdictions have already passed laws and regulations about dark patterns, and continue to do so. iirc, there are jurisdictions considering laws regarding content algorithms. There are laws regarding certain addictive patterns (remember the whole debacle regarding micro-transactions targeted towards children?). None of this is to say that these things don't still happen, but rather to refute the notion that these patterns are merely frowned upon.
IPv8 and it's (eventually mandatory) device-attestation-auth-at-protocol-level will end all of this pseudoanonymous free thinking information exchange. It was good while it lasted.
There are, genuinely, people out there who will believe anything their phone will tell them to believe. Its not just about 'good old Internet' - its about the literacy rate of the user.
Literacy can be assayed by many different metrics - mine, personally (back to the subjective), is this: the ratio between whether the user is capable of programming the computer, compared to the computer, programming the user.
Technology doesn't get old - users do. However, users getting older 'feel better about this fact', often ignored, by upgrading to new technology - and into this very slippery wheel of consumerism has been deposited a great deal many traps, by operating system vendors, to keep us in the wheel.
The solution is to promote, among as young a generation as can tolerate it - immediately - the idea of using old technology to do wonderful and new and interesting things.
>Everyday user
Yes, a majority of every day users do not need this kind of backwards-focused thinking, to get work done. It is, very specifically, about the kids.
We have to make sure there are still hackers in 10 years time.
Self-host, program in C or what ever you find sexy, and enjoy.
If you work for Evilcorp, perhaps consider joining a smaller company and settle for a lower salary in return for being treated like a human and not like a cog in a machine?
Worked for me, and I am happier for it.
(The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
So if you're implementing a 6502 in an FPGA, and you want to add (say) stack-relative addressing, there's a nice set of opcodes that you know won't ever be in conflict with the usual ones, because any 6502 ever issuing it would immediately halt (but not catch fire).
Though that still wouldn't really be the machine itself catching fire, but the building and/or wiring.
When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.
1960s era. Humorous instructions for the IBM 360/69.
If the image link doesn't work, I've OCRed it:
IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 69 FEATURES AND DEVICES
Early Card Lace
1401 Incompatibility
407 Emulation
Chinese Character Set
Branch on Burned-Out Indicator
Branch on Blinking Indicator
Branch and Hang
Branch on Chip Box Full
Branch on Power Off
Branch on Sleepy Operator
Inquire and Ignore
Reverse Parity and Branch
Branch on Bug
Read While Write While Ripping Tape
Add Improper
Divide and Overflow
Subtract and Reset to Zero
Add and Reset to Zero
Scramble Program Status Word
Pack Alpha and Drop Zones
Pack Program Status Word
Punch Invalid
Rewind Card Reader
Backspace Card Reader
Read Print and Blush
Forms Skip and Run Away
Stacker Select Disk
Write Wrong-Length-Record
Write Noise Record
Seek Record and Scar Disk
Eject Disk
Rewind Disk
Backspace Disk
Punch Disk
Punch Operator
Execute Invalid Op Code
Read Card and Scramble Data
Select Stacker and Jam
Read Invalid
Rewind and Break Tape
Write Record and Run Away
Make Tape Invalid
Reverse Drum Immediate
Transfer and Lose Return
Print and Smear
Read Chads
Sharpen Light Pencil
Transfer and Drop Bits
Erase Card Punch
Read Inter-record Gap
Read Noise Record
Erase Read Only Storage
Destroy Storage Protect Key
Update and Erase Record
Move and Drop Bits
Circulate Memory
Move and Lose Record
Move and Wrap Core
Move Continuous
Execute No-Op and Hang
Develope Ineffective Address
Halt and Catch Fire
Scatter Print
Re-initialize Meter
Update Transaction
Reduce Thruput
Print and Break Chain
Lose Message and Branch
Burst Selector Channel
Invert Record and Branch
Illogical "or"
Illogical "and"
Bite Baudy Bit and Branch
Triple-Pack Decimal
Slip Disk
Stacker Upset
Uncouple CPU's and Branch
Scramble Channels
Edit:formatting.
I compared it to another OCR of the same image, using http://ocr.space, and ChatGPT was correct in all the small number of differences, even preserving misspellings in the source.
Go watch it. Great show.
They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time.
I mean, wtf.
World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.
That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then.
Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.
I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…
I have also seen some monitors designed so badly, like the IBM MDA monitor mentioned at the link provided by userbinator, but all the TV sets that I have ever seen could only be synchronized to the desired scanning frequencies by the "sync" pulses, but they would oscillate freely in the absence of sync pulses.
The cost savings by not having relaxation oscillators or PLLs that would drive the raster scan in the absence of sync pulses, and which would limit the range of acceptable scan frequencies to safe values, have always been negligible, even by the time of the vacuum tube TV sets, and much more so by the time of computer monitors. The elimination of physical safety devices is not an acceptable way to reduce costs, especially when the savings are so small as in this case.
The vertical deflection drive appears to have some feedback, so maybe that could constitute an oscillator, but I can't see any feedback at all in the horizontal section, it looks entirely feed-forward. I get the impression they were just integrating the square wave into a ramp. The diagram shows 15us low out of only 50us total line time, which seems like quite unlike the typical 15.75 kHz sync of the time. I recall getting hold of the 6845 datasheet and trying in earnest to understand how to program that chip, and was baffled that the reference set of register values wouldn't produce a display. The fact I was missing at the time was that one had to start from 20kHz for the horizontal refresh.
Unfortunately, in my many moves it has disappeared, though I still have the schematics for it.
Somehow I missed the boat on being a billionaire!
(Disclaimer: I speak as one who has kept almost every computer I've ever hacked on since 1978...)
Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.
So for me the love/romance aspect was just the network television layer I had to peer through, in order to find the marrow of the meal, so to speak.
That said, it did have a fast attack, a moderate decay, but then a fast release, in terms of 'interest envelope', for me personally. I enjoyed the good bits while they lasted, and tolerated the soap opera in case there were dregs, all the way to the end...
And the romance was more character drama about people making extremely irresponsible choices.
I recommend it at every chance I get, but few people ever watch it. They're more likely to give Silicon Valley a try.
If anyone else loved these actors watching HACF, I would recommend watching The Fall (Pace), Fargo S3 (McNairy) and Station Eleven (Davis).
(I watched both of them years after I decided not to go into industry.)
They really captured the urge to build things in tech, and the problems that come with it. HACF, Silicon Valley, and The Soul of a New Machine are a trifecta.
Great intro too:
E.g.,
> Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty in 1951. McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941. In November 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) division, which focused on electronic equipment.[14] By 1951, the L&M division, with its defense contracts, was growing faster than GSI's geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc. Because a firm named General Instrument already existed, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments
And how it got in contact with military contracts:
> TI entered the defense electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment,[41] based on the seismic exploration technology previously developed for the oil industry. The division responsible for these products was known at different times as the Laboratory & Manufacturing Division, the Apparatus Division, the Equipment Group, and the Defense Systems & Electronics Group (DSEG).
* Ibid
The show is much more, and much better, than that though. I’m glad I kept watching.
Vladimir Horowitz very famously played a televised concert back in the 80s where, for the first time, a few cameras stayed focused closely on his hands. He had horrible technique. It was horrible by his own professed standard: for most of the fundamental things he himself taught to his students, he was doing the opposite! This was broadcast to millions of people. Piano teachers everywhere were pissed.
While that bad technique isn't particularly noticeable in the resulting sound for that concert, there's an analysis somewhere that shows the damage it did as he aged. You can hear certain problems he was having in his later recordings, and video from the same period confirms that the bad technique (like straining the wrist on octaves) was the culprit[1].
In any case, all kinds of world class people do all kinds of fucked up shit.
Edit:
1: In other words, when he was middle-aged he could play octaves accurately with a strained wrist, but he couldn't do that in old age. However, if he had been leveraging the weight/power of his entire arm for the octaves, he would have gotten accuracy in both cases.
2: IIRC, he didn't realize what his technique looked like until someone showed him the video. :)
You are looking for the wrong badge.
I still can’t ‘properly’ touch-type.
Most actors and directors put a lot of thought into small details like this, so when you see something like this it’s often intentional.
What broke the show for me was some hot peroxide blonde doing what was really done by a slightly dumpy guy in an isolated office.
I just can't watch shows that fictionalize history from my field of work. My dad's a musician and he's the same with his field.
I'm fine with that. I read the history book or watch the documentary instead.
Typing was not a core skill. He had secretaries for that. A lot of the early typing he did was on a keypunch when an operator wasn't available; "proper" early mechanical keypunch technique was index fingers only because of the high forces involved.
My memories of the early 80's have a lot of "computer people" -- both older mainframe types like my dad, and younger people -- typing like that.
Bladerunner and HBO's Chernobyl are two of my favorites that fit this.
AGREED! I became an instant favorite of that actor just from this part. I'm the rare nerd type who is extremely outgoing and comfortable in any kind of social situation, very capable of getting along and communicating with both the business types and nerds, but I'm still extremely technical to a degree that surprises the jocks and the nerds. "Gordon", the character, is the exact type of nerd that I wind up getting along best with, and I loved that character in the show.
What HACF got right, imho, was the collection of the various personalities that were attracted to the rising computer technology, of the era.
I've known plenty of Joe's and Camerons and Donna's, but the ones I chose to remember were the Gordons .. alas, there are the odd Gilfoyle and Josh stains among the sheets of memory too, though ..
It’s not like the IETF have any obvious success managing or deploying solutions to IP problems known for over 30 years.
I also no longer have the software I wrote for it, nor the keyboard or monitor. It's all gone.
My other regret is I gave away my H11 computer. Sigh.
It would be better if I'd just taken a photo of it. There is a photo of my H11 on my twitter profile.