bitsavers

I just had a flyer shoved through my door that ATT 5gig fiber is available in the building my workshop is in.

1gig symmetrical (and the possibility of some fixed IPs) is the same price as what I have had to re-negotiate every contract cycle for bandwith that is now down to 150mbits asymentrical from Comcast

Comcast can now rot in hell, though I'm not physically able to take advantage of it, I can't wait to kill my contract with them

Their monopoly in South Fremont is now broken.

The Problem-Solving Method They Removed From Every Textbook

"LLMs are wood chippers being fed the tree of knowledge. All you get out of it is mulch" -- Me

I just posted "don't clean electronic boards with piezoelectric resonators or oscilators in an ultrasonic cleaner" and someone replied "it works for me"

fuck hobbyists

Jerbs wuz here

The Unix V4 tape read was successful

https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115747843169814700

#bitsavers

"Friendly reminder to keep magnetic disks away from laptop lids!"

#bitsavers

Today's exercise in "no fun". Someone noticed the pages of this pdf were out of order. This brought back a bad memory that, in fact, this rather expensive used tome was bound incorrectly, and I forgot to fix it when I made the pdf. Several hours later after renaming every page to correct his, and create an easy to search version, it is up for your enjoyment.

Unix_System_V_Release_4_System_Calls_and_Library_Functions_for_Motorola_Processors_1993

I am baffled why anyone would want to lump some of the sections of the Unix Programmers Manual into one mongo alphabetized one, but there you are.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/System_V_Release_4_Motorola/0-13-035841-X_Unix_System_V_Release_4_System_Calls_and_Library_Functions_for_Motorola_Processors_1993.pdf

warning... it is a 48 megabyte file.

#bitsavers

Colossal blunder on my part this afternoon. Pulled the drives from an areca raid array and forgot what order they have to go back in so now the array isn't recognized and RESCUE doesn't see it. Has anyone documented the magic parameter sectors that describe this anywhere?

https://assets.oldbytes.space/assets.oldbytes.space/media_attachments/files/115/604/445/219/908/432/original/ca16913ac5c3c1da.jpg

tell me again why Cloudflare isn't considered a MITM?

Refreshing to hear of a boss not being a lemming

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_jobs_opinion/

Put this next to your G4 Cube Kleenex dispenser

https://www.ebay.com/itm/187386715254

From Bill Atkinson's Facebook via the Call-A.P.P.L.E. discord:

Dear Friends and Family, We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it. He was fascinated by consciousness, and as he has passed on to a different level of consciousness, we wish him a journey as meaningful as the one it has been to have him in our lives. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and dog, Poppy.

A pleasant surprise in a book on Bendix G-15 programming that I scanned today

https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-lobachevsky-lyrics

I post-processed a bunch of Univac 1050 software documents that were in the scanning queue.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/univac/1050

In the 00s, someone on eBay was selling 7 track diagnostic source tapes from the basement of a Univac factory for the 1050 which Paul Pierce read for me. I haven't looked at the images in 20 years but it's probably time to see if I can print out the data. As far as I know, this is the only 1050 code that survives.

January 2025 is the 20th anniversary of my quitting Apple (Oct86-Jan05) and next year will be the 20th anniversary of me being software curator at the Computer History Museum.

Choosing which of the two was less stressful and having an impact on the world is easy.

#AppleLore #bitsavers

A collection of Charles Babbage Institute newsletters from the 80s and 90s I couldn't find scans on line at the CBI website. Lots of interesting information on how they came to be and what their collecting strategy was.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/charlesBabbageInstitute/newsletters

#bitsavers

Somehow, I don't think that 2024's richest man in the world, who also is an immigrant, would ever think of using his money to create something like this.

https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy

after looking for a copy for thirty years, the APDA LocalTalk PC driver reference is on bitsavers

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/networking/localtalk/LocalTalk_PC/APDA_M7055_LocalTalk_PC_Card_and_Driver_Preliminary_Notes_198708.pdf

#AppleLore #bitsavers

Here is an IC mystery When did TI make plastic TTL with the logo embossed into the divot? It seems VERY unlikely they were making epoxy bodied ICs in 1965

I have a couple of Corvus Concept 68000 machines booting for the first time in 30+ years. Starting to pull out all of the source files for the system I've collected over the decades

http://bitsavers.org/bits/Corvus/Concept/Floppies_5inch/SOURCES

I'm hoping I can get someone interested in making the Concept driver work in MAME. I'd really like to get a local hard disk emulator working now that its able to boot again.