Tasty » Adam Sampson's history bookmarks

Ordinosaures (ordinateurs anciens): Serel 1001, ODP 505, T1600, Multi 8 et autres vieux ordinateurs edit / delete

A French perspective on computing history. There are some fantastic images here -- lots of early visualisation and graphics.

to graphics history retrocomputing retrotech ... on 04 June 2018

Welcome to the Azanorak archive of offshore radio recordings edit / delete

to broadcast caroline history pirate radio ... on 05 May 2018

Tektronix Smalltalk Document Archive edit / delete

"This page contains annotated links to primary documents related to the development of Smalltalk products at Tektronix in the 1980’s."

to history oo retrocomputing smalltalk tektronix ... on 05 May 2018

Douglas W. Jones's punched card index edit / delete

"An illustrated technical history".

to card history ibm retrocomputing unit-record ... on 05 May 2018

Stretch-ing Is Great Exercise: It Gets You in Shape to Win - IEEE Journals & Magazine edit / delete

Fred Brooks on the IBM Stretch project, which pioneered pipelining, 8-byte bytes, multihead hard disks, and various other things we take for granted today. I particularly liked this bit about ECC memory: "The contract required that Stretch run for a month with better than 90% availability. The machine chugged along great and was hovering right above the 90% line when one bit driver, or else one sense amplifier, failed completely! For the rest of the acceptance test, the IBM team just ran it the way it was. There was not time to stop and fix it; stopping would have ruined the statistics. So the Stretch ran along to the end of the month single-error correcting every memory access from that box."

to architecture ecc history ibm pipelining retrocomputing stretch ... on 16 February 2018

How ASCII Got Its Backslash edit / delete

Short answer: "It enabled the ALGOL "and" to be "/\" and the "or" to be "\/"."

to algol ascii character history retrocomputing text ... on 14 February 2018

Notes on the History of Fork and Join - IEEE Journals & Magazine edit / delete

The terms are surprisingly old -- there's a 1963 paper with a diagram that's pretty much what's on my CMP202 slides.

to concurrent fork history parallel retrocomputing ... on 02 February 2018

Industrial Alchemy edit / delete

Unusual valves, semiconductors and display devices - all the things that were competing with Nixie tubes, for example.

to electronics history led retrotech semiconductor valve ... on 07 October 2017

Roll Scanning Information Page edit / delete

A very large collection of scanned piano rolls, converted to MIDI.

to history midi music piano piano-roll ... on 20 September 2017

Software Preservation Group — Software Preservation Group edit / delete

Some fairly specific archiving projects from CHM -- e.g. as much as they could collect about early Fortran compilers.

to compiler fortran history language-design retrocomputing ... on 13 September 2017