15 Sep
2007
15 Sep
'07
7:19 a.m.
Surely any publisher of an article past or present and where software is
an important part of the design and who does not print a listing is only
doing half the job. If they are doing this to sell a few preprogrammed
chips then shame on them.
For old designs we may come across and wish to restore and are prevented
by this practice lets have a 'Wall of Shame' to identify those people
who left us a legacy like that.
Rod Smallwood
-----Original Message-----
From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Tony Duell
Sent: 14 September 2007 20:41
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Ancient 8086/80286 unixes?
Actually, Elektor have been rather better about this recently, and in a
lot of cases the _source_ code for the microcontroller firmware is
available as a free download from their web site.
Alas, in some cases (often for the projects I am most interested in
:-(), this is not the case, often becasue the author gets a royalty from
each pre-programmed chip sold.
On Thursday 13 September 2007 01:30:39 Ensor wrote:
> I first came across this myself in the mid-90s. I'd picked up a copy
> of "Elektor" for the first time in
almost 10 years and was surprised
that they
didn't provide any listings of any form for the projects
based around PICs, you had to send away for pre-programmed parts.
That's about when I remember seeing it happen; also with an article in
(possibly) PE&EE about building a Z80-based SBC that ran Forth.
These days when you can build a simple PIC or ATMEL programmer from a
couple of components, or buy an EPROM programmer off eBay for about a
tenner, there's not really an excuse.
I suspect the reason (not an excuse...) was that they made money selling
pre-programmed chips. Certainly when you boughht the pre-programmed
chip, it came copy-protected.
Ob. on-topic: does anyone remember the Forth SBC article I was talking
about, and does a copy of it exist online anywhere?
No, and as a Forth (and stack based languages in general) lover, I would
be interested.
-tony
17 Sep
17 Sep
8:51 a.m.
Rod Smallwood wrote:
Surely any publisher of an article past or present and
where software is
an important part of the design and who does not print a listing is only
doing half the job. If they are doing this to sell a few preprogrammed
chips then shame on them.
For old designs we may come across and wish to restore and are prevented
by this practice lets have a 'Wall of Shame' to identify those people
who left us a legacy like that.
That will be a big wall, since I lump "... continued next month" and
you never can find next month.
Rod Smallwood
As a side note I remember reading
years ago about great (other than next
weeks clone) upcoming hardware in BYTE and never hear about it again.
Pascal/Modula II engines come to mind.
Ben alias woodelf
5:58 p.m.
On 17 Sep 2007 at 1:51, woodelf wrote:
That will be a big wall, since I lump "...
continued next month" and
you never can find next month.
As a side note I remember reading years ago about great (other than next
weeks clone) upcoming hardware in BYTE and never hear about it again.
Pascal/Modula II engines come to mind.
The chips certainly existed, but I never saw them deployed as
anything other than a curiosity.
On a related issue, there were several CD collections put out with
code and often article text. I've got a set here simply called
"Source code" and another that excised the more interesting articles
and code from a dozen or two publications and delivered it as a
quarterly summary. I never cracked any of the things past a quick
browse--and most of the time, I forget that I even have them. DDJ
also issues compendium CDs; I don't know if Byte ever did.
Cheers,
Chuck
9:29 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
I never cracked any of
the things past a
quick
browse--and most of the time, I forget that I even
have them. DDJ
also issues compendium CDs; I don't know if Byte ever did.
I think I've seen a DDJ #14 CD ... which does imply there were a bunch
of them beforehand. As for BYTE, in the UK they had "Explore BYTE on
CDROM" available for Winter 1997, Spring 1997, Fall 1997 and
Winter 1997/98 (Vols 1-4 in that order). Then I think BYTE vanished
off the face of the Earth. I browsed them and they had what appeared
to be full articles. Don't recall about source code though.
I think Practical Electronics had contents on CDs and included software
on them (but I cannot find mine right now). Elektor has been available
on CD since some time in the mid 1990s and that has software (or at
least the ads claim it does).
But I agree that trying to build something from the early 1990s that
needed a programmed EPROM may turn out to be somewhat tricky. Still,
that's what lists like this one and usenet are for :-)
Antonio
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10:50 p.m.
--- Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote:
But I agree that trying to build something from the
early 1990s that
needed a programmed EPROM may turn out to be
somewhat tricky. Still,
that's what lists like this one and usenet are for
:-)
I own a book (that I thought was entitled "the Eprom
Experimenter's Handbook" or something close) that
seems rather to be entitled "Experiments with Eproms".
You can search for that title on Amazon. Very cheap.
Has some simple home brewed ("poor man's")
programmers. My copy is softbound and is a greenish blue.
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9:21 p.m.
Rod Smallwood wrote:
Surely any publisher of an article past or present and
where software
is
an important part of the design and who does not print a listing is
only
doing half the job. If they are doing this to sell a few preprogrammed
chips then shame on them.
Prinitng listings would have taken up too much space and made the
magazine prohibitively expensive. These days that's no excuse since
making things available via the web is trivial.
Antonio
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Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.487 / Virus Database: 269.13.21/1012 - Release Date:
16/09/2007 18:32
9:31 p.m.
Antonio Carlini wrote:
Prinitng listings would have taken up too much space
and made the
magazine prohibitively expensive. These days that's no excuse since
making things available via the web is trivial.
Stange I remember magizines for the COCO 90% BASIC listings. The other
9% cartridge games for sale. The other 1% Ads like upgrade your ...
Antonio
Ben alias woodelf
10:23 p.m.
woodelf wrote:
Stange I remember magizines for the COCO 90% BASIC
listings. The other
9% cartridge games for sale. The other 1% Ads like upgrade your ...
I too remember computer mags in the early days with listings but
they were rarely more than a page or two IIRC. The only one I
recall ever buying was a Speccy one that had a "flexible" 45rpm
disk on the cover. I didn't have a speccy at the time and it sounded
awful on the record player :-)
But those "you'll have to be a pre-programmed EPROM" type projects
were 32KB upwards. I never bought one, so I've no idea how much
real data was there, but even 16KB-worth of listing seems like
a lot to print (and type!). Much more than a few BASIC listings.
(I've just scanned what I think is the source listing to an
RML COS Monitor listing runs to 58 pages for maybe 4KB. Even
if half of that is comments and index and symbols corss references
that could be discarded, that's still a lot of pages for a
few KB.
Antonio
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.487 / Virus Database: 269.13.21/1012 - Release Date:
16/09/2007 18:32
10:48 p.m.
Antonio Carlini wrote:
woodelf wrote:
... there was that attempt (late 70's?) by Byte or Kilobaud to establish a
bar-code-type standard to print bit-streams of code/data in the magazine that
users/readers would read into their computer with a wand.
Stange I remember magizines for the COCO 90%
BASIC listings. The other
9% cartridge games for sale. The other 1% Ads like upgrade your ...
I too remember computer mags in the early days with listings but
they were rarely more than a page or two IIRC. The only one I
recall ever buying was a Speccy one that had a "flexible" 45rpm
disk on the cover. I didn't have a speccy at the time and it sounded
awful on the record player :-)
But those "you'll have to be a pre-programmed EPROM" type projects
were 32KB upwards. I never bought one, so I've no idea how much
real data was there, but even 16KB-worth of listing seems like
a lot to print (and type!). Much more than a few BASIC listings.
(I've just scanned what I think is the source listing to an
RML COS Monitor listing runs to 58 pages for maybe 4KB. Even
if half of that is comments and index and symbols corss references
that could be discarded, that's still a lot of pages for a
few KB. 
11:01 p.m.
At 04:48 PM 9/17/2007, Brent Hilpert wrote:
... there was that attempt (late 70's?) by Byte or
Kilobaud to establish a
bar-code-type standard to print bit-streams of code/data in the magazine that
users/readers would read into their computer with a wand.
Which this list has discussed many times before.
When are we going to create a definitive Wiki for our obscure topics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip
doesn't say much.
- John
11:56 p.m.
John Foust wrote:
At 04:48 PM 9/17/2007, Brent Hilpert wrote:
Sorry, kind of thought it had been discussed previously. I could well be wrong
but I'm not sure the Cauzin Softstrip is what I'm recalling though - the refs
linked on wiki refer to CS being 1985, I think there was something being
discussed or proposed by one of the mags years earlier, more in the
IMSAI/Altair era.
... there was that attempt (late 70's?) by
Byte or Kilobaud to establish a
bar-code-type standard to print bit-streams of code/data in the magazine that
users/readers would read into their computer with a wand.
Which this list has discussed many times before.
When are we going to create a definitive Wiki for our obscure topics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip
doesn't say much. 
18 Sep
18 Sep
8:36 a.m.
New subject: Cauzin effect
Sorry, kind of thought it had been discussed
previously. I could well be wrong
but I'm not sure the Cauzin Softstrip is what I'm recalling though - the refs
linked on wiki refer to CS being 1985, I think there was something being
discussed or proposed by one of the mags years earlier, more in the
IMSAI/Altair era.
I've got a Cauzin reader someplace around here, and I am pretty sure it
was the first TWO dimensional type barcode. They must have had a pretty
strong patent because it was still in use as recently as about 5 years
ago for trade show badges. Anybody know if its tied into the stuff used
in shipping now, postage stamps etc.?
10:59 p.m.
New subject: Cauzin effect
errr... be very difficult to tell for sure.
An article I read in 80 Micro (I only have issues 1 to 60, so must be between 1980-86)
stated their were only 7 types of barcodes.
In a recent Lonelygirl15 "episode" (err.. back in June/July?) on YouTube Bree
(played by Jessica Rose) stated that there are now 300 types of barcodes. No idea whether
that's true or not, but certainly barcodes are everywhere - we use them to register
samples at the lab I work at (much quicker to scan a barcode than to manually enter
primary data - location, analysis required etc.)
I'm not entirely sure how they can differ that much as they are essentially visual
binary, with special markers to mark the start and beginning of the barcode.
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
Mike Ford <mikeford at socal.rr.com> wrote:
Sorry, kind of thought it had been discussed
previously. I could well be wrong
but I'm not sure the Cauzin Softstrip is what I'm recalling though - the refs
linked on wiki refer to CS being 1985, I think there was something being
discussed or proposed by one of the mags years earlier, more in the
IMSAI/Altair era.
I've got a Cauzin reader someplace around here, and I am pretty sure it
was the first TWO dimensional type barcode. They must have had a pretty
strong patent because it was still in use as recently as about 5 years
ago for trade show badges. Anybody know if its tied into the stuff used
in shipping now, postage stamps etc.?
11:45 p.m.
New subject: Cauzin effect
On 18 Sep 2007 at 22:59, Andrew Burton wrote:
An article I read in 80 Micro (I only have issues 1 to
60, so must be between 1980-86) stated their were only 7 types of barcodes.
In a recent Lonelygirl15 "episode" (err.. back in June/July?) on YouTube Bree
(played by Jessica Rose) stated that there are now 300 types of barcodes. No idea whether
that's true or not, but certainly barcodes are everywhere - we use them to register
samples at the lab I work at (much quicker to scan a barcode than to manually enter
primary data - location, analysis required etc.)
I'm not entirely sure how they can differ that much as they are essentially visual
binary, with special markers to mark the start and beginning of the barcode.
Recently on slashdot there was a report of a technology using colors
and shapes to fit something like 3GB on a letter-sized sheet of
paper. Lotta skepicism expressed on that one.
I remember the Paperbytes thing as requiring very little more than an
input pin and a phototransistor for scanning. I made my own wand
using just such (built into an old felt-tip pen) and wiggled an
unused status line on a serial port. A smooth, no-jitter swiping
action was required to get the best results. And there were some PBs
that I just couldn't read no matter what I tried.
Cheers,
Chuck
17 Sep
17 Sep
11:09 p.m.
On Monday 17 September 2007 17:48, Brent Hilpert wrote:
Antonio Carlini wrote:
"Paperbytes" (tm) comes to mind, though I can't recall now which magazine
it
was that had that in there...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
woodelf wrote:
... there was that attempt (late 70's?) by Byte or Kilobaud to establish a
bar-code-type standard to print bit-streams of code/data in the magazine
that users/readers would read into their computer with a wand. Stange I remember magizines for the COCO 90%
BASIC listings. The other
9% cartridge games for sale. The other 1% Ads like upgrade your ...
I too remember computer mags in the early days with listings but
they were rarely more than a page or two IIRC. The only one I
recall ever buying was a Speccy one that had a "flexible" 45rpm
disk on the cover. I didn't have a speccy at the time and it sounded
awful on the record player :-)
But those "you'll have to be a pre-programmed EPROM" type projects
were 32KB upwards. I never bought one, so I've no idea how much
real data was there, but even 16KB-worth of listing seems like
a lot to print (and type!). Much more than a few BASIC listings.
(I've just scanned what I think is the source listing to an
RML COS Monitor listing runs to 58 pages for maybe 4KB. Even
if half of that is comments and index and symbols corss references
that could be discarded, that's still a lot of pages for a
few KB.
6330
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