review: a new Model M from Unicomp!

My favorite keyboard is the Model M. They're big, loud, heavy, and made of equal parts joy and engineering. Typing on one makes the familiar clattering racket that everybody loves.

Lindsey just gave me a new one! My 1988 version (IBM part #1391401) is still fine, of course. But now I can bring one to the lab.

The new keyboard is beautiful; they're making them with USB now, and they come in black! It's not quite as heavy as my 80's vintage keyboard (no big metal plate inside), and while the keys themselves are easily removable, this model doesn't have separate keycaps. But it's just as clicky as you remember, and the feel is perfect. This design is apparently the same as some of the latter-day IBM versions.

The company manufacturing the M now, Unicomp, is great, and they totally deserve your business.

The first keyboard they shipped us actually had some problems with it -- a few of the keys were sticking! So I called up the company and got Jim on the phone almost immediately. He suggested that I pull the offending keys off and then pop them back in place (usually good M maintenance advice). After some fidgeting, we determined that I wasn't going to be able to fix it myself, so he had a replacement sent out the very next day!

So fantastic. And now I have two Ms.

(here's another Unicomp review; the blogger and everybody in the comments over there seems to have had a great customer service experience too.)

you need more retrocomputing: Mini vMac and old Apple software

So I was looking for cool activities for my new XO laptop, and I ran across Mini vMac, an emulator for the Macintosh Plus; it's cross-platform, but if you happen to have an XO, here's the .xo activity.

And it works really well! You'll need a ROM image, y'know, taken from the Mac Plus that you personally own, and also an image from a "System" disk (available on that same page).

But! As the Mini vMac page points out, you can get old Macintosh System software from somewhere else -- Apple's own Older Software Downloads page, which features all sorts of outdated Apple software. System disks, drivers for bizarre old SCSI hardware... and Hypercard.

The Mini vMac page also links to this fantastic compendium of old macintosh software from third parties, which has even more wild old stuff, like vim 3, forgotten Lisps and MLs, games that you might remember.

I'm going to have to run this fullscreen on my Macbook Pro, woo!

more retrocomputing: procedural graphics languages!

One of my first online experiences -- and probably the first for a lot of people, came in the form of Prodigy, over dialup, on an old DOS box. At the time, Prodigy wasn't an ISP as such -- it was an insular online community, with its own exclusive content and games and message boards and email. Of course, this model wasn't sustainable forever...

But! The interesting thing about Prodigy was the graphics. It was clear, at the time, that it wasn't downloading "images" as such -- y'know, like raster graphics -- it was drawing in terms of commands that would build pictures out of shapes. This was kind of cool; the dialup link was slow enough that you could see it building the picture, usually bigger background shapes first, then the details would get filled in. It occurs to me now that it must have been somebody's job to work out how to draw pictures like this...

It turns out that Prodigy was using the standard language for this: NAPLPS, the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax. And there were several other services that used the same approach -- some of them sent the commands over modems, like Prodigy, but some went over TV, during that mystical vertical blanking interval that broadcast engineers talk about.

Speaking of sending non-raster graphics down the wire: did you know that there's a set of drawing commands understood by some DEC terminals? It's true. It's called ReGIS. At one point, Brett and I got our hands on some old DEC terminals and spent a few afternoons messing around with this on something that must've been a vt340 or vt420. You can find out all sorts of wonderful things about DEC terminals at the super-top-notch vt100.net. These things seem to be indestructable; I held on to the vt220 for years, passing the joy forward sometime in college; it was still chatting amiably over the serial port on my Linux box, and almost as old as I was.

That's all for now. Happy hacking!

retrocomputing from the other side of the pond

Here's what I found out on my recent voyage through the wikipedias! Semi-vicarious nostalgia ahoy!

In the early 1980s, the BBC started an initiative called the BBC Computer Literacy Project, a major part of which was the production of the BBC Micro, a machine produced by Acorn Computers, complete with its own line of peripherals including expandable memory and various pluggable co-processors. There was an associated television show, The Computer Programme, which ran in various incarnations through the decade and featured music from Kraftwerk. The computers came with BBC BASIC, a rather more advanced system than the BASICs that were shipping stateside -- it had proper named subroutines and if/then/else, features most users on the MS-DOS side of things wouldn't see until QBASIC.

The mind-blowing part of the project was Telesoftware, whereby computer programs were sent embedded in the broadcast television signal, using Teletext, which is how the closed-captioning data was sent in Britain at the time. Analogue technology like broadcast TV feels so alien these days... but the Beeb was busy using it to send example programs to eager learners at home.

There seems to be a pretty active online community of BBC/Acorn enthusiasts out there, two and a half decades later.

You know how to use the Googles, of course, but here's another, more detailed overview of the BBC/Acorn system.

Possibly interesting, but almost definitely not useful!

- My aunt, years ago, had a Newton eMate 300, and I recently found a Newton PDA while cleaning out the space behind an A/C unit -- in any case, I've had this weird fascination with Newtons for years. Now, you can relive the Newton Magic that you probably never experienced in the first place, under emulation! The Einstein Platform is a Newton emulator that works pretty well -- and you can find Newton ROM images here. It's kinda interesting. (Although I got stuck in fullscreen mode once, careful!)

- Self. It's been ported to Linux. It's one of those languages that one feels like one should learn more about. It has interesting family relationships with SmallTalk and Dylan and JavaScript...

- Thinking Meat celebrates the holidays. I just found this blog, but over at the Thinking Meat Project, she has a lovely article about taking part in the culture around the holidays and coming to terms with the cognitive dissonance from enjoying good Bach choral music while feeling like one shouldn't be participating in religious rites, for consistency's sake. It can hard to balance these things, particularly soon after giving up a faith.