I used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators.
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!)
This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.
I'm not a slave to my computer. Stop using bad services that are designed to manipulate your behaviour. There's still the good old Internet out there with genuinely interesting content.
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.
A very subjective view - but as originators and not just users of technology, we must be objective, too.
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.
That IPv8 proposal that was circulating a few weeks ago was not a serious proposal (written entirely by a single person with no substantial involvement in IETF before then) and has no roadmap to any kind of adoption.
One thing i found very interesting over the years is that when people seem to abuse systems ( key activation, share netflix accounts, vpn, torrents) it’s considered a serious crime, but when companies openly abuse systems ( unsubscribe maze, addiction, fraud ) it’s frowned upon.
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.
While I sympathise with the sentiments here, it's just not true, or at least is a gross exaggeration. While IANAL, nor have I read every jurisdiction's laws, I'm fairly certain we have yet to see someone prosecuted for sharing a Netflix password. This place would've been inundated with posts about it.
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.
Computers still do the exact same thing they did back then, which is to read opcodes and do binary math. That is all. It is people and corporations that found a way to monetize them which is hostile to us users. But I think that with time, this too shall pass and computers will still do what they always did. You can still enjoy designing a small PCB, working with microcontrollers and building something fun.
This is the way! Just because shitty and privacy invading and infatile services and tools exist, does not mean you have to use them.
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?
Time is running out to do something effective about that enslavement - well, there are other very effective things that can be done to 'cure' people of electronic enslavement (EMP and/or other disaster) - but the point is, if we want to do something effective, we must be teaching new generations, old technology.
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.
The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe.
(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)
Oh, I have so many of my own experiences to tell in this regard, but .. I'm a little curious .. if you still have the schematics, why not build it again and pick up where you left off?
(Disclaimer: I speak as one who has kept almost every computer I've ever hacked on since 1978...)
The IBM MDA also had a 6845, and since it was driving a fixed-frequency monitor of extremely simple design, any deviation from the standard timings could definitely let the magic smoke out of the flyback transformer.
That was definitely a defect of the monitor, not a serious mistake of the programmer. Any damaged monitor should have been paid by whoever had approved such a monitor design, even in the case of a monitor integrated in an all-in-one computer, which was not supposed to be disconnected from the computer.
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.
The more likely risk with a 6845 is creating a way out of spec vertical sync that can cause the monitor's frame flyback transformer to fail. Although how you describe the PET monitor's beam being "parked" suggests it's actually the same effect.
I recall seeing it just stop dead center, quite bright. Immediately just turned the machine off, but that did seem to account for why a couple of the other machines in the room had small round-ish phosphors burns right in that spot
Huh. I haven’t rewatched the show, but when I saw it originally - admittedly shortly after watching Mad Men - I thought “this is trying to be Mad Men, but it’s the '80s and in the computer industry” and interpreted Lee Pace as a laundered Don Draper.
The show is much more, and much better, than that though. I’m glad I kept watching.
Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas and then computing moving to California. It both shows mainframe, personal computers (the C64) and then beige PC taking over.
> Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas […]
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.
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).
Silicon Valley is also pretty good. I went in expecting not to like it (in a Big Bang Theory "about nerds but not for them" way) but came out loving it. It may read as parody to some but it barely is. It's a comedic but accurate take on west coast tech industry of the 2010s
The best part of Silicon Valley was that it had a very south park quality to it.. in that things that were actually happening at the time were parodied on the show.
Same. Having experienced the growth of computing in those eras, the show itself had a very well researched yet very nostalgic sense of "oh yes. I'd forgotten about that".
Lee Pace is just bigger than life, and Mackenzie Davis is electric in every scene, but my favourite on the show was Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance. Although I guess that could be said of all the main (and not so main) characters in the show.
If anyone else loved these actors watching HACF, I would recommend watching The Fall (Pace), Fargo S3 (McNairy) and Station Eleven (Davis).
(Lived the HACF era/story personally, so it was a poignant watch.)
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 ..
> Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance.
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.
It's special for sure. For those on the fence, it has some writing and direction flaws, especially with minor characters, like the disgruntled neighbor and IP theft bit in the first season. But it grows as a show over time, and the 5 leads (including Toby Huss) smooth the problems out with their talent and chemistry.
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.
I have to admit, when a specific person died I was feeling so bad about it I never watched the last episode. I still have it on the drive how many years later.
I could see it coming and HATED EVERY SECOND of it. Then it happened even sooner than I expected and the impact was huge. The actor really gave that character life, and impact when the death happened, great talent.
I don't get why it's so praised. Everybody says it's about the rise of computing, and all I got was a shoehorned romance story with computers in the background.
Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.
I lived that era and personally had many of the experiences of the characters over the decades, so as I watched, I compared the show to my own experiences.
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...
This is why a lot of my favorite shows/movie series are ones only a few episodes long, but which really give a good feel for the world they take place in.
Bladerunner and HBO's Chernobyl are two of my favorites that fit this.
When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
One cool thing about this is that there are places where old compilers feared to tread, on the 6502 for example any opcode (apart from $A2, LDX #imm) ending in 2 would be a JAM instruction - CPU just stops. The later CMOS versions still did that for most of the $x2 instructions but some were converted to NOP.
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).
Reading the post, I was immediately reminded of the Big Red Button that was a prominent feature on 80s/90 PCs because of their tendency to end up in a state where a hard reset was the only way out of the lockup. And of course there were the rare cases where even that didn’t work and the only solution was to power-cycle the machine. It’s been years, maybe decades since I’ve encountered that situation and when I have it was a hardware failure, not a software failure as was the case back then.
So many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.
No they are absolutely everywhere. Most people here don’t even know what HCF. This article is nonsense and paints it like some euphemism applied to modern coding. HCF was a joke and no actual implementation was proven. Fucking bots.
Author here. I wasn't trying to imply that this is a commonly used phrase nowadays. You can see from the sources I linked, there is definitely history to HCF and even some truth to its phrase. But yes, it was mostly a joke
I learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article.
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.
Modern OCR is amazing. That image is full of noise and ChatGPT did it without any errors that a I can see.
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.
I enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).
There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me.
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.
You'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.
It may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others.
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.
> World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.
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. :)
That feels entirely realistic for the time to me. It would certainly’ve been realistic to my formative years in the industry (a little later - turn of the century).
Keypunch operators learned to type with just their index fingers. I saw this with some older operators of the airline ticketing system at the airport years ago.
My dad was a great programmer... who typed with a terrible two finger peck technique. It was infuriating to watch as a kid.
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.
At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.
Lots of people were typing like that. As far as typing today, different layouts, hobbies with ergonomic keyboards etc we see far more people touch typing today than were in the 80's.
I wouldn't call it abnormal, I was pecking - very quickly for a long time before I ever knew what vi was. I found vi on my first unix login in '85 and still pecked at it.
I also know that today, with far more people typing, less of them probably gain the same knowledge as we did hacking back then. Good typing can't replace your computer knowledge.
Today I never look at my keyboard, it's 36 keys and its no use looking as no symbol represents what happens when you press the key. I am a better typist, not better at software though.
My father is a journalist and learned to type by himself on typewriters using his index fingers. He writes a lot and he is really fast. I don't have any issues with that.
The only reason I learned to touch type was out of boredom and the fact that the only “game” for the TI99/4a system (it had an “extender” with floppy drive and ran some spreadsheet) that my dad brought home from work at weekends was a touch typing tutor. When I started CS, I was in the tiny minority in my class that could touch type. During an introductory lecture for the course, one of the tips was “learn to touch type”.
I used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators.
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!)
This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.
“It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.”
I feel the same way when I work on older cars.
I'm not a slave to my computer. Stop using bad services that are designed to manipulate your behaviour. There's still the good old Internet out there with genuinely interesting content.
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.
A very subjective view - but as originators and not just users of technology, we must be objective, too.
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.
That IPv8 proposal that was circulating a few weeks ago was not a serious proposal (written entirely by a single person with no substantial involvement in IETF before then) and has no roadmap to any kind of adoption.
A reasonable proposal from a single person outside the IETF seems most likely to succeed.
It’s not like the IETF have any obvious success managing or deploying solutions to IP problems known for over 30 years.
It’s not like that proposal offers a solution for any of those problems.
One thing i found very interesting over the years is that when people seem to abuse systems ( key activation, share netflix accounts, vpn, torrents) it’s considered a serious crime, but when companies openly abuse systems ( unsubscribe maze, addiction, fraud ) it’s frowned upon.
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.
In my experience it's incredibly unusual for the sharing of netflix accounts to be considered a serious crime. Does this happen on a regular basis?
"to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." - Voltaire
Funny thing about that quote, it wasn't Voltaire who said that, but was in fact neo-nazi pedophile Kevin Alfred Strom lol
While I sympathise with the sentiments here, it's just not true, or at least is a gross exaggeration. While IANAL, nor have I read every jurisdiction's laws, I'm fairly certain we have yet to see someone prosecuted for sharing a Netflix password. This place would've been inundated with posts about it.
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.
Computers still do the exact same thing they did back then, which is to read opcodes and do binary math. That is all. It is people and corporations that found a way to monetize them which is hostile to us users. But I think that with time, this too shall pass and computers will still do what they always did. You can still enjoy designing a small PCB, working with microcontrollers and building something fun.
This is the way! Just because shitty and privacy invading and infatile services and tools exist, does not mean you have to use them.
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.
Time is running out to do something effective about that enslavement - well, there are other very effective things that can be done to 'cure' people of electronic enslavement (EMP and/or other disaster) - but the point is, if we want to do something effective, we must be teaching new generations, old technology.
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.
The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe.
(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)
In 1978 I built a single board computer with a 6800 uP and a 6845 to drive the display. Made a keyboard for it, and it worked.
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!
Oh, I have so many of my own experiences to tell in this regard, but .. I'm a little curious .. if you still have the schematics, why not build it again and pick up where you left off?
(Disclaimer: I speak as one who has kept almost every computer I've ever hacked on since 1978...)
I could, but the list of projects I want to do is very looooonnnnggggg and reconstructing that machine would be nice to show off, but of no utility.
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.
Oh, well at least scan your schematics in and put 'em on a repo somewhere! That might be inspiring to someone, you never know ..
You might be right!
It would be better if I'd just taken a photo of it. There is a photo of my H11 on my twitter profile.
The IBM MDA also had a 6845, and since it was driving a fixed-frequency monitor of extremely simple design, any deviation from the standard timings could definitely let the magic smoke out of the flyback transformer.
https://marc.info/?l=classiccmp&m=119637265107100
That was definitely a defect of the monitor, not a serious mistake of the programmer. Any damaged monitor should have been paid by whoever had approved such a monitor design, even in the case of a monitor integrated in an all-in-one computer, which was not supposed to be disconnected from the computer.
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.
Found a schematic for the 4016/4032 at https://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/schematics/computers...
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.
The more likely risk with a 6845 is creating a way out of spec vertical sync that can cause the monitor's frame flyback transformer to fail. Although how you describe the PET monitor's beam being "parked" suggests it's actually the same effect.
I recall seeing it just stop dead center, quite bright. Immediately just turned the machine off, but that did seem to account for why a couple of the other machines in the room had small round-ish phosphors burns right in that spot
It was a fun show. I really enjoyed it, a fictional run through the 80s and 90s computing industries.
It really starts strong too. The first couple of episodes are fantastic.
Huh. I haven’t rewatched the show, but when I saw it originally - admittedly shortly after watching Mad Men - I thought “this is trying to be Mad Men, but it’s the '80s and in the computer industry” and interpreted Lee Pace as a laundered Don Draper.
The show is much more, and much better, than that though. I’m glad I kept watching.
That’s how I pitch it to people because it gets them to watch it, but it is definitely distinct from it. Same energy though
Same showrunner is doing the current season of The Terror (a/k/a "North Pole Bear Show" in my review notes; that first season was excellent).
the terror was excellent! glad it's continuing
Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas and then computing moving to California. It both shows mainframe, personal computers (the C64) and then beige PC taking over.
Great intro too:
https://youtu.be/yD_kCKiSkoI
Oh I'd never connected this. It makes so much sense. I'd always wondered what Texas had to do with computing that made so many things start there.
> Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas […]
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
It's a shame that it is such a niche show in practice. The acting of Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis in particular are so good across all 4 seasons.
I recommend it at every chance I get, but few people ever watch it. They're more likely to give Silicon Valley a try.
All four leads are flawless and I can't really think of a single bad performance.
Silicon Valley is also pretty good. I went in expecting not to like it (in a Big Bang Theory "about nerds but not for them" way) but came out loving it. It may read as parody to some but it barely is. It's a comedic but accurate take on west coast tech industry of the 2010s
The best part of Silicon Valley was that it had a very south park quality to it.. in that things that were actually happening at the time were parodied on the show.
Same. Having experienced the growth of computing in those eras, the show itself had a very well researched yet very nostalgic sense of "oh yes. I'd forgotten about that".
Lee Pace is just bigger than life, and Mackenzie Davis is electric in every scene, but my favourite on the show was Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance. Although I guess that could be said of all the main (and not so main) characters in the show.
If anyone else loved these actors watching HACF, I would recommend watching The Fall (Pace), Fargo S3 (McNairy) and Station Eleven (Davis).
(Lived the HACF era/story personally, so it was a poignant watch.)
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 ..
> Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance.
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.
I sometimes tell people that HCF is why I wanted to become a programmer and Silicon Valley is why I didn't become one.
(I watched both of them years after I decided not to go into industry.)
Yeah a truly fantastic show all the way through the end. One of my favorites by far.
It's special for sure. For those on the fence, it has some writing and direction flaws, especially with minor characters, like the disgruntled neighbor and IP theft bit in the first season. But it grows as a show over time, and the 5 leads (including Toby Huss) smooth the problems out with their talent and chemistry.
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.
Don’t forget Fire in the Valley.
I have to admit, when a specific person died I was feeling so bad about it I never watched the last episode. I still have it on the drive how many years later.
You should probs edit out the spoiler, or encode it somehow for others who haven't watched it yet!
Fair enough. I assumed everyone would have watched it by now from here :)
For example ... I just finished it 2-3 months back and started only because of a thread here :)
Yeah, that was a rough bit. I’ve rewatched the show and I know it’s coming and it still gets me.
That’s too bad because I think the last episode is brilliant. I think about it a lot even years after seeing it.
I could see it coming and HATED EVERY SECOND of it. Then it happened even sooner than I expected and the impact was huge. The actor really gave that character life, and impact when the death happened, great talent.
I still have it downloaded somewhere as wanted to watch it again. It was great
Agreed. This was one of the few shows that advanced the storyline quite a bit threw the seasons without jumping the shark.
I don't get why it's so praised. Everybody says it's about the rise of computing, and all I got was a shoehorned romance story with computers in the background.
Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.
I lived that era and personally had many of the experiences of the characters over the decades, so as I watched, I compared the show to my own experiences.
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...
All good stories are about the characters. Genre-first gets old quick.
This is why a lot of my favorite shows/movie series are ones only a few episodes long, but which really give a good feel for the world they take place in.
Bladerunner and HBO's Chernobyl are two of my favorites that fit this.
Even companies that create computers are still run by people, and the relationships of those people are just as impactful as the business decisions.
I mean, for something you consider to be the background, it takes up a hell of a lot of the foreground.
And the romance was more character drama about people making extremely irresponsible choices.
When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
One cool thing about this is that there are places where old compilers feared to tread, on the 6502 for example any opcode (apart from $A2, LDX #imm) ending in 2 would be a JAM instruction - CPU just stops. The later CMOS versions still did that for most of the $x2 instructions but some were converted to NOP.
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).
Complete series is at all time low on iTunes/Apple TV, 14.99:
https://www.cheapcharts.com/us/itunes/seasons/1745389594
Reading the post, I was immediately reminded of the Big Red Button that was a prominent feature on 80s/90 PCs because of their tendency to end up in a state where a hard reset was the only way out of the lockup. And of course there were the rare cases where even that didn’t work and the only solution was to power-cycle the machine. It’s been years, maybe decades since I’ve encountered that situation and when I have it was a hardware failure, not a software failure as was the case back then.
I'm calling urban legend on the story of an IBM 360 catching fire from an illegal opcode.
Well, data centers catch fire all the time. And it stands to reason that an infinite loop could increase power draw and trigger a fire.
Though that still wouldn't really be the machine itself catching fire, but the building and/or wiring.
So many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.
Have they been removed? I’m mostly seeing comments from established accounts.
No they are absolutely everywhere. Most people here don’t even know what HCF. This article is nonsense and paints it like some euphemism applied to modern coding. HCF was a joke and no actual implementation was proven. Fucking bots.
Author here. I wasn't trying to imply that this is a commonly used phrase nowadays. You can see from the sources I linked, there is definitely history to HCF and even some truth to its phrase. But yes, it was mostly a joke
BikiniPrince is an AI bot account. No need to justify anything to him.
This article subverted my expectations past the first couple of sentences. Nice read. The show is great too btw.
Love how many people here are thinking this is about (or just taking it as an opportunity to talk about) the under-appreciated TV show!
I mean, it is the thing that made me go down this rabbit hole. Need to watch it now!
I had an old projector; If the film roll stopped for any reason (operator error, getting stuck, etc...), the lamp was so bright that it'd catch fire.
In the realm of flammable computer parts and adjacent devices, there's the somewhat related lp0 on fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
I learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article.
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.
The Nintendo64 had a halt bug in the MIPS 4300. Doesn’t catch fire though.
The oldest reference I know of to "Halt and Catch Fire" is shown here : https://www.facebook.com/larry.langerholc/photos/d41d8cd9/74...
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.
Modern OCR is amazing. That image is full of noise and ChatGPT did it without any errors that a I can see.
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.
> I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire…
Go watch it. Great show.
I enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).
There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me.
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.
When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon
You'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.
I didn't even notice that bit.
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.
It may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others.
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.
> World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.
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. :)
That feels entirely realistic for the time to me. It would certainly’ve been realistic to my formative years in the industry (a little later - turn of the century).
I still can’t ‘properly’ touch-type.
Keypunch operators learned to type with just their index fingers. I saw this with some older operators of the airline ticketing system at the airport years ago.
My dad was a great programmer... who typed with a terrible two finger peck technique. It was infuriating to watch as a kid.
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.
At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.
You are looking for the wrong badge.
My dad was a programmer in the 70s and 80s and, to this day, he types with both middle fingers and that's it.
Lots of people were typing like that. As far as typing today, different layouts, hobbies with ergonomic keyboards etc we see far more people touch typing today than were in the 80's. I wouldn't call it abnormal, I was pecking - very quickly for a long time before I ever knew what vi was. I found vi on my first unix login in '85 and still pecked at it. I also know that today, with far more people typing, less of them probably gain the same knowledge as we did hacking back then. Good typing can't replace your computer knowledge. Today I never look at my keyboard, it's 36 keys and its no use looking as no symbol represents what happens when you press the key. I am a better typist, not better at software though.
I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.
Mario teaches typing hadn't been invented yet!
My father is a journalist and learned to type by himself on typewriters using his index fingers. He writes a lot and he is really fast. I don't have any issues with that.
The only reason I learned to touch type was out of boredom and the fact that the only “game” for the TI99/4a system (it had an “extender” with floppy drive and ran some spreadsheet) that my dad brought home from work at weekends was a touch typing tutor. When I started CS, I was in the tiny minority in my class that could touch type. During an introductory lecture for the course, one of the tips was “learn to touch type”.
Stories like these are what endear me to my chosen career.
I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…
This article is deadbeef on arrival.