Coincidences which segue into codebreaking
There are an awful lot of strange and lucky coincidences in life. I'd like to relate two of them to you, if I may. Not that you can stop me.
Today, I received an email that told me that my account on a website would be cancelled if I didn't log on before Sunday. I tend not to use this particular account (I won't tell you the details because it's the Nintendo of Europe VIP site and I don't want to seem geeky... damn) very much but I wanted to keep it going. If I hadn't fiddled around with the settings on Thunderbird so that I could get my ISP email account on Deneb (my iMac, a task I've been delaying for a long time and only performed for eBaying-purposes), I would have lost my account, a real inconvenience.
The Wii balance board having been announced just yesterday (damn, I still need to download the Nintendo press conference) and having attracted my interest, I was surprised to find, while thumbing through Retro Gamer, a mention of the Amiga Joyboard, a similar idea for a controller, though obviously less effective due to more primitive technology.
Actually, the Joyboard has an interesting history, which I've cobbled together from Retro Gamer and Wikipedia. It was created to work with the Atari 2600 and a handful of games that Amiga made to fund their plans to make a 16-bit computer with the Motorola 68000 processor. As a random piece of trivia, the original funding for the company came from a trio of dentists. Project Lorraine, named after the company (then called Hi-Toro)'s wife, eventually produced the Amiga 500, one of the most successful computer of its era.
The Joyboard was a favourite toy of the ex-Atari engineers who founded the company and they used to play a game where the object was to sit cross-legged and completely still for as long as possible, in the manner of meditation. This led to the "Guru Meditation" errors, an in-joke that became AmigaOS's equivalent of a BSOD.
I'd talk more about the 500 but I have to confess, I haven't finished reading the article yet.
If I were in a whimsical mood, I'd wax lyrical about the fact that coincidences must pass us by every day and that there are so many possible coincidences that could happen, those that do are extremely insignificant.
But I'm not in a whimsical mood, so I'm just going to do a few notes.
StreamK (I'd link it but there's not much at the website) has pretty much entered the early beta stages now and I guess my major part in the work is just beginning, Skippy having already put in tremendous amounts of effort. Speaking of which, I promised to set up some email stuff for him by... uh... yesterday. Oh, well. He hasn't done a New Word Thursday today so if I don't get it done tonight I'll accuse him of that and hope the whole thing goes away.
I'm close to getting Lucy, my old LC 475, online, so if Blogger is compatible with Netscape 2.02 (which I believe is the version I'll be using), I might just post something from her in the coming week. Or maybe I'll use Linus. Probably won't use my Amstrad though.
Speaking of ancient computers, there's a museum of them opening up at Bletchley Park, famously home of the Colossus computer (computers, I should say; ten in total were in operation by the end of the war), the first ever digital computers, best known for breaking German codes during World War II. An original model has even been rebuilt by volunteers, working without documentation and with the same kind of Post Office exchange components that were used in the original. It will be the centrepiece of the new museum which will also hold other working examples of computers from 1945 to the present day.
More information here, here and here.
I never though I'd say this, but I really want to go see that museum.
Today, I received an email that told me that my account on a website would be cancelled if I didn't log on before Sunday. I tend not to use this particular account (I won't tell you the details because it's the Nintendo of Europe VIP site and I don't want to seem geeky... damn) very much but I wanted to keep it going. If I hadn't fiddled around with the settings on Thunderbird so that I could get my ISP email account on Deneb (my iMac, a task I've been delaying for a long time and only performed for eBaying-purposes), I would have lost my account, a real inconvenience.
The Wii balance board having been announced just yesterday (damn, I still need to download the Nintendo press conference) and having attracted my interest, I was surprised to find, while thumbing through Retro Gamer, a mention of the Amiga Joyboard, a similar idea for a controller, though obviously less effective due to more primitive technology.
Actually, the Joyboard has an interesting history, which I've cobbled together from Retro Gamer and Wikipedia. It was created to work with the Atari 2600 and a handful of games that Amiga made to fund their plans to make a 16-bit computer with the Motorola 68000 processor. As a random piece of trivia, the original funding for the company came from a trio of dentists. Project Lorraine, named after the company (then called Hi-Toro)'s wife, eventually produced the Amiga 500, one of the most successful computer of its era.
The Joyboard was a favourite toy of the ex-Atari engineers who founded the company and they used to play a game where the object was to sit cross-legged and completely still for as long as possible, in the manner of meditation. This led to the "Guru Meditation" errors, an in-joke that became AmigaOS's equivalent of a BSOD.
I'd talk more about the 500 but I have to confess, I haven't finished reading the article yet.
If I were in a whimsical mood, I'd wax lyrical about the fact that coincidences must pass us by every day and that there are so many possible coincidences that could happen, those that do are extremely insignificant.
But I'm not in a whimsical mood, so I'm just going to do a few notes.
StreamK (I'd link it but there's not much at the website) has pretty much entered the early beta stages now and I guess my major part in the work is just beginning, Skippy having already put in tremendous amounts of effort. Speaking of which, I promised to set up some email stuff for him by... uh... yesterday. Oh, well. He hasn't done a New Word Thursday today so if I don't get it done tonight I'll accuse him of that and hope the whole thing goes away.
I'm close to getting Lucy, my old LC 475, online, so if Blogger is compatible with Netscape 2.02 (which I believe is the version I'll be using), I might just post something from her in the coming week. Or maybe I'll use Linus. Probably won't use my Amstrad though.
Speaking of ancient computers, there's a museum of them opening up at Bletchley Park, famously home of the Colossus computer (computers, I should say; ten in total were in operation by the end of the war), the first ever digital computers, best known for breaking German codes during World War II. An original model has even been rebuilt by volunteers, working without documentation and with the same kind of Post Office exchange components that were used in the original. It will be the centrepiece of the new museum which will also hold other working examples of computers from 1945 to the present day.
More information here, here and here.
I never though I'd say this, but I really want to go see that museum.
posted by Alasdair Corbett at
10:42 PM
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