Archive | |
2021-03-27: Altair OS Part 2 | |
To get started, I had to answer some basic design questions. There are a couple | |
ways of handling things in an OS. | |
2021-02-19: Altair OS Part 1 | |
After several project false starts, I finally settled on my next Altair project. | |
Spoiler: it's an OS. | |
2020-12-13: Debug Diversion | |
As I was finishing up my assembler, I knew I was going to need a way to save | |
assembled programs off the Altair so I starting working on a new bootloader-type | |
program. Writing, assembling, and testing revealed a new problem of trying to | |
debug programs that I don't have the hand assembled version of. | |
2020-11-29: Altair Assembler Part 4 | |
After completing the hand assembled assembler, the next step was to convert the | |
code into the assembly that the assembler will be able to assemble for me. The | |
process revealed some bugs and missing features. | |
2020-11-17: Altair Assembler Part 3 | |
I had intended to write a series of posts documenting the process of writing my | |
assembler but ended up spending my available time writing the assembler. | |
2020-10-15: 8800c Problems | |
I haven't posted much as I've been enjoying working on my 8080 assembler on the | |
8800c. Recently, however, I've had a bit of an unplanned break. | |
2020-08-16: Altair 8800c | |
This Summer has been weird so I ended up going back to retrocomputing and | |
building an Altair 8800c. | |
2020-07-26: Altair Assembler Part 2 | |
Writing an assembler that is a far bigger program than I've written previously | |
has exposed some problems in my development style and workflow that I've had to | |
overcome. | |
2020-02-01: Altair Assembler Part 1 | |
As I keep complaining, it's getting harder and harder to hand assemble | |
everything. It's error prone and tedious. An assembler can handle a lot of the | |
work for me so I'm going to try to write one. | |
2019-12-08: Altair Monitor PROMs | |
The availability of teletypes and terminals allowed for a vast improvement of | |
human/computer interaction over front panel switches. Monitor programs ranged | |
in complexity from simple boot loaders to development environments. | |
2019-11-24: Altair Boot Loader | |
Entering everything via the front panel was going to get overly tedious very | |
quickly. Early on, boot loaders were produced that would bootstrap more complex | |
programs read from paper tape, cassette, and eventually floppy disk. | |
2019-01-06: Altair Networking Environment | |
After getting the WiFi modem working, the next step was to write a more useful | |
client for using it. I wanted to remove the need to send commands to the modem | |
directly and allow for some processing of data coming back. I ended up with a | |
lot more. | |
2018-12-26: Altair on WiFi | |
Putting the Altair 8800 on the internet is easy and cheap. Just takes a bit of | |
hardware and some firmware emulating a Hayes modem. You can get on a BBS in | |
minutes. | |
2018-12-21: 8080 IO string echo | |
The echo we're used to is a program that takes a string then writes the whole | |
string back out. We don't need to invoke another program so we can skip that | |
part and just modify our echo program to work on strings instead of characters. | |
2018-12-08: 8080 IO - echo | |
Time to take a leap forward in technology and human-computer interaction. I'm | |
allowing myself to use a terminal to talk to the Altair. A couple of | |
implementations of echo demonstrate serial IO. | |
2018-11-27: 8080 RTC Timer | |
The next thing I was interested in learning on the Altair was hardware | |
interaction and dealing with interrupts. The Altair clone has the 88-VI-RTC | |
included which is a Vector Interrupt board and Real Time Clock. | |
2018-11-21: 8080 PRNG Part 2 | |
Before moving on to the next program (which still doesn't work right), I'll dig | |
into the Xorshift PRNG, explain how it works and give a little overview of 8080 | |
assembly programming. | |
2018-10-27: 8080 PRNG | |
I decided that my first assembly program on my Altair would be a Pseudo-Random | |
Number Generator (well, the first after doing 16 bit multiplication using | |
iterative addition, but that's not as interesting to talk about). | |
2018-10-20: Altair 8800 Intro | |
Last year, I got intrigued by the MITS Altair 8800. I actually wasn't aware of | |
these computers before seeing one in a video by LGR. I was immediately hooked | |
by the lights and switches of the front panel. | |
2018-10-08: Updates | |
So after a year, I have made some updates to the site and other things. | |
2018-02-21: Migrating to CopperheadOS | |
I have been interested in the efforts of CopperheadOS, a hardened, de-Googled | |
Android since it's early days. | |
My usual smartphone situation was to get something cheap, which likely means its | |
already behind the current Android version, and suffer through it's slow demise | |
over the next few years. I will have received maybe one OS update in the first | |
few months of ownership and never again. By the end of it's life constant | |
crashes, missed calls and messages and no free space despite never installing | |
anything new forces me to get the next cheapo phone because phones are awful. | |
2016-10-11: VMM Networking | |
Started playing with OpenBSD's virtual machine hypervisor again and got a NATed | |
networking configuration working. | |
2016-10-10: Teaching Developer Hygiene | |
How do you teach non-developers good development practices and process and get | |
them to like it? | |
2016-07-11: Log Roll | |
Fun thing found in my ssh log today. | |
2016-07-10: Resurrecting My Zaurus | |
Finally got my SL-C300 running again! ...mostly. | |
2016-06-26: Value of Adventure | |
A.K.A The point of pointless endevers. | |
2016-06-24: Exterior Design | |
Spent a bunch of time designing the site template. I like web sites to be | |
simple. I like them to work in Links. | |
2016-06-23: To Blog or Not to Blog | |
Need to test out RSS feeds still... |