February 2021 - vcf-midatlantic

Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast
by Christian Liendo 22 Feb '21

22 Feb '21

In case you may not know who Jim Keller is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) The Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hL5Om4IJ4 This is a long video, most of this may be boring, here are the parts of the video that may be interesting to us as people who are interested in computing history. 11:40 - RISC vs CISC 15:39 - What makes a great processor? 17:09 - Intel vs ARM 18:58 - Steve Jobs and Apple Complete Video 0:00 - Introduction 1:33 - Good design is both science and engineering 7:33 - Javascript 11:40 - RISC vs CISC 15:39 - What makes a great processor? 17:09 - Intel vs ARM 18:58 - Steve Jobs and Apple 21:36 - Elon Musk and Steve Jobs 27:21 - Father 31:03 - Perfection 37:18 - Modular design 42:52 - Moore's law 49:50 - Hardware for deep learning 56:44 - Making neural networks fast at scale 1:04:22 - Andrej Karpathy and Chris Lattner 1:08:36 - How GPUs work 1:12:43 - Tesla Autopilot, NVIDIA, and Mobileye 1:17:23 - Andrej Karpathy and Software 2.0 1:23:43 - Tesla Dojo 1:26:20 - Neural networks will understand physics better than humans 1:28:33 - Re-engineering the human brain 1:33:26 - Infinite fun and the Culture Series by Iain Banks 1:35:20 - Neuralink 1:40:43 - Dreams 1:44:37 - Ideas 1:54:49 - Aliens 1:59:46 - Jordan Peterson 2:04:44 - Viruses 2:07:52 - WallStreetBets and Robinhood 2:15:55 - Advice for young people 2:17:45 - Human condition 2:20:14 - Fear is a cage 2:25:04 - Love 2:31:27 - Regrets

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New Commodore PET games
by Jeffrey Brace 19 Feb '21

19 Feb '21

Found someone at the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) who is making his own Commodore PET games: https://www.masswerk.at/pet/prgs/ Some cool games. He is working on a Lode Runner Clone at the moment. It's not uploaded yet. By the way can someone point me to some 8K PET games that I can load into the museum's Original Chiclet PET computer? Jeff Brace ========================================= Vice President & Board Member Vintage Computer Festival East Show-runner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey(a)vcfed.org cell: 732-759-1783

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Personal IRIS PSU repair
by Joseph Marlin 18 Feb '21

18 Feb '21

Hey, all. Just thought I'd reach out and bother everyone to see if there's anyone else out there who's dealt with a dead Personal IRIS PSU. Apparently they pretty much all go eventually, but I haven't been able to find anything about what the common failure modes are. Hoping there's someone with some thoughts or experience, because I'm massively a novice when it comes to power supply diagnosis.

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Re: SX GBIC fiber cable speed
by MikeWillegal 17 Feb '21

17 Feb '21

Neil, Unless you need the speed or connectivity, I would prefer messing with copper. Just too many strange incompatibilities with optical SFPs and various vendors equipment when you go optical. Things that should work, don’t, and visa versa. Wasn’t that terrible in our lab at work, because we had loads of different SFPs, cables and switches to change out to try to get things working, but at home, that sort of experimenting will most likely cost you money. At work, it mostly cost us time, and it was just part of the cost of doing business. After a while, it became a pretty routine thing for us to swap SFPs or switch ports when optical links didn’t come up when connecting new gear. When Service Providers do deployments of new equipment, they trial every component in the system before rollout for a reason. Just my two cents… Mike Willegal

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2021 Event T-Shirts
by Adam Michlin 17 Feb '21

17 Feb '21

Hi Everyone, With the news that VCF East has been postponed to the Fall, we are able to move forward with one of many projects to give members more input into the day to day running of VCF. To that end, we're going to try a new approach to designing the T Shirts. For those who may not know, we design one t-shirt for all events in the year (VCF East, VCF West, and, historically, VCF Pacific Northwest). This year we are going to ask several graphic designers to submit designs on the theme of the anniversary of the IBM PC 5150 and the general theme of text adventure games. To that end, we are opening the floor for both input and suggestions. The running idea is to have a stylized IBM PC 5150 with a classic Colossal Cave Adventure (CCA) quote on it. Personally, I'm hoping for "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." The idea is that CCA was played on the 5150 but also predates it on mainframes and minicomputers. We're also leaning towards the green and amber on black options from last year. We won't necessarily do this every year, but it seems to make sense when talking about the 5150 and, of course, who can resist a good old fashioned green versus amber argument? Once we have a quorum of submissions by graphic designers, we will return to the membership to help decide which shirt goes to press. We realize this takes some of the fun of the surprise out of it, but we also realize that designing a t-shirt that more people like and have input on is a win all around. We also have near term hopes to make shirts available for print on demand after the events and may even bring back some of the classic shirts (thank you, Dan Roganti! May you RIP), also as print on demand. General and specific suggestions, publicly or privately, are most welcome and we would love some more ideas of different classic text adventure quotes. To answer the most obvious question, Zork was high on our list but there are already a lot of t-shirts with the famous Zork quotes. We would also love any submissions of the actual drawn design from any of you, the more the merrier! Best wishes, -Adam --- Adam Michlin Director of Marketing Vintage Computer Federation http://vcfed.org https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation https://twitter.com/vcfederation https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKdBVD2wVUkuJQZhxGvVr0Q

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SX GBIC fiber cable speed
by Neil Cherry 17 Feb '21

17 Feb '21

I've posted this in the CDL list also. I don't know of a polite way to post once to both and I'm not sure it's a good idea to try. :-) It has been a while since I played with fiber (2010) and I'm trying to figure out if I should go fiber or copper in my home. Here's what I know from my current switch: - SX GBIC - LC - duplex - MMF I want to buy about 25M of fiber. I think the price is competitive with copper. I'm also hoping that the fiber will age better than the copper. I'm seeing a few old copper drops fail to lower settings. One went to 10/half (wow, that's bad). The GBIC & switch I have handle 1G. So I can easily pop in a few 1000baseT, put them into a LAG and get 4G (4 ports). So I'm covered for a while. - Can the same piece of fiber handle 1G or 10G? (in case I upgrade in the future). - Does anyone know the bend radius of this fiber? - What color should I expect for SX fiber. ? - What's a "mode-conditioning patch cord" ? I'm seeing a $35 price for 25 Meter OM3 LC LC Fiber Patch Cable (Corning 50/125um core/cladding) and it says 1G but with a "mode-conditioning patch cord" (an attenuator?). Any pointers? -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] SX GBIC fiber cable speed
by Neil Cherry 16 Feb '21

16 Feb '21

On 2/16/21 11:08 AM, MikeWillegal via vcf-midatlantic wrote: > Just too many strange incompatibilities with optical SFPs and various vendors equipment when you go optical. When I was in the labs in 2011 we used a lot of fiber. The long haul single mode stuff was fun. In order to use it we had to have attenuators so as to not burn out the lasers. Yes, the SFPs was also fun/ We did have a few no-name (weren't really no-name but I can't recall the vendor). With some equipment we'd turn off the check. Other vendors there was no turning off the check (lock in). The good news is that SFPs are now pretty in expensive for the distances I need. So can actually afford to by the vendor specific SFP. On the subject of vintage networking, I started at the end of coax (10Base2 & 10Base5). I still have nightmare about cable splinters. ;-) I also worked with 1BaseT and that crazy FDDI which had a large LC like connector (why did that LC like connector always end up going to a hub with an ST connector? ;-) ). Didn't like fiber then, did love the 10BaseT hubs. A lot easier on my hands! But my eyes can no longer easily build those cables. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry(a)linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies

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ENIAC Birthday and thanks to Tony Bogan and the UNIVAC Crew
by Adam Michlin 16 Feb '21

16 Feb '21

Hi Everyone, Tony Bogan worked with our UNIVAC people to create an amazing video honoring the 75 anniversary of ENIAC that has been playing very well on all our social media but has been particularly successful on Twitter with 22,000+ impressions and 3,500+ views only 24 hours after posting. If you haven't seen it, you can view it here: https://twitter.com/vcfederation/status/1361329841275084802 Please retweet! -Adam --- Adam Michlin Director of Marketing Vintage Computer Federation http://vcfed.org https://www.instagram.com/vcfederation https://twitter.com/vcfederation https://www.facebook.com/vcfederation https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKdBVD2wVUkuJQZhxGvVr0Q

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Paper tape fun
by Crawford Griffith 16 Feb '21

16 Feb '21

Folks, David Gesswein wrote: Things that visibly do stuff are fun. The DEC fanfold is nice the way it mostly restacks. I love watching fanfold run, whether punching or reading. In college, we used to have small ‘SysOps wars’ amongst us nerds on the PDP-11 system. (We were good sportspeople, it had to be recoverable). I took one guy’s entire RSTS/E account, PIP’ed it to the fanfold tape punch, flipped the tape and read it in backwards. Every single file was now byte-reversed, e.g. a BASIC program would start with: “DNE 0009”. He could never figure out how I did it until I told him. I even told him I used ROM. -Crawford

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Paper tape
by Mike Loewen 15 Feb '21

15 Feb '21

Recently, I've been deep into paper tape territory. I exhumed my HP 2748B high speed paper tape reader, and got it running after a clutch plate adjustment. It's connected to my HP 2108A minicomputer, along with a 2645A terminal. I can punch tapes from a Linux system to a GNT-4601 paper tape reader/punch, connected via serial port. Then load the tape into the 2748B and read it into the 2108A. They're not kidding when they say "high speed". http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/HP/2748B/ So, I'm able to load diagnostic tapes from a very large paper tape library on Bitsavers. Some of the diags only require front panel operation, while others need a terminal. There's also paper tape BASIC, which I'll get to after a connector arrives to make a different terminal cable. http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/HP/2108A/HP2108A_2748B_2645.jpg The 2748B reader doesn't have a takeup reel, so naturally the tape goes all over the floor. Rewinding it is a PITA. I saw a picture of a handheld HP tape rewinder, and built my own to chuck into my cordless drill. Rewinds even faster than it spits out! http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/HP/Rewinder.jpg Mike Loewen mloewen(a)cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/

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