Crazy Eddie's Used Computers

@dectape.bsky.social

127 Followers 160 Following

I like to do stuff with ancient electronic junk, mostly computers. Sometimes I post pictures of it!

The LP album "Tarnation" by Tarwater being held up by yours truly. Cover is a black and white rendering of the band (possibly a pencil drawing). They are sitting on a hill or something and they look very country. Maybe even... hard core country.
Close-up photo of a PCB from inside the HP 9810A calculator, showing two ceramic packages with gold lids. Both are 3301A biplor ROMs, but the bottom is HP-badged with HP's in-house part numbering applied.
FLOWS 9 from the 11/70 engineering drawings, which describes the microcode related to integer divide operations.
Photo of my laptop running Tera-Term, displaying a successful boot of 7th ed. Unix.
Photo of "Miss Piggy," ICM's (formerly LCM's, formerly Microsoft's) DECsystem 570 (PDP-11/70) system. The processor chassis has been pulled out of the rack and a KM11 diagnostic board is plugged into the left-hand side. A laptop sits on top, displaying microcode flow diagrams.
A photo of an album entitled "PERSONAL POWER through CREATIVE SELLING" by ELMER G. LETERMAN, who is apparently the World's Best-Known Insurance Salesman. The cover features a nuclear explosion in the background. Convincing.
Screenshot of the emulator running BUS-II; it has dumped a few dozen bytes of memory to the teletype.
Photo of a vinyl copy of Synergy's album "Computer Experiments: Volume One" from my collection. Sometimes, I don't remember exactly why I bought a record; this is not one of those times.
Photo of the back of a rather banged up copy of the Thin Lizzy album "Jailbreak." Text reads: THE JAILBREAK The warrior locked himself into his video scanner and gazed throughout the Universe . . . until he came up on Dimension 5. DIMENSION 5 was now in the hands of the Overmaster, whose lust for ultimate power had become an obsession. Religion and media were all under his control and computer files were kept on all known living persons within the city zones. Many were arrested and jailed. It was therefore significant that The Jailbreak represented a freedom for so many yet to those involved at the time it was a series of events, the outcome of which no-one could have foreseen. The plan was simple. By knocking out the alarm systems in a riot, they then would cause an explosion which would blow half the cell blocks away. Outside help came from an organisation known as Phono-Graphics, who if the plan was successful would eventually capitalize on the whole project. The night of The Jailbreak all hell broke loose. A Red Alert was issued by the Overmaster himself. Robot trackers, military police, dogs, and all available vehicles were on the hunt. All were caught, except four, who made it to the Rampic Buildings on the south side of the city. It was in these buildings that they broadcast and recorded selected material, some of which still survives today. Through these recordings, they built up a following who eventually took to the streets in what was to become the Final War. The Warrior had become wear and disillusioned with war, but seeing how the people struggled to be free he knew once again he must raise up his sword... The music sailed out into the night then upward towards the skies, traveling on that thin border between reality and imagination.
A man, adorned in formal white labcoat and tie stares into your eyes through coke-bottle glasses. In his hands he holds an RCA SelectaVision Capacitance Electronic Disc. With a deft movement he slowly releases the catch... and slowly reveals the platter inside. You cannot resist it, you have no choice but to watch. To look into those eyes. To see... the future.
An ad from a 1965 issue of "Computer Design" magazine, reading (in multiple typefaces): "WHAT THIS COUNTRY *NEEDS* is a good $98 SHAFT ENCODER." You know it's true.
Photo of the cover of Moby Grape's first album, sitting on a Teletype. The first track on this excellent psych rock album, "Hey Grandma" features the lyrics quoted in the post.
A photo of me holding up a rather worn LP copy of Ray Manzarek's "The Whole Thing Started With Rock & Roll Now It's Out Of Control." This album has 4.5 stars on AllMusic and I am not in agreement.
A photo of my KS10 powered up and running to celebrate the holy DEC-20 day.
Cover of Telly Sevalas's 1974 album "Telly." He is on the cover, coat draped across his back, holding a toothpick and looking dramatic. You cannot resist his allure, he will take you on a hard-boiled detective adventure, just put the album on the turntable, baby.
Photo of the inner sleeve from the 1977 Peter Gabriel album referred to as "Car." Somethin's weird with the man's eyes, they're not right, I tell you.
A design and implementation failure exposed as a configuration option in the Windows 11 Terminal: "Text measurement mode". It reads "This changes the way incoming text is grouped into cells. The "Grapheme clusters" option is the most modern and Unicode-correct way to do so, while "wcswidth" is a common approach on UNIX, and "Windows Console" replicates the way it used to work on Windows. Changing this setting requires a restart of Windows Terminal and it only applies to applications launched from within it."
A screen shot of the "Rendering" options tab (tab? is it a tab? what is this attempt at a user interface and why does it look like nothing else in windows?) in the Terminal in Windows 11. It features three verbosely described checkboxes (which are now sliders because of touch interfaces, I don't have a touch interface on this computer, why would I). I won't transcribe them all here, suffice it to say that they are for three options that users shouldn't ever have to think about, described in such a way that users will never, ever understand the consequences of their choice. Also the iconography here is terrible. Susan Kare is having nightmares right now because of this. All UX these days looks terrible, no one cares, and now "30% of it is written by LLMs" so it'll only get better. I'm so cold. It's getting very dark in here. I use Windows now only because I have to, but it's still too much. I moved to a Mac last year and it's also bad, what the hell has happened to computers, man?
IS RESULTS TO BE NEG. ? YES
A scan of an inter-office memo from Xerox PARC dated Nov. 19, 1975 and titled "Bit BLT." The full scan may be found on bitsavers at: https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/BitBLT_Nov1975.pdf.
The cover of "Look Out For #1" by the Brothers Johnson. The aforementioned brothers are looking just amazingly cool with their guitars. Funk Level: 8.9.
The cover of the album "Having Fun With Elvis on Stage." "Fun" may be overselling this just a tad.
Me holding up the Frank Zappa album "The Man From Utopia" on glorious vinyl. The cover's art makes you think the wrong things about this album, probably. Who can say. Not me. I wouldn't try to influence your thoughts like that, not even subliminally via alt-text.
Photo of part of the lyric sheet (is it really a lyric sheet if they only print selected excerpts?) from a late 1980s album that no one appears to have liked. I'm not going to transcribe the lyrics, not because I'm a prude but because... I just... I can't. These words should not be preserved, and I shouldn't even be posting them here. They're not offensive, they're just *bad*.
Photo of a CRT screen showing the part of MIPS risc/os startup that is silly. It reads “To fsck only dirty ones, type ‘yes’”.
A Long-Playing Phonograph record, entitled "High on Mount Rushmore," by the group "Mount Rushmore." There are some guys on the cover, they are shirtless and if I'm honest they probably shouldn't be. I assume this is the band. Anyway, they're holding the earth in their hands and one guy has fire in his hand and like, wow, I'm so high right now.
Me holding up an LP copy of "Mongel" by the Bob Seger System, 1970. It's good! You should listen to it!
A short video showing areas on the tape where the oxide layer has completely come off the tape's substrate.
A short video of a 9-track tape drive auto-loading a tape.
A small pile of hickory-smoked 9-track tapes, rescued from a house that suffered a catastrophic fire.
A graphic from a brochure reading "You Cannot Outdistance Control Data"
Photo of an LMI Lambda lispm all set up for the big ICF show tomorrow. Come by and see how rusty it is!
snippet of a table of contents from a UNIX book, reading "2. My System is Hung!" Sure, buddy.
A photo of a Mac Color Classic displaying the “about:Mozilla” Easter egg text, reading “And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.”
Photo of a small section of the display of an LMI Lambda running "DOCTOR" (aka ELIZA), the good DOCTOR has just asked me "DO COMPUTERS WORRY YOU" to which I have replied "oh my god you have no idea."
Image of a strip c. 2008 (?) from the (alas, defunct) "Pictures for Sad Children" webcomic which has remained sadly accurate and prescient. I apologize for being too lazy to transcribe the entire strip here, there is a lot of text and it's a busy day and I'm weak and tired. Help.