I spent a good chunk of my Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival, which was an opportunity to see some of the old eye-burning blocky graphics, listen to barely filtered square waves, and muse about my humble beginnings as a programmer. We also caught the tour of the Computer History Museum’s Visible Storage, and caught a demo of their recently restored PDP-1, demonstrated by none other than legendary PDP-1 programmer Peter Samson, who wrote some of the first computer music software for the PDP-1. It was quite a thrill to see him flip the power switch, and listen to the relays inside clack into action. Since the machine had core memory (which is non-volatile) it didn’t require anything to load: Peter just toggled in the run address, and played some music, demonstrated “The Minskytron”, the predecessor of what we would call a screensaver, and ultimately Spacewar!, which could lay claim to being the first video game. If you scan back through my archives, you can see I’ve written about this machine before, and have even written my own PDP-1 simulator so I could play Spacewar!

Back in May, I attended this video lecture at the opening of the PDP-1 exhibit, and it’s worth watching to learn some of the background around this nifty computer.

[tags]Vintage Computer Festival,PDP-1,Peter Samson,Computer Music[/tags]

Addendum: You can download some of the music from the Computer History Museum website.

Mercury will transit in front of the disk of the sun on Wednesday. It’s kind of a cool thing to witness (only happens about 12 times a century) if you have the right equipment. Back in 1999, I captured about an hour of video of the transit that that year and created the animated GIF that you see on the right. This transit looks like it will cross the disk much closer to the middle, and should be more impressive. At the moment however, skies are not looking favorable for the San Francisco area, but I’m dusting off some equipment that I haven’t used in a while in some hope that I’ll get lucky. We’ll see.

The last transit.

[tags]Astronomy,Mercury,Transit[/tags]

Addendum: The San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers have a nifty page on the transit, which was brought to my attention by Phil Plait over on the Bad Astronomy blog.

The 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1911, and is the last edition of that work which is currently in the public domain. I noticed that the Distributed Proofreaders released the first bit of this for download. I’m looking forward to the rest.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 by Various – Project Gutenberg

[tags]Public Domain,Project Gutenberg[/tags]

Addendum: Check out this nifty map of Roman Britain, click on it for the larger version.

Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth was revised, but Addison Wesley decided not to republish it. That’s fine because now it is available as a PDF download. Want to figure out the basics of compiler construction? Here’s something you can download for free.

[tags]Programming Languages,Compilers[/tags]

Legendary creationist con-man Kent Hovind was convicted on 58 charges relating to tax evasion yesterday, and is now jailed awaiting sentencing. The maximum sentence would appear to be 288 years. His wife is free on bail, but faces similarly long years in jail. I’m betting he gets one year and some monetary damages.

News article.

[tags]Kent Hovind,Creationism[/tags]