Open Hardware and Retro Leftovers
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Liam Proven ☛ Another day, another paean of praise for the Amiga's 1980s pre-emptive multitasking GUI
Yes, the Amiga offered a GUI with pre-emptive multitasking, as early as 1985 or so. And it was affordable: you didn't even need a hard disk.The thing is, that's only part of the story.There's a generation of techies who are about 40 now who don't remember this stuff well, and some of the older ones have forgotten with time but don't realise. I had some greybeard angrily telling me that floppy drives were IDE recently. Senile idiot.
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Hackaday ☛ An ASIC For A Secret File
Some time over a decade ago, the arrival of inexpensive PCB fabrication revolutionised the creation of custom electronics on a budget. It’s now normal for even the smallest projects we feature here to have a professional PCB, which for those of us who started by etching their own with ferric chloride is nothing short of a miracle. When it comes to the ultimate step in custom electronics of doing the same for integrated circuits though, it’s fair to say that this particular art is in its infancy. The TinyTapeout project is a collaborative effort in which multiple designers have the chance to make their own ASIC as a single tile on a chip along others, and [Bitluni] had the chance to participate. His ASIC? A secret file which could be read through his ESP32 to VGA board.
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Hackaday ☛ A Dial Phone SIPs Asterisk
An endless source of amusement for those of advancing years can come from handing a rotary phone to a teenager and asking them to dial a number with it. It’s rare for them to be stumped by a piece of technology, after all. [Mnutt]’s 4-year-old son had no such problems when he saw rotary phones at an art exhibition, so what was a parent to do but wire the phone to an Asterisk PBX with shortcut numbers for calls to family and such essential services as a joke line, MTA status, or even a K-pop song.
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[Old] The University of Illinois ☛ Illinois Bell Telephone Fire - Significant Illinois Fires - LibGuides at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
On Sunday, May 8, 1988, a fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company. One of the largest switching systems in the state, the facility processed more than 3.5 million calls each day while serving 38,000 customers, including numerous businesses, hospitals, and Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway Airports. Around 4 PM, the Division Alarm Reporting Center for Illinois Bell began receiving automated reports of power failures and fire alarms at the Hinsdale Central Office, but it was nearly an hour before a technician arrived at the facility to investigate the alarms. By that point, however, smoke was pouring out of the building and telephone service had been knocked out for much of the region. In fact, the telephone technician had to flag down a passing motorist to ask him to drive to the Hinsdale Fire Department to report the blaze in person.
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[Old] MIT ☛ TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Remembering the Great Telco Fire, May, 1988
According to this source, the fire was first noted in Springfield, IL, when an emergency alarm was automatically tripped by the Hinsdale office. This was about 4:30 PM. A human being in Springfield called the duty supervisor for Hinsdale to ask what was going on. According to the newspaper report, by the time office personnell got around to calling the Fire Department, *the lines had already burned out* -- making the call impossible. A supervisor stuck his head out the door at a minute or two before 5 PM and told a passer by to please go to the Fire Department immediately. Apparently the person did not do so. Finally someone -- as yet unknown or unnamed -- went to the police station in Hinsdale to report the fire at about 5:15 PM...by that time, the phones throughout the area had already been dead for half an hour. If this report is true, then there need to be some very serious discussions at corporate level to find out why local employees discovered the fire *after* someone downstate manning a computer terminal, and why it took another 45 minutes for someone to go to the Fire Department personally if necessary, to rouse the firemen.