Retro Computer Fashion

Moore's Law applied to tape …

A comic strip this morning represented a computer with 12 inch reel-to-reel tape drives. Such drives were my friend … in the early 1980s over 40 years ago.

In 1984 IBM introduced 3480 tapes drives, using cartridges about the size of a 8-track tape with much higher capacity than the older 12 inch reels. Also, you could queue an entire pile of scratch tapes to be written in the input stacker of one of the drives.

(Whereas in 1970 12" reel-to-reel drives held hundreds of megabytes per reel, the descendants of the various cartridge tape drives by leading vendors hold up to 40 TB.)

But who thinks of a computer when you look at an 8-track tape player? 

IBM System/360 2400 Series Tape Drives

IBM System/370 3480 Series Tape Drives

A Weighty Matter

Background

I've mentioned before I keep pretty decent archives. I've got FORTRAN programs from high school, tape images from the 1980s, and archives of our PCs from early 2000s.

My crowning achievement is a spreadsheet from hell that logs my exercise going back to 2004 and my weight going every year back to 1997 (with sporadic entries even before that). There are gaps in every year, but there's enough data to have show clear trends.

(There is also enough data to push Google Docs towards a nervous breakdown if I reload it fresh from a local copy; ~14 cells on 365 rows per year for decades is not trivial, even with many of the cells blank. In ~ 2011, the Google Docs developers didn't believe that I could give their application trouble until I showed them with my 25 years of data.)

Today

Having slowly lost weight over the 15 years since my peak, and having lost approximately a half pound every week this year to date, I am now at my lowest weight since before 1997 (30+ years) by a comfortable margin. I'm still close to 40 pounds over the line between obese and merely overweight, but I am ~ two-thirds of the way down — progress has been made.

Tomorrow

I really need to work not so much on my weight, but on my conditioning. That's a topic for a different day.

Job's Not Over Till the Paperwork is Done

Our Job of acquiring Zesty is now complete. Just under 14 years ago, Oscar and Penwiper inspected the new plates for for Purr More the Green and the Bronze Audi.

Inspecting the "new" plates back 2012

The PURRMOR plates have graced three MINI Cooper S convertibles, nearly half of it on the 2019 Caribbean Aqua one.

The MEOWLES plates only lived on the 2009 Bronze Audi A4 until now, but forthwith they will be on our 2023 Zesty Yellow MINI Cooper S 4-door.

Sisters Meow Less the Zesty and Purr More the Aqua tucked into their garage

Note: Zesty's name is simply Zesty, not Zesty the Yellow. We love her color, but she does not want it even implied that she is a lemon in the manner of the long-departed Purr More the Melting Silver.

Out With the Old, In With the Gently Used

It's getting time to replace our 16 1/2 year-old Audi A4, and I'm doing something that I've never done in the 44 years I've been buying cars: Buy a used one. We are also buying a second car that's the same brand as the first (as opposed to replacing a car with the same brand). 

Basically, new shiny cars from both Audi and MINI (including dealer loaners) have a plethora of touchscreen controls on glass dashboards (Katherine's term is FGD — and the F is NOT silent.) Neither Katherine or I want controls you have to look at to manipulate; we want physical knobs and switches that you can adjust by touch while you keep your eyes on the road.

Given I don't drive much these days and don't need cargo space for more than groceries, I could look at getting a gently used MINI Cooper S two door. However, with our policy of one door per passenger, we don't take passengers in Pure More the Aqua (our 2019 MINI Cooper S 2 door convertible). So on my side of the garage we need at at least a 4 door MINI for passengers.

From the dealer we bought our last two new MINI Cooper S rag tops from, I selected a low mileage 2023 Cooper S 4 door (not a Countryman) that's the same generation as Purr More.

2023 Zesty Yellow MINI Cooper S 4 Door Exterior

The obvious differences with Purr More are the color, hard top, four doors, DCT transmission, digital instrument cluster, no head up display, and no navigation system. (However, apparently Apple CarPlay will talk to Apple Maps or even Google Maps on my iPhone.)

2023 MINI Cooper S 4 Door FGD-free cockpit

And oh yes, it's ~two-thirds the price of a new MINI.

(I have to admit, the color sounds like a dipping sauce for Onion Rings at Burger King.)

Update: This post was originally written as an adventure in progress. It's now complete. The Audi is gone (traded in), and the 2023 MINI is sitting in our garage next to Purrmore the Caribbean Aqua.

 Back when we lived in Stoneham, we once ended up with too many packages of your basic Morton Salt. It was referred to as the Salt problem. Ever since then, when we have an excessive inventory of anything X, we refer to it as the X problem.

These days, I have the Headphone problem.

I have:

• (At least) two ancient corded (DiscMan era) headphones in my closet (I'm afraid to look, actually)
• A corded USB headset in my closet
• High end corded Sennheiser headphones issued to me when I joined Google (under the stereo downstairs)
• Sennheiser 550-X BT noise canceling headphones I bought when I moved into a zoo of an office after five years at Google (they now live in my largest backpack)
• Soundcore noise canceling headphones I bought last year when I had trouble replacing the ear pads on the Sennheiser 550-X (since fixed)
• A cheap Motorola BT headset at my desk
• 3 cheap BT earbuds for my smaller EDC bags (never mind I only have two smaller bags)
• A pair of PowerBeats Pro earbuds I didn't like and gave to Katherine.

But I mostly use:

• Kipsch wired speakers on my Mac Studio
• My networked Yamaha office stereo
• A Motorola HX550 Bluetooth Headset I use for iPhone calls at my desk.
• Altec Lansing BT Boombox when on my exercise bike

QOTD (1995 edition)

Today's example of how 1980s-1990s era BSD fortunes have not aged equally well:

Dreams are free, but you get soaked on the connect time.

"connect time?" 

It's been a long time since we worried about connect charges.

It's been …

• 30 years since we went to a always-on PPP link (56 Kb/s) to our ISP
  (this required a second dedicated analog phone line)
• 27+ years since we switched to an always-on cable modem (6 Mb/s)
  (Katherine wrote up our experience for the October 1997 WIRED)
• 17+ years since we switched to FiOS (60 Mb/s),
• 4+ years since we upgraded to 1 Gb/s FiOS.
  

Out With the Old, In With the New

I go way back with music on Apple devices; I owned multiple iPods going back to the iPod classic (Click Wheel), ripped 600+ physical CDs, and I joined the iTunes store in October 2003.

(Why yes, I do have 27 years of personal email archives.  Doesn't everyone?)

Today, the Library has 9,608 items using 68 GB.

This relationship has not always gone smoothly. I distinctly remember years ago after a software upgrade of my iOS device or MacOS, my iPhone had Biblical performance issues when initializing. When moving from iTunes to Apple Music, Apple broke automatically adding user ringtones to devices, and since 2015 the push for Apple Music over Libraries of user owned music has driven me nuts for years.

Consider my current iPhone settings:

Note how Apple Music is clearly set to not show.  (And no, I don't belong to it!)

However, in the actual Music App, search still shows an entire screen full of selections from Apple Music:

Quite frankly, I have no idea what the "Do Not Show Apple Music" toggle does at all.

This week, I finally sufficiently got sick of accidentally searching Apple Music instead of my own Library that I did a little research and found the iOS app Marvis Pro.  

Marvis Pro:

• reads (and updates) the user's music Library synced by the MacOS Music application.
• favors the user Library over Apple Music.
• has more powerful display options:
• displaying more information about tracks and playlists
• (for example) setting any playlist to display as Albums, not individual tracks,
• sorting
• works with various functionality in the Apple Watch Music Apple and other Bluetooth devices (like our Audi A4) to play music.  (This is similar to other apps like Spotify and Podcasts)

Now, if I could just tell my iPhone to never open the Apple Music app again …

Field Expedient Hardware Modifications

 The MINI Cooper S has a never needed its Sport Mode (just keep the manual gearbox in second gear), and the Audi has also has one I do use on the Ramp of Chaos (Washington Route 202 onto Washington Route 522 West). Some of the more witty plush creatures around here think the new chairlift needs one for when I'm in hurry.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

I offer you exhibit one of what can go wrong:

A Software Safari in the Land of Intel

I think I seriously Crossed the Streams … and I liked it.

My favorite Tetris game is from the ~1990 MS Best of Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x. It runs well on Windows 98 SE and even on Windows 7, but forget about it about on Windows 10. (Windows 10 doesn't do 16 bit apps.)

Unfortunately, I haven't had a machine on my desk which will run Windows 98 (real, virtual, or emulated) since I switched away from my Intel-based iMac to the Mac Studio two years ago.

Until now. (And no, I didn't buy an obsolete Intel box on EBay.)

The x86 emulator Bochs is described as the slowest of the popular emulators because it's the most accurate; I'll take that trade off. I installed Bochs on a Raspberry Pi 4B. Suffice to say having the 4B emulating processors popular 26 years ago (~12 iterations of Moore's Law) might be heavy lifting, but the machine is up to it.

So I now have Tetris (and Solitaire and …) on Windows 98 SE on an emulated Pentium MMX host on Bochs on X Windows on Linux on an ARM single board computer. I actually installed most of the games I had in CD images on disk; testing will continue. :-)

Footnote: The 2 GHz 8GB Raspberry Pi 4B with a 512 GB SSD is the size of 5 stacked CD classic jewel boxes.

Riding the Rail

The stairlift has proved useful. I wasn't sure it would, but two  round trips on it downstairs & back for meals me left feeling me less drained than I have been lately.  

In other words, it was not a really expensive mistake!

The top to bottom trip takes 105 seconds, I timed it when remotely parking it to charge in the front hall for the night. 

That space in the front hall will normally be more out the way than the landing park/charge space (even after they move it), but if we have actually have people using the front door that will change *real* quick.  

(It also can park/charge just outside my office, but that's only good if Katherine doesn't need the stairs. That works tomorrow morning, when she's gone to Aikido for five hours.)

MIssed it by that much!

The Stairlift is installed, inspected, customer ridden … and wrong.  

Per the diagram, when charging the chair on the landing it is supposed be almost in the corner, inline with the bottom half of the stairwell (effectively under the window in the photograph below). 

The charging station is actually almost in the exact middle of the landing, directly across from the center railing/pony wall.  In other words, it's a choke point. (It failed the laundry basket test.)  

I can't sign off on it (and thus will be locked out of it) until we have this resolved (or have a binding promise of same).

UPDATE: We paid ~86% of the total and I signed off on it.  They will be back next week to move the charger.

Stairlift as Designed With Offset Charge Station on Landing

Stairlift as Installed with Centered Charge Station on Landing

It's Here! It's Here!

The stairlift is being installed as I type. It's uglier than I expected. Mostly, it's heavier construction than I  anticipated (which is a good thing) and is effectively freestanding; it gets screwed to the stairs not to support it, but to simply keep it from shifting.

(When The Bomb gets dropped, you can add the stair lift along with Cockroaches & Keith Richards to the list that will be still be around afterwards.) 

Almost … almost

The dumb waiter (AKA the stair lift) should arrive at the vendor (Mobility Concepts Inc.) today; they called this morning and scheduled the install for next Friday, the 13th. They start at 8 AM; it should be all installed and inspected by the state at ~ 1 PM.

It's a disk drive, but …

In the early 1980s when I first started working full time, I was in operations. I occasionally reorganized disk packs, which made me very aware that an IBM model 3330-1 drive held 100 MB of data and its double density cousin the 3330-11 held 200 MB.

Much later (in the Wikipedia era), I learned Digital Equipment Corporation had used 3330-1/3330-11 compatible drives on their systems as the RP04/RP06 drives.  

This weekend I went to install an emulated PDP-11/70 image, and discovered that while the legacy IBM and DEC systems may have used similar drives (in fact, the media on the real drives is interchangeable), how they use them isn't the same. If you write full tracks (13030 bytes, a number I can rattle off from memory 40 years later) as IBM users do, you can fit the aforementioned 100/200 MB per volume.  But DEC environments write 512 byte sectors (which imposes more overhead per track), and it reduces the 200 MB capacity to 176 MB.

This confused me no end when I was looking at the RP06 webpage and the "same" drive had different numbers than what I knew.

"It's an IBM model 3330–11 drive, but not as we know it, Captain."

A Pinball Wizard For the New Millennium

I've mentioned before that I've had a series of machines dedicated to arcade games running MAME. The current setup includes a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with:

• Logitech Gamepad F310
• Backup media
• Shared access to my desktop KVM, which in turn connects to my:
• Keyboard
• Trackball
• 27" ASUS monitor
• Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX speakers

Of course, 1980's video games don't deserve either the monitor or the speakers, but the Mac Studio doesn't mind sharing.

What I have not done in the years I've had these machines take the proper time learn about my hardware, MAME, or its games. (Or to use them!) But, finally, I've made progress on that in the past week.

First, I reread the GamePad documentation. I discovered it can do either XInput or DirectInput protocols, and I had in it the wrong mode (which disabled a button required to exit games!). I also didn't know the GamePad can swap the function of the left four-button D-Pad and the left analog joystick. (Many games play better with a joystick.)

Hardware problems do exist which don't have an easy fix, like using a Gamepad that has generic A-B-X-Y buttons for games written for specific controls. That means sometimes you "Cross the Streams". For instance, under MAME firing in BattleZone also turns the tank slightly before it fires! (Try aiming while anticipating that!) (BattleZone fixed by twiddling the game specific controls.)

Alas, I've also rediscovered a problem I knew in the 1980's and let fade from memory: I positively stink at video games, especially the ones that rely on twitch reflexes.

In other words: PBKAC

*sigh*

Arcade Emulators, Redux

Back when I owned an iPad 2 (acquired ~13 years ago), I bought Atari's Greatest Hits and also a Atari Arcade stand with a joystick. The stand connected to the iPad 2 with a Doc Connector, which speaks to how old the technology was.

I declared the iPad 2 both obsolete and slow after a few years; I replaced it with a 5th generation iPad, which alas uses a Lightning connector. The newer iPad is now also obsolete, but not so slow (or used enough) to replace it.   

I still have the Atari Arcade stand and its incompatible Doc Connector sitting around gathering dust. However, last week I discovered not only was Atari's Greatest Hits was installed on my current iPad (I didn't think the App was supported), but by using a Doc Connector <--> Lightning Adapter & an extension cable it will run the games with the Atari Arcade stand and its joystick. 

Cool!

Atari Lunar Lander running on my 5th Generation iPad

Sadly, my attempt to make the display bigger with the iPad HDMI adapter simultaneously with the Arcade stand did not work. 

I can now run arcade games on MAME on Linux, on Windows 95 virtual machines, and my iPad. Not that I ever get around to using any of them …

Summer of Home Improvement

I'm trying figure what the current phase of our "Summer Home Improvement" is.  So far, we've had:

1. Patio Furniture replaced
2. New garage ADA railings & rear steps railing / garden gate fixed
3. House painted 
4. Window pane replaced 
5. Roof replaced
6. Eaves painted
7. New doorbell camera, stairwell outlet, & rear porch lamp
8. New front steps railing  
9. Floor refinished 

I feel like I missed something, quite possible given all the excitement of what I do remember.

Today (as I type) is:

• Stairwell Carpet replaced 

So I guess today is ~ phase 10. 

Phase 11, the new stairlift, won't be until the end of August. (We've already been measured for it.)

Baby Home Improvement

 The summer of home improvement continues …

I took the first small physical step towards installing a stair lift; I had Bel-Red Electric install a power outlet by the stairs. (The deposit on the lift was a far bigger step, but that left no physical evidence.)

They also installed a door bell camera (which required a higher voltage doorbell chime); now I can initially answer (or ignore) the door from my desk upstairs. They may save me some trips downstairs; it will certainly allow me to slow down on the stairs.

Lastly, they replaced our motion sensing rear porch light; the problem with the old one may have been user error, but I just had them go ahead and do the replacement with the new one anyway.

Stairlift … The Adventure Begins

 I just signed an order for a stair lift, including paying a 50% deposit on the stair lift.

I'm surprised they took a credit card for that amount, and I guess my AmExp IS bulletproof.  (I remember when it wasn't, 30+ years ago.)

My knees thank me.

They Live!

TL;DR: New Raspberry Pi toys are alive after a month of torture.

My two new Raspberry Pi 5 units are alive! They are in Argon ONE v3 cases with M.2 NVME SSD drives connected via PCI-e.

Back at Christmas, I asked for a Raspberry Pi 5. My geeky spouse was happy to order it, but warned it was backordered. In March other vendors got it in stock, so she canceled the original order, and I ordered two from other sources.

Then I ordered cases.

The torture came from multiple sources:

• Argon 40 makes nice hardware, but their shipping department is … lacking. It was two weeks after they said it was shipping before the package was in the hands of the shipping company.
• The Argon 40 case would not power up when the NVME base is installed. (I finally jumpered the case to "always on" and poof it worked.)
• A stop gap NVME USB adapter (bought when the Argon 40 NVME cases were delayed) is not reliable.
• As Tom's Hardware describes the Argon 40 NVME SSD installation, it needs "a level [of] dexterity normally reserved for magicians [to] connect the PCIe cable to the PCIe connector on the Argon ONE V3 board."

The flaky NVME USB adapter was most the evil part, because it made both the Raspberry Pi 5 and the NVME SSD drive look suspect. That made me nervous about doing the tricky into-the-case install once the Argon 40 NVME cases arrived. However, the internal case installations are reliable.

The Raspberry Pi 5 with the NVME SSD speed is ~4 times as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4 with M.2 SATA SSD drives connected via USB, and ~ 1/8 the performance of my Mac Studio (which was ten times the cost).

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the various spare hardware I ordered during the adventure ...

Pro tip

When using a Raspberry Pi 5, using good heat sinks matter, as in a ~20º C (~35º C under load) difference.