Monday, December 22, 2014

“This one’s for you, Mom.”

“This one’s for you, Mom.”  Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist) with a lovely post about a very special chair – the one at right...

Intel 1405A...

Intel 1405A...  One of my earliest digital designs was for a video board.  It used a character generator ROM and 14 of those Intel 1405A shift register memories to provide a 7 bit wide, 1024 character memory to store the 16 lines of 64 characters.  By today's standards it was laughably primitive.  By the standards of 1975, when I built it, it was like something out of science fiction.  I found those 1405A parts in the back of one of the early computer hobbyist journals (it may actually have been TCH) at a discounted price.  That find inspired me to design and build that video board, copying many ideas from one of Don Lancaster's cookbooks.  I built the entire thing with wire-wrap, with the board being roughly 10" x 6".  When I finally got that thing working, you could hear me whooping and hollering for miles :)

$1.3B for zero results...

$1.3B for zero results...  Your tax dollars are hard at work, guided by the smartest, most transparent government evah!

Why does this...

Why does this ... not surprise me?

Before and after...

Before and after ... adoption.  From misery to joy, canine-style...