i found a box with my dad’s things from the 1990s (and earlier). a few microcontroller dev boards (pic, z8, 68hc11, 8052 – some with 5¼” floppies), a bunch of radio shack/arrow chips, a few plastic packets of 74xx chips and other components (for a class project?), and two ancient radio shack acoustic couplers.
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and with markdown support...
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-- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I’m also sitting on one of the big stories of the late seventies and early eighties: the personal computer—a full-sized computer (in function) available in kit form for less than two thousand dollars, which when completely assembled is about as big as a portable Olivetti typewriter. Hackers, as personal-computer constructors have dubbed themselves, are already building the machines by the thousand all over the country; they’ve formed clubs like the Homebrew, and they’re serviced by a number of small retail computer stores and by national magazines, including one called Byte, which is published in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and which, after twenty monthly issues, has grown to a press run of eighty-eight thousand. Vern, a typical hacker, worked in electronics in the Air Force for fourteen years as a radio technician, following two years as a merchant seaman. He also has a degree in economics from San Jose State and is a former personnel officer for Lockheed, and likes to call himself a former merchant seaman and roughneck. The kits that Vern and his compeers are working on require a certain basic knowledge of digital electronics, but within six months, according to Carl Helmers, the editor of Byte, the field will be completely accessible to ignoramuses like me: Heathkit, the famous kit people, who already market a color-TV kit that an orangutan can assemble, will offer a computer kit next fall. And in just a matter of weeks a couple of men in their twenties from Los Altos, California, the next town over from Mountain View, will start selling Apple II, which Helmers calls the first appliance computer—a fully assembled briefcase-size unit, with a large memory and a keyboard, that can play any number of computer games, draw pictures on your color TV, and operate like any other computer, using the TV as its display. Cost of Apple II: thirteen hundred dollars.
In a couple of years, Vern predicts, similar units may be down in the two-to-three-hundred-dollar range, and kids will be able to do math problems at home which were impossible to mathematicians before J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly invented the eniac thirty-one years ago—impossible because they would have required a couple of hundred man-years of calculations. “Of course, if the electricity fails, the kids will be in trouble,” Vern says. He also says, “People will be able to do their home bookkeeping, they’ll be able to program their home computer to maintain a constant temperature in the apartment, and to start the coffeepot in the morning—eggs over easy will still be a human function—and then they’ll start hooking their machines in with their friends’ machines, and people will get on nets of computers, which could mean you could vote or buy something while sitting at your own computer keyboard. Games are the big thing at the moment, but what’s interesting to me is that people with little or no electronics background are getting into the field and, since they’ve never been instructed about what the computer can’t do, they’re already trying crazy things and coming up with completely unheard-of uses for computers.”
– Bytes and Chips by Anthony Hiss, March 27, 1977
“Oh,” says the woman in the blue dress, “and you’re some kind of expert on Japanese Buddhism, I suppose?”
“Mmmmm, kind of? I was really into Zen in college. I would sit zazen for two, three hours every day. A few years after I graduated, I took the plunge and quit my job at Google to study a Zen monastery near Kanazawa. The first day I was there, the master said ‘This very world is the Pure Land, and each one of you is already enlightened.’ I was really relieved, because I’d thought I would have to stay at the monastery like ten, maybe twenty years to get enlightened. So I thanked him and went off to pack my stuff. He ran after me, asked ‘Where are you going?’ I said that honestly I wasn’t that into the Zen aesthetic and I was just there to get enlightened - but if I was already enlightened, then mission accomplished and I might as well go back to Google. I spent a couple days seeing Kanazawa, then flew home.”
“You moron, that’s just a cryptic riddle. You have to spend the years at the monastery in order to appreciate the sense in which you’re already enlightened.”
“Nah, I got an email from the Zen master a few months later telling me that I was the best student he’d ever had.”
“The point is, even though it’s sad to see people being foolish, there’s no use giving up. Nothing good can come of giving up. That just means you lose completely, right away.”
@phoe have you tried http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs-lisp/src/diacriticalize.el
altcaps, by Protesilaos Stavrou:
The altcaps package helps you apply alternating letter casing to convey sarcasm or mockery. For example, convert this:
I respect the authorities
To this:
i ReSpEcT tHe AuThOrItIeS
The altcaps package thus makes you more effective at textual communication. Plus, you appear sophisticated. tRuSt Me.
@mortentor if you decide to run a node and prune other transactions, you still have to decide which transactions to prune. ahead of time, your node doesn’t know all the addresses you’ve generated in your wallet. for example, your hard drive could’ve crashed, and you’re syncing the blockchain again. you know your bip39 seed phrase, so recreating your wallet isn’t a problem. but did you create 10 addresses, or 50?
@mortentor so, you’re depending on other nodes to hold all the data. in that case, why run a node at all?
part of the advantage of running a node is that it’s a peer-to-peer system, and when a new node joins the network to sync its state, it can ask the participants for previously mined blocks (which, in the current setup, almost all nodes keep a copy of). your pruned node won’t have most of the blockchain. why run a node, and not some wallet software?
@mortentor a balance on a blockchain is a synthesized value, based on all the inputs/output transactions related to an address.
@mortentor yes, but how do your node know my wallet really had that $10? my transaction just says “send $10 to your address”. a previous transaction (pruned from your database) could say “send $8 to someone else”.
@mathew @mortentor @tante from the horse’s mouth: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/features/requirements
today it’s 350 GB of disk space, and grows about 500 MB a day.
ethereum is about 650 GB of disk space and grows at 14 GB/week. an ethereum archive node is over 12 TB. the difference between an archive node and a normal one is that you can ask an archive node what balance address 0xabcd had at block height 25000; you can’t peek into history like that with a normal node.
@mortentor your node calculates the balance from transactions it knows of. if you prune transactions, and you receive funds from an address that was funded in a transaction your node no longer has, you don’t know its balance. you have no way to verify that the address really did have the funds it sent you. you don’t know if it was a double spend.
@mortentor if i sent you some btc from my 2011 wallet, how would your node know that it’s a valid transaction without a copy of the transaction that funded my wallet?