Vintage firing control computer
A US Navy training film describing the mechanical computing involved in vintage firing control mechanisms.
MacPaint source
Apple has donated the the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. Bill Atkinson was responsible for the code, including QuickDraw, which formed a large portion of the MacOS.
A reporter asked Steve Jobs, “How many man-years did it take to write Quick Draw?” Steve asked Bill, who said, “Well, I worked on it on and off for four years.” Steve then told the reporter, “Twenty-four man-years”. Obviously Steve figured, with ample justification, that one Atkinson year was the equivalent of six ordinary programmer years.
The main source is written in Pascal, and is quite beautiful to read — you can tell that he took pride in it. The rest of the code is written in assembler language for the 68000 processor.
Using GPU’s for general computation
How the
If a program can be broken up into many threads all doing the same thing on different data (ideally executing arithmetic operations), a GPU will probably be able to do this an order of magnitude faster than a CPU.
3D Mandelbrot
The Mandelbulb is an attempt to create a three dimensional equivalent to the famed Mandelbrot fractal. There’s information about the math behind the Mandelbulb, many images, links to videos and more. If you want the quick version, Wired posted a brief overview and a gallery of images.
Apollo 11 source code
The source code for the Command Module and Lunar Module has been scanned and posted online for all to enjoy.
Homebrew CPU
Steve Chamberlin created his own custom 8-bit CPU, which he dubbed Big Mess of Wires. It brings me back to my assembly language class and the late night bug hunts, there’s something very visceral about talking directly to the machine.
Computing and the Creative Arts
Computing and the Creative Arts is a new degree being offered by my alma mater that would’ve been right up my alley.
Substrate Gallery of Computation
Substrate – Gallery of Computation
