can bloggers and the twafia turn a VR museum into an RL museum?
The Centre for Computing History in Suffolk (bordering Essex, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk in the UK) is trying to raise £1,500,000 so that they can go from being a virtual museum to become a physical museum. To those ends they are asking the twitterverse/blogiverse for donations.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/13891/
The centre for computing history is a very important cause especially because they will be preserving working (and alowing people to use them) computers from the heyday of the British computer industry, the 80s, where anyone with 50 grand and a dream could become a computer manufacturer and anyone with 10 quid and some programming skill could become a computer game software publisher (or software house.)
Happy 30th Birthday ZX81
30 years ago today the British home micro industry really hit the big time. The Sinclair ZX81 was released. This was the 3rd Sinclair produced micro and the first that was could be bought from high street stores, starting with W.H. Smith and quickly followed by others.
The ZX81 (later sold in the USA as the Timex 1000) came either in kit form or prebuilt and had 1K of ram as standard (although you could buy the infamous rampack of up to 16K and suffer the joys of rampack wobble after entering your code for several hours only to have it disappear when the dog knocked your table). The ZX81 was quickly followed by the Sincalir spectrum, the BBC Micro, The Acorn Atom, the Dragon, The Camputers Lynx...... for a while there in Britain anyone with 50 grand and a dream could become a computer manufacturer. It also indirectly spawned many famous hardware and software companies such as Psion, that started by writing software for the ZX81 and eventually produced such fantastic hardware as the Organizer II and the MX series. The ZX81 is also responsible in making Britian one of the best places to become a Computer Game programmer/publisher as it was the first computer for alot of kids that went on to write for the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro.... and as adults for the  Xbox, PS1/2/3......
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ZX81!!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
COBOL coding sheet pdf
A few months ago a friend sent me an excel spreadsheet with various COBOL coding forms in it. They were very nice but they spread over a few pages when printed and no amount of massaging and paper resizing would fix them so I put them on one side for a while. I woke up this morning and decided to have another go at "fixing" the coding sheet at least and I finally managed to get a nice PDF of the coding sheet that's fits on quarto or ledger size paper (minimum size 11"x9" landscape), actually it looks really good on 11"x9" landscape paper, anything bigger and the "margins" are "strange" looking. Anyway I don't know where my friend obtained the xls and there is no copyright on it so i'm putting it up here for others in case they'd like it. The only thing I ask  is you don't print copies and sell them on ebay as that is a bit iffy.
You can download the coding sheet pdf here.
["COBOL Warriors" image Copyright © 2008 Robert Saczkowski. Banner courtesy of the GIMP, Copyright © 2008 Brian Tiffin and both are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/]
Forth for the Tandy M100/M102
Michael Alyn Miller has written an ANS Forth option rom for the Tandy Model 100 which looks rather nice especially if you can program in Forth. I don't have a REX add-on for my m100's but it looks as if it'll work best if you have a REX although if you can blow eproms then you could make your own option rom. If you don't have a real m100 then you could run it in VirtualT.
Ghetto eprom erasing
[Note: As we all know cameras and I don't exactly work well together but i've tried to at least get semi-focused shots.]
I have been messing around recently with Psion Organiser2's. I'd wanted one when i was younger and they first came out but I had better things to spend my money on at the time (Girls, Beer and travel). Anyway I recently picked up a couple along with a couple of programpaks, rampaks and some datapaks. The rampaks are just battery backed up SRAM and the you can read/write to them willynilly as much as you like as long as the battery is still functional. Programpaks are normally PROM (or ROM) so you don't really need to worry about writing to them as you can't but the datapaks are EPROMs, so like the rampaks you can read/write to them however there are certain caviats. reading is fine, you can read from them until the cows come home and a couple of months beyond and writing is ok too, it'll drain the battery in the Organiser a  bit but no real problems, where there is a difficulty is that when you delete a file on a datapak it isn't really deleted it's just unlinked, the space isn't freed it's just not available so eventually you will have a datapak that you can no longer write too. When Psion were making and selling the Organiser they also made and sold a datapak eraser that was really just an eprom eraser in a psion labelled box and a 20 minute timer. I don't have one of those and I haven't seen one that runs on American voltages anyway and I no longer have a bog standard eprom eraser either so I needed to either build one or buy one. The thought of buying one does go against the grain for something so simple and the ones on evilbay looked like they either sucked, were unsafe or the drawer for the eproms would be too shallow. So I set about looking for instructions on building one. I found a link to some instructions to building one that looked quite nice http://highfields-arc.6te.net/constructors/other/epromerase.htm but I haven't seen a flashlight like the maplin one in the states for years and i wandered around a few pet stores and medical supply stores in the area and noone had the right tube anyway (i do plan on trying to find the parts to make the one in the link as it looks nicer than my "hack" but for the time being i'll use what I eventually ended up with.
Emulation (and Gaming) on the cheap
Over at hunterdavis.com Hunter has written a great post on using the dockstar as a gaming and emulation system. The dockstar is something I keep mulling on getting a few as they can be had for as little as $25 but i've not had the spare cash recently because what little disposable income i've had recently has been used to get psion organiser 2 and tandy model 10X stuff. I'm now definatly going to be saving my pennies for some dockstars (unless someone wants to send me a brace or two) though as i have a lot of emulators i use on a regular basis and i play wesnoth fairly regularly too. Even if you aren't that interested in Gaming and Emulation it's still a good article on the dockstar. the relevant post is here
The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley
About 25 years ago I was dating a girl (CHM) who gave me a copy of the book "The Land of Green Ginger" by Noel Langley. It had been a traditional bedtime storybook in their family for a couple of generations. She actually gave me two copies, one dogeared and tattered copy that had been in her family for about 40 years to actually read and a newish copy to keep. I returned her "family" copy and reread my copy several times. Over the years what with moving and everything I misplaced the copy she gave me and although it's a kids book it is a fun book for a couple of hours for adults so i've spent a about 15 years looking for a new copy as it was out of print, i tried a few out of print services but they couldn't find a copy that wasn't disgustingly manky. a couple of weeks ago I was messing around on amazon and happened to type "the land of green ginger" and "noel langley" in the searchbox and up popped several copies along with the information it had been reprinted. I'm going to order a copy but before I do i decided to check the Brooklyn Public Library catalog and see if they had a copy, they do, several in fact. I placed a hold on it and was able to pick it up last saturday. I was involved with several other things until last night when I got a chance to sit down and read it. It is still as good as I remember it both for kids and adults. If want to buy a book for your kids or a nephew, neice, cousin, aged parent for Christmas it's a pretty good book to get them (make sure you read it before you wrap it, you'll thank me 
)
[Note: The reprinted edition available in the States isn't as nice as the "original" british puffin/penguin edition but I maybe just going all nostalgic and make sure it's the Noel Langley book of that name and not one of the myriad other boosk with the same name.]
Wikipedia page on noel langley
amazon link for "the land of green ginger by noel langley"
4tH for the ZipitZ2
[ Thirtieth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 21/07/10]
I've built 4tH for the zipit. I haven't modded the editor for the Zipits screensize yet as I just wanted to check that it built and ran correctly before making any changes. It seems to be running well so far and all the examples work (or at least the ones i've tried, which is about 90% of them).
4tH is a Forth Compiler and Interpreter that is almost fully ANSI Forth compatable and has been ported to MS-DOS/FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, OS X, AIX, BSD, BeOS, RISC-OS... and any programs you write will run on any of the ports with no recompiling.
My build runs on a Zipit running Z2Shell, IZ2s, IZ2Se and EZ2S, in other words any zipit that hasn't had it's kernel/initramfs or bootloader upgraded and can be downloaded here
z80sim — Z80 Simulator/Debugger for the Zipit Z2
[ Twentyfifth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 20/06/10]
As many of you might know i'm very old-skool and a bit of a Z80 and CP/M fanboy. So when I had a few minutes between world cup football games this morning I decided to see if I could get YAZE or z80pack running on the Zipit (If the Z2 had a few more pixel rows i'd be ecstatic as then I could use it to emulate a TRaSh80 model 3/4, Grundy Newbrain, Camputers Lynx and a few others of my favourite 80s home micros) because if I can't get full machine emulation maybe I can have CP/M 2.2 or CP/M3 on my Zipit.
After a few false starts I got both YAZE and z80pack compiled and running and after a bit of playing I decided that I currently like z80pack better as it's more faithful to the z80 and CP/M experience and has a lot of things available for it.
I'm working on packaging it but in the meantime if you want to have a little play with the emulator and debugger then you can find the binary for IZ2S/EZ2S here