How the RESISTORS put computing into 1960s counter-culture

alhazrod an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is an excerpt from the book “README A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines” by W. Patrick McCray.

MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553483/readme/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/README-Computing-Electronic-Everythin...

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anthk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Trac64 implementation:

https://git.luxferre.top/nntrac/

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kmoser 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They borrowed an acoustic coupler—a forerunner of the computer modem—and connected it to a nearby pay phone

The acoustic coupler is mounted on a modem, and is just the cradle where you rest a handset. The device is not a forerunner of a modem, it is a modem.

	▲	badlibrarian 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Almost. A modem sometimes had a phone jack as well as a coupler, for those cases when the handset was hardwired into the phone and the phone was hardwired into the wall. We tapped where we could and we were happy. Bonus points if the rotary phone had a lock on it and you dialed out by pulsing the hangup switch.

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throwaway81523 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Web site is still up, resistors.org . It looks like John and Margy Levine (first generation Resistors) are running it now. I think Dave Fox (2nd generation I guess) took care of it before. The linked article looks pretty good. There were a bunch of paper archives kept around that are probably still interesting. I don't know who has them now or if they still exist.

I didn't know about Trac64 or that Trac even really had the concept of bits. It was all string operations, including string arithmetic in arbitrary precision, I thought. But I never used it much. It could be seen as a weird take on both Forth and Lisp.

#(ps,#(rs))