Collaborate Disseminate
While on the surface they might seem like little more than cosplay accessories, there are perfectly valid and practical reasons for building a custom cyberdeck. For one thing, a hand-built deck is going to be easier to upgrade and modify …read more
Continue reading Stay Focused with this Distraction Free Cyberdeck
Computer languages have always advanced faster than computer hardware. Case in point: we’re just now getting CPU instructions for JavaScript floating point numbers. The 1970s and 80s wasn’t the garbage fire of JavaScript instructions in silicon, instead they were all about garbage collection. Lisp machines were CPUs designed to run Lisp efficiently. They were great, until the companies responsible realized you had to sell a product to stay in business. Combine an interesting architecture with rarity and historical interest, and you have a centerpiece of any retrocomputing enthusiasts collection. Yes, we all want a Lisp machine.
Now there’s an interesting …read more
Someone walks into the Vintage Computer Festival and asks, ‘what’s new?’. It’s a hilarious joke, but there is some truth to it. At this year’s Vintage Computer Festival West, the exhibit hall wasn’t just filled to the brim with ancient computers from the Before Time. There was new hardware. There was hardware that would give your Apple IIgs even more memory. There was new hardware that perfectly emulated 40-year-old functionality. There’s always something new at the Vintage Computer Festival.
Some of the more interesting projects are just coming off the assembly line. If you want a modern-day Lisp machine, that …read more
Continue reading VCF West: Homebrew Lisp Machines And Injection Molded PDPs
Lisp is a supremely elegant programming language, but you won’t find it around much today. That’s a shame; in the 80s and 90s, all the cool kids were using Lisp machines, computers dedicated to the creation and interpretation of Lisp. While the AI renaissance of the 80s is dead, replaced with the machine learning fad of today, Lisp machines have gotten much smaller. Now, they’ll fit in your pocket, and they have parenthesis matching, to boot.
If this build looks familiar, you’re not wrong. A while back, we saw a similar pocket Lisp computer based around the ATMega328 microcontroller with …read more
