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The Oric Atmos won the 10-line BASIC Programming Competition in 2022 with a 1000-room dungeon crawler named "SNAKE TEMPLE":

https://bunsen.itch.io/the-snake-temple-by-rax

IN 10 LINES OF BASIC!!

I thought it was cute that it used the RND() function to seed things necessary to generate each room .. so I used that technique in my own Oric game, which generates a large blob of graphics data using the RND() seed, meaning I don't have to ship that data in the program itself. I find the pseudo-ness of the RNG infinitely resourceful in that regard ..

Another cute trick on the Oric Atmos is to seed the 14 registers of its synth chip with ROM data .. meaning the Oric Atmos has literally THOUSANDS of onboard sound presets to choose from - once you find them, of course. So I wrote a program to find the most interesting ones and have been accruing a list of "synth presets" that come onboard with the Oric, for use in my game.

Its quite rewarding to go back to these machines and use such techniques to generate nearly-infinite levels/sounds/etc.

This has been a very fun peripheral to add to my 40 year old Oric Atmos system ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric_(computer)

.. which didn't quite live long enough in the 80's to evolve a proper modem/BBS scene, like many of its peer systems in those days did.

But now .. in the 21st century .. with the LOCI device ..

https://www.raxiss.com/article/id/38-LOCI

.. the Oric joins the 80's-era systems online, finally, in a very viable way. The Oric got USB, and combined with the PicoModem, it becomes an exremely fun way to get into BBS'es again.

And these periperhal devices have brought so much power to the Oric .. there are efforts under way to produce a rudimentary web browser, an ssh client, and some other funky/cool things - multiplayer network gaming on a 40-year old 8-bit machine? YES PLEASE!

So thanks, /u/byb, for your great contribution to the retro- computing scene. It has really been rewarding to apply your work to my old system. ;)

Can confirm .. I grew up in a country (Australia) which is practically impossible to live in, without a car .. then I moved to California and did everything I could to avoid the commutes (really a very difficult task), lived there for 15 years and only managed to optimize my life to be able to walk around LA/my neighborhood in the last few years of it .. then moved to Japan for a year, where everything I needed to survive was within a 10 minute walk of my apartment - and then to Austria, in a city that was laid out a thousand years ago to be navigable by foot, and still is.

Commuting is one of the worst aspects of the Western world. The fact that hundreds of millions of people have to sit in their cars, for hours every day, to get to work/play/live, is just a tragedy. I truly hope the next hundred years proves much, much more fruitful for those of us who are willing to change lifestyles to avoid the commute. Its a huge drag.

Electric motorbike rider here. I had to tape a whistle to my helmet to prevent ignorant pedestrians from stepping right in front of me ..

I care not one iota for the opinion of someone who degrades human rights, which are universal and apply to you - and me - equally, whether you agree or not.

The USA has far more innocent blood on its hands, this century, than any other nation state.

And only nationalist/racists ignore the fact that China has lifted a billion people out of poverty during the same period that the USA and its allies have destroyed countless other sovereign nations and left 36 million refugees from their illegal wars for the world to deal with...

China has a lot, lot better record on human rights than any member state of the criminal 5-eyes/9-eyes countries, which engage in massive human rights violations at atrocious scales every minute of the day.

For me, the most important factor is:

* All modern AI is a perfect front for harvesting material for processing by NSA/GCHQ.

Given the criminal US' 5-eyes/9-eyes apparatus' atrocious war crimes and human rights records, this is reason enough to eschew American AI 'products'.

I'll use the AI created by the culture that lifts a billion people out of poverty first, not that from the culture that murders children every 15 minutes and lies to itself about it ..

* xargs gets you the spaces in filenames landmine

Ignorance of xargs gets you the landmine.

Understanding of xargs, helps you complete the mission without blowing off limbs.

    $ find . -name "Some Files With Spaces*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} echo "Processing: {}"  # landmine avoided

Yes, I think the author is just showing their ignorance, not actually doing anything about that ignorance, and re-inventing the wheel:

    $ find /path -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} echo "Processing: {}" # handles paths properly, obviates the need to write anything new whatsoever

A better awareness of human rights would go a long way to solving the conditions which make surveillance capitalism profitable.

Folks only accept these heinous abrogations of their human rights because they don't understand human rights.

I regularly take friends and family visiting Vienna to see The Kiss, its a common waypoint in our tours of the city. Glad you love the city, it is indeed a very fun place to live .. although, in some ways, a bit like a small country town.

This exact phenomenon is, I believe, as a result of the separation of the compiler tools from the operating system. If the iPhone generation were able to write software for the iPhone, with the iPhone, there wouldn't be such a vacuum "Why?" being asked by your students .. they'd have tons of examples of great stuff they could do, without requiring permission, with the supercomputers in their pocket.

Its just that entire generations have evolved now to treat their computers as commoditized services - as you noted - and don't understand that they could, as users, program the thing themselves.

Our industry has rigorously enforced hierarchical structures in place to make sure this doesn't happen, and it sucks.

This is why I believe we should not be teaching comp-sci students with modern computers. We should start out by teaching them to program old computers, first - and then let them catch up with the current market in the last few years of their studies.

Indeed. ;)

I consider it a blessing that I grew up with computers. We both came of age about the same time, even ..

Then thats using other peoples computers. I want to use my computer, for my purposes. That needs permission.

The C64 didn't ruin anything.

Apple removing the compiler from the supercomputer in everyones pocket did, however.

Great! Did you ever visit Austria? Maybe you can take some of the early impressions of German-language speaking with you ..

Kindred spirits, you and me. That PDP-11 put you on the right path, for sure.

Those of us who grew up with computers are truly a special breed, since we had to know how things work in order to do anything at all with the things.

These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.

Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.

I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.

1977; I was with my Mum visiting one of her friends. Bored out of my mind I poked around her living room and peeked underneath a cover, expecting to see a typewriter - it was a teletype terminal with the earcup telephone/modem receptacle, a stream of z-paper folds neatly piled up like some holy sacrament, with which my Mums friend was learning computing. She taught me a few commands, which I still remember and use today .. "ls" .. "cd" .. "cc" .. and she showed me a few lines of this 'new powerful language' she was learning, C. It was the first time I saw a printf(), and the precise moment I learned the real difference betweeen a \r and an \n and what it meant to the paper scroll, rolling underneath endlessly.

1978; I travelled with my Dad to a distant outback town to visit one of his clients. While I waited for them to conclude business, a big box arrived, and the client interrupted my Dad to unpack it, with great enthusiasm. We stood by while the styrofoam was spread around the office in a flurry of unpacking and cardboard ripping chaos. The client swept all the paper nonsense off a spare desk onto the floor and promptly plonked down a brand new Commodore Pet. He poked at it a few times, promptly disclaimed "I have no idea what to do with this thing, I just know I need it <chuckle chuckle>..." Dad and the client left me alone for an hour, and I spent my time typing every single weird character I could, learning how the shift and Commodore keys worked, eventually drawing a weird maze on the screen, which I recognized much later on in my youth as what could have been the beginnings of an RPG-like map.

1980; I was a bit delinquent at a local posh college, supposed to be applying myself to my homework; instead, I followed my fellow classmates with excitement, at the end of the school day, to the local "Computer Age" shop, which had just opened up in our local neighborhood (Claremont, Perth, Western Australia) .. and there, touched my first Apple II, and then Atari 800, computers. I spent so much time after school in that shop, learning BASIC on both systems, that the salesman eventually gave me my first 5.4" floppy disc, to save all the work on in between visits. I still have that floppy, buried in the depths of some book I also value highly. Somewhere.

1982; My regular jaunts around the shopping district of Subiaco took me to every single newsstand in the suburb, and then the Tandy store, and then to my mates place, who had just gotten himself a C64 - which, much to my dismay, couldn't read the code off my Apple II 5.4" floppy, nor would it allow me to just type it all in and RUN it without a hefty serving of pokes. Nevertheless, for a little while (before my mate started getting games in the mail from his British cousins), he and I would spend our weekends porting BASIC listings from the endless magazine piles we'd collected, to the C64 - my first serious cross-platform porting project, an activity and set of experiences which led to MUCH greater success a few years later in my career.

1983; my Dad had finally agreed to get me my first computer, but it was not without great conditions - I had to work at least 4 hours every weekend with him, carting rubbish and bricks and detritous around various building sites he had his hands on, and .. we had to drive to Melbourne (from Perth) to get it, since it would be an opportunity for some quality family time vacation, as well as providing a considerable discount, since my Dad knew the computer importer who was bringing the machines to Australia. And so it was, after a 4 day trip across the Nullabor Plain, I was loaded up with an Oric-1 and a couple of cassette tapes, which I promptly plugged into every single cheap television set I could find on the way back home. Somewhere out there on the Nullabor, was a hotel TV with "Ready" burned into its screen. That was me. That was the end of quality family time on the Nullabor plain too - nobody in my family had the foggiest clue what I was doing to burn those Ready's into the screens.

1987; I have by now become an Assembly programmer and a budding C hacker, and knew far too much about anything to be bothered continuing with my studies, so I drop out of high school and get myself a job on the only electronics assembly production line in Western Australia, at that time, at first stringing endless marine cable harnesses, then touching up a near endless stream of clothes-iron temperature controllers as they pour through the wave solder, and then eventually I get to touch-up the box full of Australias first home-grown modem product - which didn't work, until me and the hardware guys realized there was not enough space between various components near the connectors - necessitating a redesign, a failed schedule, and an abandoned project as the designers gave up in light of the fierce competition from Singapore and Hong Kong and so on. Well, I at least got a patched-up PCB to play with, and with that I taught myself how to write a MODEM driver - first for CP/M, the only operating system available to me at the factory, and then .. when I showed other engineers in the lab that it could actually work, for MS-DOS, on the brand new PC the factory bought for the purpose of demonstrating the one Australian modem that was ever made in Perth. I got paid handsomely for that project, my first proper terminate and stay resident program ...

1988; I arrive in Los Angeles, California, my skills having sharpened enough to cut my teeth on writing an undelete program for the funky proprietary filesystem that Progress/4GL was using to bypass all the OS cruft that got in the way of performance. Astonished that I'd gotten it working (it was easy), the company offered me another project, and then another, and then another .. and after a year, with a litany of things under my belt - a multimedia engine that made fancy graphics on CGA and EGA (and eventually VGA) without requiring additional artist fart'ery, I was ready for more. Always another adventurous thing to write/compile/build/run/test/debug. And so it was, one beautiful glorious afternoon, a brand new MIPS Magnum pizzabox showed up on my desktop, far from the operations room I'd usually have to card my way into, halon emergency mask lessons and all, and suddenly .. I was a Unix/C programmer, and I had daemons to write, systems integrity to check, and a whole set of legacy terminal-based software to port. I need another terminal, but wasn't getting one until I actually wrote the terminal, on the brand new PC that I was also using, less enthusiastically. I wrote the terminal, I used it to log on to my MIPS box, I gained access to the ops room from a grand distance.

1990; BBS'es had my eyeballs pretty much glued to the screen, day and night, and from this it was a short step onto the Internet. I spend every moment of free time parsing USENET, downloading code, getting it to work on my pizzabox, sharpening and refining things, such that my boss just gave me endless challenges to complete - no longer doubting that it would happen, but rather expecting it.

1994; I participate in building the technical backbone of one of America's biggest ISP's at the time, and after a few weeks of hair-on-fire T1 configurations, modem-bank alignments, DNS and USENET server setups, I sit back, turn on the wire tap, and watch as a veritable firehose onslaught of daily new customers from all over Southern California spend 95% of their newly gained online time, downloading porn. (Oh, and I subscribe to minix-list to get me some hot Unix action on my mostly-useless 486, and as soon as Linus' little project hit funet.fi, I am hooked, line and sinker, as a Linux developer.)

2000; I'm burned out, I have a room full of SGI gear, and too much money. Motorbikes, Hollywood girlfriends, trips all over the country. I decide, its time to make synthesizers.

2001; I move to Germany to work for one of Germany's greatest synth companies, and spend my idle time in the Ruhrgebiet learning German and writing firmware loaders, USB drivers, and other such mundane things. I make a lot of cruddy synthesizer music, I learn how Germans party, I find myself far too many distractions.

...

2026; I'm sitting here in Austria, surrounded by 40 years of computing history, which still works just as it ever did over the decades. I can count my productive, shipped userbase for various big commercial projects literally in terms of millions, accrued over the decades, but all I really wanna do is hack on 80's computers and make them valuable again.

I've introduced 40,000+ folks in Vienna to the concept of retrocomputing, giving them hands-on time with machines many of them have never heard of, let alone considered worthy of attention .. a pimped out ZX Spectrum 128+, an Amstrad CPC6128, and an Oric Atmos - each with peripherals designed and built in the 21st Century, to bring each machine up to date with such things as USB storage, class drivers for mice and serial lines, and brand new display capabilities. The microcontrollers in these peripherals are many thousands of times more powerful than the original Z80/6502 CPU's in the 40 year old computers they are serving bytes to, but this doesn't matter any more. The only thing that matters is the fact that there are still brand new software titles being written for these machines every single day. Yes, the Oric Atmos gets new stuff, the Speccie and the Amstrad too of course, and .. any day now .. the Atmos will have a browser, surf the web, download software - finally catching up with its peers in terms of capabilities.

What a wonderful journey its been. One day, all of these machines will find other eyes and hands to entertain, but until then .. I hack on. And on. With dreams of the Nullabor journey still etched in my mind, a never to disappear "Ready" prompt floating in front my eyeballs, its time to read a bit more Hacker News, dig into some of the great repos' from todays preening, and build some stuff.

Everything you say is true, NUC's kind of ate this problem.

Still, one of these days I'll get around to setting up a system like this, just for the fun of it.

I can think of a few applications where it would be fun. Music-making, for example ..

In the early days of FM synthesis it was not uncommon to hear the refrain "FM synthesis can reproduce any sound you can hear on the radio" from some of the wilder-haired synth nerds of the time.

Aphex Twins' MIDI Mutant came pretty close (quite a few years ago now) to delivering on that promise:

https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/articles/aphex-twin-midimut...

I'm pretty sure another pass at this problem would prove quite fruitful - as others have noted elsewhere in this thread, there are tools like SynPlant which promise this kind of functionality, although - for my needs - I much prefer AT's approach, having it all in a single box.

Seems to me that the Zynthian/Monome[1] folks might have something like this in their toolkits, somewhere. Might be time to catch up with those projects...

[1] = https://zynthian.com / https://monome.org

True, they probably didn't read the article - but their claim is still relevant.

We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination, even though our PC's are more than capable of doing this - and the underlying technology is all right there in the kernel - but distro's just don't seem to be catering to this need, since the market hasn't identified it as something that users want.

But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption. I see no reason why this isn't practical, especially in cubicle environments - one fat PC for 4 or 5 people, who are mostly just doing web browsing, document editing, and ssh'ing to things, seems like a very interesting and viable service to deliver, distro-wise.

I wonder which distro's are closer to achieving this target, in the grand scheme of things .. seems to me its only a matter of configuring the X server properly, with multiple independent display units, and getting the USB keyboard/mouse dance started ..

In that era (87/88'ish) I used Quarterdeck Desqview to provide multi-user capabilities on my (then) super-charged 486:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

It was possible to wire things up so that multiple users could connect to a separate Desqview instance and have their own local user context, albeit an MSDOS one .. it was quite functional as a multi-user system for a few years until I got on minix-list and heard about that little project Linus was working on, then decided to switch ..

I'm pretty sure there's a modern way to do this with a Linux system packed with video cards and multiple USB keyboard/mice accessories .. one of these days it'd be nice to do that, and get things caught up with how it used to be, SGI-wise ..

Cool. What about porting this to pwnagotchi, then?

That was a delightful read - in those days I'd already been involved in starting a major ISP, and .. burned out from that .. dove straight into the web, founding one of SoCals' first web development agencies, in that same time period - late '94 - early '95. We had brand new Indy's delivered, a contract with Prime Time Sports network and a few other Hollywood players, and .. it rocked .. until it didn't.

So it was really interesting to read the stories from the SGI side of things, straight from the source. We pushed those machines into places they didn't really belong (US Huntington Beach Womens Volleyball tournaments .. so much sand ..) and did things we shouldn't really be doing (Hi, Aleph One!), but .. so much fun.

I'll boot up my Octane2 for the memories this weekend, maybe I can still find some of the old sites we made with that clunky WebFORCE software ..

3 hard things: you missed counting things.

Nowadays the only thing thats truly being pirated, is peoples' attention.

Everythings been commoditized, nothing serious can be compiled onboard any more, everything needs permission.

Bring back the compiler, you fuckers!

Its a supercomputer, in my pocket, and I need permission to do things to it.

Maybe you also didn't know that it was marketed as a web server and in that capacity, was quite a bit more widely deployed than you might expect for such a machine ..

The Indy was a very popular platform for building an early web presence. I know, because I used it for multiple, major media companies who were getting onto the train.

Er, yes.

Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines.

The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving.

(Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)