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Space Hobo

retroadventurers.podbean.com/e ← Come all ye fans, and hear the tale of the 1990 tape release and the reverse-engineered 1977 binary.

retroadventurers.podbean.comEpisode 36 - Zork Novelties #1: Zork-285 and Mini-Zork I | The Retro AdventurersIt's the Infocom classic Zork, but in two unusual formats! First Nick and Jason explore the unusual covertape edition of Mini-Zork I, a stripped-down, memory-resident version of the original Great Underground Empire created in 1987 and later provided free to readers of the November 1990 issue of ZZap 64 magazine for the Commodore 64. It's a bold undertaking, but is it art? Indeed, does it even work at all? Then the Retro Adventurers take on Zork-285, a reconstruction "of the very first MDL version of Zork from June 14, 1977" as provided by Henrik Åsman. Only available to play by a small cadre of MIT insiders, this version has the bones of what would later become the full-fledged Dungeon game before being carved up for Infocom's commercial products Zork I, II, and III. It's full of pitfalls but notably empty of grues. Cover image from David Ardito's 1981 Zork poster, sourced from zarfhome.com Mini-Zork I on IFDB Zork 285 on IFDB The Newton (excerpt from The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, performed by Jason)  
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Space Hobo

Alan Turing didn't have our modern boolean circuit notations, so he described circuits by the minimum number of high input lines required to trigger an output. You can almost see it as a neural net rather than logical gates, except when the ≢ sign appears for XOR. The lines with zeroes written over the node outlines are inhibitors.

The semicircles are delays measured in bits, which (as this was a serial machine) can achieve all sorts of shifting and rotation operations. The rectangles are delay lines (mercury tanks designed by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office research centre in Dollis Hill), and the number inside indicates the number of bits cycling around (although in some pages it's the number of 32-bit words, confusingly). Smaller delay lines could buffer a word for combination in a future operation.

The image here is a page from The Logical Design of the Pilot Model ACE, by J.H. Wilkinson,Sept 1951. alanturing.net/turing_archive/

Figure 18(a) "Small Accumulator" showing a diagram of data flow through numbered nodes, a box labelled "adder-subtractor unit. 2nd input zero unless D17 or D18 are used", and a rectangle indicating one of the 32-bit delay lines (mercury tanks). Below that is "Figure 18(b). Details of adder-subtractor unit" which is more elaborate, and has nodes that are numbered, semicircular nodes, and some with "not-identical" signs in them.
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Space Hobo

I want safer streets filled with worse bikes ridden by people who are carrying more and going slower and I'm not kidding.

The victory screen from Paperboy 2, which shows the eponymous paperboy (there's another that can show a "girl" character model) receiving a trophy on the front page of The Daily Sun. I've used Foone's "Death Generator" to replace the headlines with the text of the tweet, namely: "I want safer streets filled with worse bikes ridden by people who are carrying more and going slower and I'm not kidding."
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Space Hobo

youtu.be/zcP_Dfgvuo8 ← Here is the video I did with @tastytronic explaining the `HELLORLD!` code, and documenting the entire debugging saga—complete with actual photos of my printouts at the pub, and videos of blinking console lights!

YouTubePDP-12: HELLORLD!By Peter Peterson
#pdp12#pdp#vintagecomputing
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Space Hobo

@ed1conf Incidentally, Kirk McKusick used to tell an anecdote in his BSD Kernel Internals class about the original NFS code.

The NFS implementation came from Rick Macklem at the University of Guelph, who wasn't the best at `ed(1)`. Instead of using `z` or `p` or related commands to display a section of code, he'd just hit Enter over and over to print out lines.

On a 24-line terminal, that meant he could only see about 12 lines of context at once. As a result, he broke all his kernel code up into squillions of little 10-line macros.

Here's an example you can see from tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file

When McKusick set Macklem up at Berkeley to get it integrated into 4.3-Reno, they already had those cool BLIT graphical terminals from Bell Labs, so he asked how many terms he wanted on the screen.

"Oh just one will do."

So he got one 100-line terminal or something, and was delighted that he could now see 50 lines of his code at once!

Space Hobo<p>I often wonder how many people who insist that problematic software is &quot;just a tool&quot; are the same folks who turn hex nuts with pliers.</p>
Devine Lu Linvega<p>Couldn't sleep last night after I realized that two ropes are natural XOR gates.</p>
Devine Lu Linvega<p>Let's learn to count with ropes!</p>
Sarah Brown<p>In a sign of how well AI adoption is going, I noticed that Adobe is referring to manual edits I made by hand in Lightroom Mobile as “AI edits”.</p><p>“Nobody wants this so we will pretend they used it”</p>
Cube Drone<p>So, uh, I haven't... I haven't tried TikTok yet. I know, it's weird, I'm a grown-ass adult, and yet here we are. </p><p>I just spent like 30 minutes browsing TikTok and honestly it explains _so much_ about why... well, everything is just LIKE this, now.</p><p>it's... just wall-to-wall political misinformation, loud noises, boobs, kittens, AI slop, teenagers echoing white supremacist talking points, stunts, ads, get-rich-quick-schemes, it's like pure liquid USA</p>
Glyph<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/pfish.zone" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>pfish.zone</span></a></span> so much of the maintainer community right now is handwringing about "but if we ban LLM use, how will we tell?" and I am exasperated because the answer is not some sophisticated word-probability detection machine, it is "they will be blindingly obvious about it, and if they manage to not be obvious for a second, they will brag about it, they can't stop themselves"</p>
geekysteven
Pip Gowenlock<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>spacehobo</span></a></span> woohoo.</p>
Previous-Instruction Ignorer<p>I have replaced <br>the tests<br>with llm<br>slop</p><p>and which<br>were working <br>just fine<br>for years</p><p>Forgive me<br>but my brain <br>has become smooth<br>and full of worms</p>
Emily Velasco<p>Holy shit, i did it, lol. It looks terrible, but it works.</p><p>For people who haven't been keeping up with this project, I've been doing ceramics for a couple years now, and recently people kept tagging me in posts about a European feminist hacker collective that was making circuit boards out of court they dug out of the ground and fired in a campfire. </p><p>After having an epiphany about some experimental copper ceramics glazes i made last year, i thought i would see if i could solder to them, and i found that i could.</p><p>Sooo ... I made a stamp and stamped out some really basic boards for an astable multivibrator (two blinky lights) circuit. I filled the recessed traces with copper powder and had them fired in our pottery kiln.</p><p>Now i have ceramic circuit boards.</p>
Space Hobo<p><a href="https://andrewblair.co.uk/apps/who-title-generator" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">andrewblair.co.uk/apps/who-tit</span><span class="invisible">le-generator</span></a> ← This little generator is a lot of fun.</p>
OSNews<p>DECmate II: the little PDP-8 that could</p><p>When Cameron Kaiser speaks, we listen.</p><p>In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the only PDP-series mini it happened t</p><p><a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/145157/decmate-ii-the-little-pdp-8-that-could/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">osnews.com/story/145157/decmat</span><span class="invisible">e-ii-the-little-pdp-8-that-could/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/RetroComputing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RetroComputing</span></a></p>
Taggart :ifin:<p>Hot diggity dog.</p><blockquote><p>The briefing concludes that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with [International Human Rights Law]. As such, Amnesty International is calling for a prohibition of such systems, including where such systems are identified as exacerbating existing inequalities or creating new forms of discrimination. </p></blockquote><p><a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40</span><span class="invisible">/0996/2026/en/</span></a></p>
Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:<p>I am not happy with the LLM policy that the Alpine council has proposed. I am evaluating where I go from here.</p>
Justin Bianco<p>Spotted on a walk 🦝</p>
Elena Rossini ⁂<p>For clarity (see previous toot) I'm not worried about the existing state of the fediverse re: corporate capture. To me this space is the Rebel Alliance.</p><p>What worries me is the wrong project (a corporate entity sovereign-washing) attracting NEW people to the open social web saying: pick this protocol (not AP) and our server to enjoy a new, ethical era of social media (they're far from ethical).</p><p>What I know about their shenanigans would blow your minds (not allowed to disclose it, maybe one day)</p>
Just van Rossum<p class="quote-inline">RE: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@danielpunkass/116639318125898071" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">mastodon.social/@danielpunkass</span><span class="invisible">/116639318125898071</span></a></p><p>What I'm reading is “My take on redistributing wealth towards the already wealthy is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.”</p>
jonny (nonvenomous)<p>So, look. One shot rewriting the whole test suite in another language is probably not great to do, but what happened here is so much worse than you are expecting. </p><p><a href="https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/pull/903/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/</span><span class="invisible">pull/903/</span></a></p><p>This does not "translate tests into pytest" or a unit testing framework, it <em>writes its own</em> testing framework where tests are whole python scripts that redefine basic test functions in every script. Surely there would be a single way to "run rsync and get the results" - nope, well, there is, but then every test file will randomly redefine its own <code>_run_and_capture</code> function. So like now rsync needs a test suite for its test suite.</p><p>If instead of telling an LLM to "rewrite the tests in python" you just searched "python testing" you would find the pytest docs. And then you would find examples. And then you could write fixtures to deduplicate all the prior shell script setup and teardown stuff, and so on. But since it was just "rewrite the tests in python" its now worse than before, and the odds of the rewrite actually being a 100% faithful translation are close to 0.</p>
jonny (nonvenomous)<p>So rsync rewriting all the tests puts the entire project in play. Now the entire protective surface has been sloshed through a layer of probability, so the loop must accelerate. Followup PRs add more carveouts with lengthy LLM justifications that sound perfectly plausible but amount to an erosion of the protective surface. We go from cumulative improvement to a random walk.</p>
Gentleman Programmer<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>fluidlogic</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://oldbytes.space/@amoroso" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>amoroso</span></a></span> Obliquely, Frank Land who worked on the Lyons computer was born 24 October 1928 and died 16 May 2026, just a couple of weeks ago</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/28/frank-land-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theguardian.com/technology/202</span><span class="invisible">6/may/28/frank-land-obituary?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other</span></a></p>
Get verbed<p>Get bamboozled, kitty</p>
Best of MLTSHP<p><a href="https://mltshp.com/p/1RQOW" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">mltshp.com/p/1RQOW</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> “E73-Regular: nobody needed this font ...”</p>
Xavier Horatio Xinicit<p>So tired of blacking out every full moon when I really want to stay up and help the townsfolk hunt for the werewolf</p>
Mark Kristensson<p class="quote-inline">RE: <a href="https://universeodon.com/@digyoursoul/116664826352228964" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">universeodon.com/@digyoursoul/</span><span class="invisible">116664826352228964</span></a></p><p>"Underwater bollards protect fishes"</p>
Daphne Preston-Kendal<p>Everyone talks about not having senior devs in the future because we’re replacing the juniors with LLMs, but nobody’s talking about losing senior devs now because people who are competent and care about the quality of their work are leaving this LLM-infested hellscape of a career path to go into carpentry, hostelry, or subsistence farming</p>
The Retro Adventurers<p>&gt;OPEN MAILBOX. GET LEAFLET. READ IT Classic text adventure report for June 2026 with game contests you can still play-and-judge in, a Visible Zorker update, news on several development environments, and new games. On all podcast platforms, YouTube, and at <a href="https://retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/42/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/42/</a> now.</p>
Marie LeBlanc Flanagan<p>Happy May Day! <br>I'm making a tiny game about the *Robins des Ruelles* ~60 people in Montreal who put on costumes and rob grocery stores to feed the hungry</p>
Feneric<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zarfeblong" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>zarfeblong</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://masto.ai/@mattgriffin" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>mattgriffin</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://weatherishappening.network/@WEATHERISHAPPENING" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>WEATHERISHAPPENING</span></a></span> Apparently a meteor exploding in the atmosphere off the southern coast of Mass?</p>
⁡snow :eepy: windows users finding out why curl | bash is stupid<span class="quote-inline"><br><br>RE: <a href="https://wetdry.world/@tim/116663826356708889" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://wetdry.world/@tim/116663826356708889</a></span>
jwz<p>Are.na Hypernormalisation Machine.</p><p>Pull images and text from are.na to make a strangely familiar documentary critique of late capitalism:<br><a href="https://jwz.org/b/yk7_" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">jwz.org/b/yk7_</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p>
hex_m_hell<p>Alright security program wonks. I've been crossing Operational Art (Counterinsurgency theory) with <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/cybernetics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>cybernetics</span></a> (Beer's VSM) and I've created an ungodly abomination that I'm starting to write about: a vision for a VSM informed security program, putting the "cyber" back in <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/cybersecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>cybersecurity</span></a> to manage the spiraling complexity that we all recognize.</p><p><a href="https://infosec.press/security-through-the-looking-glass/cybernetic-security-invariants-identity-and-constraints" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">infosec.press/security-through</span><span class="invisible">-the-looking-glass/cybernetic-security-invariants-identity-and-constraints</span></a></p><p>I'm starting by sharing it here because I think Mastodon tends to give better and more helpful feedback than other platforms. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.</p>
abadidea<p>was watching a video of a Chinese guy playing an English-learning video game on bilibili</p><p>The word "herb" came up. He read the definition. "Uh-huh." Clicked the British sound sample. "Uh-huh." Clicked the American sound sample.</p><p>"HUH???"</p>
aburtch<p>If all the <a href="https://shakedown.social/tags/Mamdani" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Mamdani</span></a> news seems too good to be true, it’s because politicians haven’t worked for the average person for decades and we’ve gotten so use to it a politician doing their job correctly seems completely foreign.</p>
DB 🌱💦<p>The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove. Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001.</p><p>Then in early 2018, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract to build AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.</p><p>The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.</p><p>Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface. </p><p><a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Google</span></a> <a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://mstdn.ca/tags/Tech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Tech</span></a></p>
Ken Shirriff<p>In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to be faster for spreadsheets or CAD, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point chip. Internally, the chip runs special code called microcode. We opened the chip, extracted the microcode, and are figuring out how it works. 1/n</p>
Amin Girasol<p>In retrospect, it's completely incredible that apparently <em>not for a moment</em> did the team behind the 1981 UK Computer Literacy Project consider a non-British-built computer as the project's flagship.</p><p>That's not a criticism; it's an acknowledgment of how vibrant the UK computer manufacture scene was at the time. The BBC asked <em>seven</em> different British computer manufacturers to make a pitch.</p><p>In the context of the current talk about data sovereignty and looming technofascism, the choice to wind down the British computer industry (in the name of efficiency?) seems shortsighted.</p><p>Alison Gazzard, "Now the Chips Are Down", MIT Press Platform Studies series, 2016.</p><p><a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/history" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>history</span></a> <a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/retrocomputing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>retrocomputing</span></a> <a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/industry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>industry</span></a> <a href="https://oldbytes.space/tags/sovreignty" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>sovreignty</span></a></p>
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