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I have several Thinkpads, but my favorite is a T420s.

AFAIK, it was the last of the line that had sculpted keytops, it feels good to type on. It's a damned shame that the newer ones have those chicklet keys.

i7 with 16GB RAM, HDD replaced with SSD. Runs Fedora like a top.

lophon Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

That's a real shame.

I first heard of Zuse when I spent a week in class in the Zuse conference room at DEC Spit Brook Road, Nashua aka ZKO1. (there were many rooms in that facility named after computing pioneers...)

There were pictures of Zuse and the Z3 in that room, but also an original Konrad Zuse oil painting. I wonder what happened to that painting...

lophon The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

It's important in the historical context of the Alpha AXP to also remember the DEC PRISM architecture. Canceled in 1988. One of many architectures killed off by DEC.

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

Killing Prism sent David Cutler into the arms of Microsoft.

Another dead architecture was Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_project

Killing Jupiter sent many of DEC's DECsystem-10 customers to IBM.

Years later, they both seem like bad decisions.

lophon A nicer voltmeter clock

https://web.archive.org/web/20250410222119/https://www.n1kdo...

Your AS might be blocked by firewall rules. The Wayback Machine can show you the page.

lophon A nicer voltmeter clock

I saw somebody's arduino based voltmeter clock way back around 2014, I think here: https://maniacallabs.com/2014/07/08/meter-clock-pt1/

I thought it was pretty cool, but a bit expensive for what it was.

So I made my own with a PIC chip: https://www.n1kdo.com/meter-clock/index.html

Mine is more of a novelty than a accurate clock. It is a interesting desktop geegaw to invite discussion.

lophon Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

That page does not include VMS DECwindows Motif, so here is a link:

https://www.xanthos.se/~joachim/OpenVMS.html

VMS DECwindows Motif 1.0 was released in August 1991; it is difficult for me to comprehend that was 35(!) years ago. I still have a mouse pad from the release party.

lophon NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

Only Boulder servers lost sync.

To say NIST was off is clickbait hyperbole.

This page: https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi shows that NIST has > 16 NTP servers on IPv4, of those, 5 are in Boulder and were affected by the power failure. The rest were fine.

However, most entities should not be using these top-level servers anyway, so this should have been a problem for exactly nobody.

IMHO, most applications should use pool.ntp.org

lophon Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

IMHO, "tech optimism" reached its peak in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.

We watched them walk on the Moon on live TV.

After seeing them perform that impossible feat, it seemed like we could use technology to do anything.

As far as the Digital and/or Internet revolutions, the changes have been so fast and widespread that people have not come to terms with them, at least I haven't, and I've been pretty deep into both.

My particular concerns are around atrophy of basic skills (reading, research, writing, etc.,) the authenticity/trustworthiness of "knowledge" obtained from various Internet sources (misinformation, fake news, deep fakes,) and lack of personal contact and interaction in a world where peoples' only connection to others is through a screen (fakebook, instagram, tiktok, etc..)

AI is not going to make any of those any better.

I would not describe my feelings as "dismay" or "fear" but rather of "extreme caution" -- if that makes any sense.

With that said, I'm going to step away from this computer and go play with my dog.

lophon OMSCS Open Courseware

I have taken three of those classes as part of the Online Master of Cybersecurity program. They were all excellent. I can say that the assignments were an important part of the learning experience, for instance the practical experience of attacking weak RSA keys.

I would not let the lack of assignments, tests, and quizzes stop you from trying these if you are interested. At a minimum, they would give you a feeling for what the program/s are like, and possibly encourage you to enroll into the online degree program, which is an exceptional value.

lophon Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs

How many times has this problem been "solved"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC

DCE/RPC worked in 1993, and still does today.

Protocol buffers is just another IDL.

lophon TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

This is highly relevant:

"Meta in talks to spend billions on Google's chips, The Information reports"

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-talks-spend-billions-g...

lophon 1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)

I still have a PDP-11 Programming Card I bought at that Digital retail store. That was an interesting place. As I recall, there also was a AT&T store in that mall where you could buy... telephones.

lophon 1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)

This book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

I was exposed to this book in about 1975 when I was in detention in the math teacher's room. It set me on a path to programming.

lophon State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions

The list does not include DECterm.

https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/net/dev/system/pmax_ul3/srvd.74/us...

Maybe it's hard to find these days. However it had the best VT220 emulation I have seen running on X Window System.

I will note that I have not seen a terminal emulator that supports the "double wide" and "double high, double wide" character modes of the VT100. Those giant letters were kinda fun. (<esc>#3, <esc>#4, and <esc>#6 if my memory serves me right.)

lophon Why do some radio towers blink?

It's not just radio towers. I've seen aircraft warning lights on tall buildings, particularly those near airports.

see https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-E...

lophon Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

The TL;DR is that there are malicious browser plugins that make the browser into a web scraping bot.

I see this all the time in web server logs; it is recognizable as a GET on a deep link coming from some random IP, usually residential.

lophon People stuck using ancient Windows computers

Some businesses are still using DEC PDP-11s, first released in the 1970s. Those are even more "ancient." Many of these are used for industrial controls, among other applications.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505421

The article does not mention what OS is being used, but RT-11 was designed for "real-time" applications. That was released in 1973, so over 50 years ago.

lophon Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator

Thanks. I'll stick to a walkie-talkie. FRS radios are cheap, easily obtainable, and will work as far or farther than this 915 MHz stuff.

If you get into deep shit, some amateur FM handy-talkies are IMHO more likely to be able to get you help. Or perhaps T-Mobile's T-Satellite service if you are headed somewhere really remote.

Unpopular opinion: Meshtastic is a solution in search of a problem.

lophon The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals

They were inexpensive when compared with a VAXstation II/GPX!

lophon The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals

It was the interoperability of X Window System devices that enabled this.

Your X server (e.g. a X terminal) could display applications running on a variety of other vendors' hardware and operating systems. The specification enabled this interoperability. Apps running on SunOS could display on VAX workstations, and vice versa (as long as you had TCP/IP installed!)

The advantage X terminals had was that they were relatively inexpensive to buy and operate. Most did not require management, however the CPU cost moved into a computer room and you needed a pretty fast network to get reasonable performance.

lophon PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?

I can tell you that lights strobing exacerbate my migraines. Even 120 hertz from fluorescent lights will affect me. I have mitigated this in the past by adding incandescent lights in my office, or demanding to work near a window. LED lamps are no good, as another commenter posted, even the simplest ones strobe. Incandescent bulbs grow harder to find as time goes on. Progress?

lophon The Atomic Airplane

This is related.

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

my understanding is that the area is still a bit "hot" with radiation.

lophon Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)

My recollection (which could be rusty, it has been >30 years) is that the Motif API, coded in C, implemented a kind of polymorphism.

lophon Public Access OpenVMS System

VAX Notes. Perhaps the original groupware. Not really useful without collaborators any more, since DEC is dead and took that cultural fork with it.

See https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/2012/12/14/vax-notes/

and the referenced paper

https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/...

lophon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History