Projects

All of my projects and crap can be found in this section, other than Rambler and American Motors Corporation (AMC) car stuff. That is a fairly large subspecialty so it has it's own section.




The Road
The Road This is a new project, so it doesn't have any/much structure yet. ...
Rocks and Code Rocks and Code was the subject of my MFA thesis (Rocks and Code (PDF) UCI, 2009), where I got to indulge research into a fairly narrow slice...





Cold War
Book review: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates the RAND Corporation, 1955 Free Press Publishers, Glencoe Illinois This is a strange book, possibly the oddest book I own, and I have a f...
Civil Defense Logo Dies at 67, and Some Mourn Its Passing The Civil Defense symbol, left, born in 1939 and familiar to generations of Americans, has been replaced by an emergency ...
Civil Defense film strips Below are some representative images from some Civil-Defense 35mm film strips I purchased from Xerxes Books' 'atomic ephemera' list....
INPUT/OUTPUT by Tom Jennings Revised 27 July 1999 Input/output, I/O, is the klunky and crude write-off phrase for the only part of symbolic machin...
Nuclear Films: Updated July 11, 1996 Note: Experimental films by independent film-makers are marked "EF". Films that are so marked usually aren't available at local...
Nuclear bookmarks Likely all obsolete or get you on some post-9/11 blacklist for clicking on them....
Review of Andrew Hodges' book, Alan Turing: the Enigma by Tom Jennings <tomj at wps dot com>, April 1999 Please refer to the Alan Turing homepage, and to my Story Teller. One of th...
The Earth's Satellite This is a 45 rpm vinyl record made of the Soviet Unions Sputnik satellite circling the earth, a sound recording made from earth. It doesn'...
An assortment of Radiacs Tom Jennings, 1997 revised, 6 Feb 2000 'Radiac', or sometimes 'radiacmeter', is the generic word for radiation detection and meas...
Donald Davis' space art (no excerpt)...





Computation
An annotated history of some character codes The codes covered here are the beginning of a crude alphabet for our new machines' pidgin, a baby language, for better and worse, mindle...
Bits, Bauds, & Modulation rates Serial communications, here meaning RS-232 and current loop 1999, revised slightly February 2005 mark and space -------------- S...
Burroughs Corp. Nixie and Panaplex application notes While there's sufficient information in the net and elsewhere to light up Nixies and make them work (see my Nixie datasheets) but as far...
Burroughs Nixie additional datasheets Here are a few random datasheets that don't quite fit in the rest of the tube database scheme. These are courtesy David Forbes (www.cath...
COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE 1. The Imitation Game I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meani...
Computer music system for my 1970 AMC Hornet (2009 note: I abandoned this project after three years of work; the software and hardware worked great, but the power supplies kept popping ...
Cubic Corporation V-45 Digital Voltmeter 4 digit resolution, 0.01%, +/- 1 digit accuracy claimed Serial Number 275 26 transistors, 4 telephone steppers, 10 steps/sec. rack m...
Data General NOVA4 Tom Jennings, updated 2 Nov 2006 Tom Jennings, updated 8 March 2005 (Bob R. is now the lucky owner of this machine now. I was never goi...
Drum memory computer data from Huskey & Korn's COMPUTER HANDBOOK (no excerpt)...
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC Below is a copy of John von Neumann's EDVAC Report, in 150dpi image form...
General Radio Model 723c Electronic Fork This lovely device is an electronic frequency standard dating from the 1940's or early 1950's, a large tuning fork with a vacuum tube amplif...
LGP-21 Documentation In this section I'll accumulate documentation for the LGP-21 (and LGP-30, in the case of software, with which the '21 is partly...
Librascope/General Precision LGP-21 Computer Tom Jennings, updated 16 September 2004 15 February 2003 This is the documentation for my Librascope/General Precision LGP-21 comp...
NIXIE INDICATORS AND DECIMAL COUNTING TUBES by Tom Jennings, tomj @ wps . com; last updated 31 Jan 1999 The capabilities of informational displays have historically lagged other...
Paper tape Paper tape is a data storage medium from a past century. It's roots are in mid-19th-century telegraphy. The cliche "dit dit dah da...
Project PIC source code These are sources to various WPS projects (and umm products). Most are PIC sources, for an old PBASIC compiler. Most of them are Story T...
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal [ A letter to the editor of Datamation, volume 29 number 7, July 1983. I've long ago lost my dog-eared photocopy, but I believe this was...
Royal McBee/Librascope General Precision LGP-30 serial drum electron tube computer --> These are just a few photos I took of the Computer Museum's LGP-30. You can find a few documents about it on the net with a...
The Universal Machine My most recent (and most complicated) project is this Universal Machine. I keep repeating this paragraph from the Logical Design manual ...
U.S.TTY/ITA2 to ASCII translation programs The original contents of this page have been superceded by the history of character codes page. It now only contains the ITA :: ASCI...
Using Photomultipliers in Two-Wire Probe Configurations (no excerpt)...
Various fine instruments of the past Teletype Model 28 Teletypewriter. A mainstay of communications for a generation (the one before mine; I grew up on the '33), the mode...
the Charactron 1. THE HARDWARE The Charactron (sometimes branded a Typotron), a special-purpose electron tube, was a peculiar device with a brief...
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CPM-80 diskette contents Diskette contents listed below; I need to make them accessable......
How to wire a Nullmodem cable I swiped this source from http://unix1.hials.no/~aoy/home_uk.html, it was so damn useful I was afraid it might disappear. Finding this d...
Mel the Programmer Though this was written in the 1980's, the LGP-30 was a vacuum tube machine from the late 1950's. Steve Simmons writes: "Found, after a...
Otrona Attache 8:16 diskette contents 23 May 2001 These are copies of the diskettes that remained with my original Otrona Attache. THe computer was sold on eBay, and the b...
The Sharp PC-5000 The Sharp PC5000 is a portable MS-DOS compatible machine. This means the hardware is not IBM-PC compatible, and it uses...





Obsolete
Y2K I considered keeping lists this year of people and businesses mongering "y2k" nonsense for greed, profit, and stupidity, such as the Real G...





Products

My "products" are things I made under the guise of World Power Systems, my fabled (in my own mind) vague and nebuluous entity of uncertain means.

"EDE": portrait of Edward Teller "He's a danger to all that is important. I really do think it would have been a better world without Teller" -- physicist I. I. Ra...
Alan Turing made flat This is a hack, a test of a process. It seems to have worked OK, so I'll probably do more of them. I took an image of Turing hacked it ...
Atomic Number Generator INCOHERENT EXPOSITION ON A WORK IN PROGRESS -- NO COMPLAINTS! The intertwined developments of automatic computation, mathematical table a...
Cold war collages Random and undirected impulse to build begat mediocre collages. Mixed media (Wood, glass, iron, paper, ferrite...
Cold-War film reviews Capsule reviews of some Cold War-era films, well-known and otherwise; some available from WPS on VHS. Entire contents copyright Tom J...
Desktop Atomic Pile (Work in progress.) The world needs a good, portable desk-top atomic pile, suitable for demonstration purposes. Used properly, harm to life...
Discorporate spell box This is a mildly threatening device for focusing energy on our corporate enemies. Assembled from the detritus of a century of terrible in...
Encapsulated Landscapes These are part of an as-yet indeterminate series, each describing peculiar, little-seen and hidden-away uses of the earth. Built into ne...
Model 11 Clock Model 11 Nixie Clocks are the most straightforward instruments in the WPS lineup, beautiful and exotic, obsolete yet completely pract...
Model 13 Clock The Model 13 is a one of a kind clock, partially a design study in the use of an analog D'Arsonval meter movement for information displa...
Model 17 Audible Detector This is the second WPS product. Initially considered a failed project, it seems to have warmed with time's passing. It has a funerary fe...
Model 23 Trinitite Box This is was first WPS product. The heart of the device is a tiny diorama, water colors on lead, with a reactor-shielding lead glass win...
Model 3 Tape reader Completed September 1999 Price list The Model 3 Tape Reader reads perforated tape and sends the information on to other devices that speak and print. A tape is mounted on ...
Model 31 Vocalizer completed July 1999 Price list The Model 31 Vocalizer is a component of the Story Teller federation; it utters speech when provided with a stream of encoded phoneme...
Model 47 Trinity Diorama A measurable analog of the Trinity Site and surrounding area, as it appeared shortly after 6 July 1945. As is well known, land may tell...
Model 71 Measuring Device The instruction card attached to this instrument says it best: "The Model 71 is a portable standard for calibrating once-living and ...
Regenerator The Regenerator is a subtle and difficult machine for communicating with entities, real and unfortunately sometimes imagined. It requires P...
Story Teller Actually, this is a boring device. It's an integral part of the Story Teller system, and is quite useless without it. Left to itself...
Story Teller Story Teller is a self-contained but ever-expanding system for, well, telling stories, which are stored as rows of tiny holes in long s...





Scans
Archived and obsolete data I had a lovely Zemco CompuCruise computer installed in my 1970 Hornet; very 1970's! It finally drove me crazy and I sold it on...
Electron tube database, 1958--1961 Updated 5 December, 2003 This database contains technical specifications on some 2000+ electron tubes, mainly obscure and hard-to-find ...
Miniature lamp data (no excerpt)...
Photos from the Ivall book. (no excerpt)...
Semiconductor datasheets and catalogs I am just beginning to scan and index my solid state component catalogs and datasheets, as I have done for most of my electron tube da...
Various datasheets and catalogs The following are catalogs that will not be scanned. They're too specialized or difficult. The only one of general interest is TI Integr...





Uncategorized
Arizona (no excerpt)...
Idaho: EBR-1 -- Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 (no excerpt)...
(no headline) 21 October, 2002 Once upon a time. This is my boyfriend Josh. We've been together for just over ten years (as of October 2002). He's...
(no headline) Trouble is a microscopic Chinese Crested Dog, mostly hairless, fine baby-girl blonde hair, fair skin with freckles. He was the runt of t...
(no headline) This is a gratuitous picture of me at 2, sticking my little hand into the hub of my father's Ford Model A's spare tire. This is in 19 fu...
(no headline) An absolutely brilliant and succinct description of large social processes is below. For a more modern and functional take, and some pr...
(no headline) ii.</!BOLD> All experience is mediated--by the mechanisms of sense perception, mentation, language, etc.--& certainly all a...
(no headline) My friend Richard Loranger created these texts specifically to work with a low-resolution graphical display. More are coming; I have to ...
(no headline) Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his ass to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words....
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164 Shipley, Gulf War nostalgia Ahh, the Gulf War. Remember when this was fashionable? I have to admit, it was I that printed up those 8x11 three-color paper flags. I made...
164 Shipley Oh look! Outside! The mean construction men banged their big tractor into a hydrant! Well our street wasn't exactly high on the city's list...
164 Shipley This was one of my favorite and best cars. It was originally yellow, and the sperms (about 50 of them) were brilliant orange and yellow. I l...
2001 Venice Bienalle Some photos from my trip to the 2001 Venice Bienalle. My Model 71 was part of the Temporary Autonomous Pavillion, hosted by the Slovenia...
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanx to the following publications, current and defunct, in which some of these pieces appeared (no doubt I've lost or forgotten many--...
Bloody punk Napa Sometimes you make basic judgment errors, you know? Well. In 1990 in the local fascist skinheads held a "picnic" in Napa county. There had ...
COMMUNIQUES OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY Some of these are "sincere" slogans of the A.O.A.--others are meant to rouse public apprehension & misgivings--but we're not sure wh...
California This is completely incomplete. Eventually. Go check out New Mexico, it's much more interesting anyways....
Cook report COOK Report: What got you into the Internet services business? Jennings: I never really did decide to do it. It just sort of happ...
Customer Service Agreement This was our customer terms-of-use agreement. We kicked ass. ...
Greta Snider's PUNK ROCK DATING GAME This is a program written in Director for the Macintosh, which means it's quite large, some 8.8 megabytes to download. It's definitely ...
Greta has her say This billboard was in the corner of a parking lot that ran between Shipley and Folsom, and faced the oncoming Folsom traffic. They regularly...
Hit'n'Run shows Shred of Dignity put on a lot of free shows. We did about four "Hit and Run" shows, where we'd pick some safe-looking place, rent a generato...
Jesus loves little boys This is a color xerox of a page from a Catholic picture book....
Josh & Tom's dogs (This page is new (April 2002) and existing scattered dog pix and such will get moved here. As always, it could take years (really).)...
Nevada (no excerpt)...
New Mexico I'm sorry, the pictures available in here are skimpy. I'm a kinda existentialist type road tripper, not a pop-up-one-meta-level-and-record-m...
Permanent TAZs by Hakim Bey (no excerpt)...
Pictures of 2350-2360 Allesandro (no excerpt)...
Pictures of 2350-2360 Allesandro Josh & I bought this property in February 2001. Where others see disaster we see promise. It will be our house and my workspace and ...
Plot map. (no excerpt)...
SPECIAL HALLOWEEN COMMUNIQUE Black Magic as Revolutionary ActionPREPARE AN INK OF pure & genuine saffron mixed with rose- water, adding if possible some blood fr...
Shits (no excerpt)...
South West U.S. Travelogue (2002) This is a personal account of portions of my road trips around the SouthWest U.S. I'm not much for taking pictures on trips, I just never...
T. A. Z. Back to Text archive...
THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE Some years ago I looked through a lot of secondary material on piracy hoping to find a study of these enclaves--but it appeared as if no...
THE TOILET CAMERA WAS A HOAX -- FUCK YOU ALL!!! HA HA HA HA!! In 1994 I put up this fake toilet camera web page, to poke fun at the idiotic cameras-on-coffee-pots and other net.nonsense that was all ...
The Black Hole of Los Alamos Ed Grothus' Black Hole, aka Los Alamos Sales Co. nominally sells what he calls "nuclear waste" -- surplus from the infamous Los Alamos N...
The Little Garden and TLGnet, Inc Once upon a time, three little businesses wanted a connection to the ARPAnet/internet. The year was 1990 or 1991. John Gilmore, John Ro...
The Little Garden, TLGnet, Inc. {You can view the original TLGnet, Inc website, here.} From 1992 until it was sold in 1996 I ran an internet service provider (ISP) c...
The WPS text archive. (no excerpt)...
This Leaflet is a gift This leaflet is a free gift from the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, of Rougemont, Quebec. Copies of this leaflet have been mailed to millions...
TomJ's unmentionables. (no excerpt)...
Valerie's motorcycle Val and Great on Val's motorcycle, outside our lovely door. This photo was the cover for HOMOCORE #4. ...
Weekend trip to Death Valley, 2005" (no excerpt)...
he black flag of anarchism by Paul Goodman Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct respo...
the old CHRISTIAN.ORG site (I sold this domain in 1996, this is what it had in it. It still cracks me up.) I'm very sorry this is so incomplete, but our missionary wo...
The M.O.R.C. Collective: Peter Lamborn Wilson, The Army of Smiths (Dave, Sidney, Max), Hakim Bey, Jake Rabinowitz, Thom Metzger (The Moo...





Various
(no headline) Shred of Dignity started out life as Duke Crestfield and Shawn Ford flyering to get support to stop a city-wide ban of skateboarding in ...
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DOG TALK, aka Coyote Protocol (no excerpt)...
Ed Grothus, 1923-2009 Ed Grothus, the legendary proprietor of the Black Hole, a long-standing Los Alamos NM artist, friend, anti-nuke activist and irritant to d...
Fido and FidoNet This is a work in progress, and is unstructured and not illustrated. I'd been using BBSs since 1976 or so, 300 baud accoustic coupler...
HOMOCORE 1988-1991 Below are all issues of HOMOCORE zine, from #1 through #7, except for issue #5-1/2, the BAD POETRY ISSUE, because it's 2 feet by 3 feet...
Shred of Dignity and Homocore audio recordings All of these recordings were made with my little hand-held Aiwa pocket stereo casette recorder, with a small clip-on stereo mike. Overall,...





Obsolete
(no headline) (no excerpt)...
(no headline) Useful URLs: Generate lat/long...
(no headline) This is the official distribution of WPS-approved informational films originally distributed by various branches of the U.S. government....
(no headline) These are the remainder of a very low production run of Radiological Defense badges; five-color embroidered sew-on badges, the insignia...
Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP), and Manhattan Project badge The Army designed a patch for their staff at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos New Mexico, a rather childishly-rendered but scary imag...
Burning Man, Carbon Dioxide theme camp This page is mostly vestigial, having been replaced by the Carbon Dioxide Camp site. This is still where I upload images though since that s...
Classic Computer Scams: World Power Systems, Inc. --> In 1979 an outfit calling itself "World Power Systems, Inc." appeared on the scene with an amazing assortment of microcomputer...
Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker's Club Welcome to the incremental and erratic home page for the club electronics class, taught by Tom Jennings. This page is new as of 7 Mar...
Model A1 Programmer Adapter and progM01 host software. Tom Jennings 18 November 2003 OVERVIEW The Model A1 Programmer is a companion to the PIC_based Model 01a Control Engine, allowing ...
OBSOLETE FORGERIES A story in three parts, adjunct to the show in the Access Tucson lobby....
References and materials Tom Jennings You might take a look at my "What is World Power Systems" rant, here. It carries the flavor of the approach I take to te...
The WPS Model 01a Control Engine and Model A1 Programmer Adapter and progM01 host software. Tom Jennings 9 June 2003 OVERVIEW NOTE: This thing is obsolete. It made a lot of sense in 1998, but it's worse than redundant in 2006. G...
VA40 ...
World Power Systems embroidered badge The RADIOLOGICAL DEFENSE badges were so sucessful (two sold in two years) that we are making available WPS corporate badges. These are ...
c-level.cc's Art and Technology Hacker's Club" Los Angeles Art and Technology Basic Electronics class, 6 July 2003 This is a small bit of support data for the last class, using th...