WPS:Projects

Projects

This is an overall view of all of my projects. See about WPS for my curriculum vitae and other tedious overhead; the table of contents to find things by subject; or the home page when all else fails.

Computer audio system in a vintage car In progress 2005-	For my 1970 AMC Hornet I'm making an appropriate computer based music playing system. The interface is very carefully and intentionally designed and very counter to typical automotive electronics design.
1970 AMC Hornet In progress 2003-	My current "new" car project. While car projects are never really "complete" it's on the road and driving now.
Data General NOVA 4/X In progress 2005-	Where am I, and how did I get here? I seem to have adopted a Data General NOVA 4/X minicomputer system (circa 1980), and it's close to operational. The last thing I needed was another time-consuming project, but there you go.
Electronic forgeries (artwork)	Here are my objects, my collection of World Power Systems functional electronic objects.
General Precision LGP-21 in progress, 2003--	I am now pleased to be burdened with a slightly defunct General Precision LGP-21 computer (1962), the transistorized version of the infamous LPG-30. I intend to make it operate again. Photos, documentation and so forth will follow shortly.
Model 01 Control Engine in progress, 2003-	This is my open-source PIC-based controller system for embedded systems, consisting of a general-purpose PIC16F628A-based PC board with lots of extra support, an in-circuit programmer, and host-side software, as well as "library" PIC code that supports the PIC hardware. Made for linux, it should easily port to windows and macintosh, as the interface to the host computer is a simple 3-wire serial port. The entire project including PCB layout is GPL.
PIC-based project sources in progress, 1998-	Here are the program source files to many of the WPS projects that use PIC-based technology. highly technical; a peek into the innards of some of the devices described here. I'll eventually add schematics (need scanning), since these things are highly hardware-dependent a lot of the source material won't make much sense without that context.
Universal Machine in progress, 1999-	I'm working on ground-up design of a vacuum tube computer, a sweetly revisionist (but historically accurate enough) 1952 serial machine. I've completed much of the design documentation, including software architecture, preliminary hardware blocks and some schematics, physical layout, and it includes a simulator and cross-assembler written in Perl. The target is a fully-functional machine capable of outputting text in real time (60 wpm), about 80 (tube) envelopes, 2000 watts, desk sized (portable). I would like to build a few of them; you can only rarely see such a machine in a museum, and to my knowledge there are no operating machines of this class left; the user paradigm is so amazingly alien to today's computing experience it will really be a time machine.
Story Teller in progress, 1999-	My Story Teller is an open-ended system using wonderfully obsolete media -- perforated paper tape. It, well, tells stories, via print, phoneme-speech, and occasionally lit-up glowing phosphors and ink-on-paper. It requires a certain sort of patience to experience. If you are in a hurry you can simply read about it here.
ASCII/teletype art completed 1998	Machine words of an olden kind: I volunteered to transfer some old amateur radio 5-level radioteletype paper tapes, encoded in U.S. ITA2, to disk, as part of an ASCII/teletype art archival project. Here's the story, plus programs I wrote to to the conversion. Make of it what you will.
Obsolete Forgeries completed 2000	I forgot I had done this, and stumbled on it accidentally: the background images I used on my Obsolete Forgeries cable access TV show I did at Access Tucson in (surprise) Tucson Arizona, in 2000. I believe that Tucson's cable access is amongst the most-used and most-watched in the country; all I can say is, it was great to do a show there, and there lots of great shows. (Here in Los Angeles, Adelphia doesn't even LIST THE CONTENTS OF their access shows.) The images here were blue-screened behind me as I yammered on about the subject at hand (discernable from the backgrounds I hope). I have the show on SVHS; I hope to transfer it to DVD (along with my Cold War films) and make it accessible.
A million random digits with 100,000 normal deviates 2004	Here's my review of the RAND Corp.'s book, one of the weirdest books I own. Almost literally inverse knowledge, in the black magic sense.
Alan Turing: The enigma completed 1999	Here's my review on Andrew Hodges' book Alan Turing: The enigma, one of the most important books I've ever read.
Cubic Corp. V-45 electronic digital voltmeter completed 1998	About 40 years late, my review of the Cubic Corp. V-45 electronic digital voltmeter, a lovely thing. It typifies what I find interesting about just-barely-obsolete ideas, and in a small, graspable way illuminates the sort of thing Thomas Kuhn wrote about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Fine instrumentation completed 1998	Look and listen to some images and sounds from some fine instrumentation from my kilopounds of old stuff.
Paper tape completed 1999	Speaking of paper tape -- here is a brief description of my favorite medium.
History of character codes completed 2000	Here is my comprehensive history of character codes. It presents a history of the ASCII code, and its immediate predecessors; FIELDATA, ITA2, Murray's Code, Baudot's Code, Morse's Code. It is fully annotated with sources, and it covers the history of control-codes, their meanings and origins. There is probably nothing else like it anywhere. I take up where Mackenzie's Coded character sets: history and development leaves off. Ever wonder what ASCII codes SI and SO were for? Why Baudot code seems so scrambled? Now you can know the answers.
Bits, Bauds, & Modulation rates completed 1999	Confused by bit rate, bits-per-second, baud or is that baud rate, mark and space, start and stop bits? It's actually not very complicated; read it here in Bits, Bauds, & Modulation rates, in the context of mechanical teleprinters, but it's the same for 115200 baud PC async ports.
Input and Output completed 1999	"Input and output", or I/O, is what it was called in 1959. In 1999, it's called "user interface". Hardly anything else is better except for side-effects of Moore's Law. let me rant at you, then tell you about an Army system that did "I/O" in 1959.
Royal McBee LGP-30 completed 2000	Speaking of desk-sized tube computers from the 1950's, here's a quick technical overview of the Royal McBee LGP-30, a serial arithmetic, automatic digital drum computer. There are just raw scans of the Huskey Computer Handbook, and here's the obscurely famous ditty about Mel the programmer who did his legendary work on one.
First draft of a report on EDVAC completed 2001	John von Neumann's First draft of a report on EDVAC is puzzlingly absent from the net. (Or was, when I scanned this.) You can read it here after wading through my editorializing.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence --	This is Alan Turing's famous paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which he discusses the possibility of machine (computer) intelligence, in which he posits the 'turing test' for determining a working definition of 'intelligence', in short, if you can't tell whether or not a thing is intelligent, you ought to treat it as if it is. But in typical Turing fashion, he makes a muddle of things by using as an example a questioner trying to determine if a remote entity is man or woman, dragging a world of cultural baggage into the argument; while it clearly illustrates the relativity and cultural assumptions about how intelligence is defined, it was very confusing to a very straight and narrow public in the Cold War 1950's. Poor Alan.
On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace --	This may seem so obscure as to be inscrutable, but it was once a big deal, the ordeal being over because everyone on the battlefield died. Is bit 0 the one on the left or the right? is basically the question. It really matters, but largely resolved. This is an awe-inspiring document, written by internet demigod Danny Cohen. It's a model of technical writing, on a potentially numbing subject.
Real Programmers Don't Write Pascal --	All you hardcore fanatics for one programming system or another -- extreme programming, OO, java, python vs. perl, structured fortran, whatever -- BORING! -- you will be parodied like this. If you're lucky.
The Charactron display device completed 2000	Here is a very brief description of a peculiar and short-lived information-display technology that had an interesting influence on computer art. The charactron display tube was designed for military tactical displays and microfilm archiving -- but was also used to make some of the first computer movies, in the early 1960's.
Nixie indicators and decimal counting tubes completed 1999	Another look at interesting early-computer technology, here's a history of Nixie indicators and decimal counting tubes. Now long forgotten, these were physical solutions to problems that are now solved in software.