MOCA works extremely well. especially if you already have coax in all your bedrooms (old houses).

They did.  But never saw them outside of a few targeted markets.

We used them at Ford in the plants.

Sun Apr 28 2024 14:56:01 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

It does, and as I mentioned earlier I think the people who make the hardware missed an opportunity by not making MoCA adapters that attach directly to the computer without Ethernet in between. Now that wireless has taken over everything and home Ethernet is pretty much the domain of the hardcore, that opportunity has probably come and gone.

Speaking of moca i have it running from my computer room to my "closet"  ( mentioned it before. Last year upgraded speeds. I cant use a WiFi bridge reliably due to interference, plus i cant get 1G wifi.. ).

This morning, noticed both changed IP addresses..   how odd.   Even during power outages they have never done that.

Cool. Now that Zilog is killing off the Z80 after a couple of centuries ( ok, exaggerating, slightly )  there is a project to release an open source version, on silicon. A 1:1 pin compatible replacement.  Using a 'seed studio' like place, except they do chips, not boards.  

Long live the Z80!

Not been blessed.  But, they have not sued any other z80 FPGA or emulation project..  I doubt they will this.    Besides patents run out after a couple of decades, so that angle is over anyway.  They could force a name change.. but that wont kill the project. "we renamed to Zeta80"

Assembly is where i started. With blinking lights and slide switches.  ( slide as they were cheaper than toggle.. i was a kid.. )

Thu May 23 2024 22:59:09 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Cool. Has this project been blessed by Zilog or are they going to sueball it out of existence?

I sure do wish I had known just a little more about Z80 assembly when I was mucking about with my S-100 system back in the mid 1980s.

And speaking of old architectures, i loved the 8031 series.   It separated program space from data memory, in hardware.  Just made sense to me.

I still have the last board i built with it on there, well never finished it but was mostly done.   useless in the bigger picture but it still means something to me. 

Back when i was still into that sort of thing, i was designing CPU architectures.  Would use the boards to 'emulate' the processor, and the pin layout of a real thing so it was 'like it was real'. Never expected to be able to build it, but liked designing that stuff, and was hoping someday perhaps id get to work in that field when i grew up.    Did a few in discrete logic. then realized i could use EEprom's to reduce the parts count *dramatically*. Most logic is just a 'Karnaugh map' anyway, so its easily reproducible in a ROM..  Perhaps not as fast as real gates, but the tradeoff was more than acceptable. Reduced chip count AND easy to fix, or change.    Sort of an early FPGA, in a way. But then after that "why not do it in code and use the i/o ports like they were the real thing.... "

And since its 'pix or it didnt happen', the last board, 1987 ish..:

Mostly wired, ( other 1/2 is on the back side of the board ) but is missing the serial port driver chip.  And yes, i stacked those 2 chips ( 32k ). Another short cut. Id find chips with the same pin out, piggyback them other than the chip select. Tho often times id use a socket on top, so could easily remove the EEProm and reprogram it )  Which one was active is driven off those 2 smaller TTL gates, based on address decoding. Didn't do piggyback if i was doing an official PCB to put out in the plant or something.  This was just for dev work.

Fun times.  Different world today.

8031s ( and their siblings ) were hugely popular embedded chips and all over the place back then. Much like the ESP32 is today. 

Grr make that Eprom not EEprom.  typo.

I dont think EEproms existed yet. We still had to use ultraviolet light to erase them.    ( i might even have my eraser around in a box somewhere..   donno )

Well, mainframe at the office will out live my career.

The project to decom it, pushed back at least 5 years. ( combination of reasons ). I wont be there in 5 years.

Cant say for sure as im not even allowed back in the DC now, other than we still have some sort of onsite Z-series IBM hardware that the ops team babysits. ( times have changed.. Used to have free access to everything in the old days, would even rack VMware hosts in the and even had access to our disaster site if i wanted to drive down and visit.. )

Dont see that every day.

In a box i thought was only ( electrical ) car parts, a 10MB ( i think.. might have been 20MB. not going to open the case just to see ) scsi drive, attached to a ASCSI adapter. 

Atari was ahead of their time in adding a SCSI port on the back of the ST, but it had to be slightly different, so you had to have an adapter card.    At least the MIDI port was standard.

oooo no, not 10mb or 20mb  its  2G.. wow. i was fancy.. i don't remember it being that big.

( decided to go ahead and take the disk out and destroy it before it hit the trash.. while chances of anything being on it ( or readable ) doing it just in case.

Thu Jul 04 2024 08:13:52 EDT from Nurb432

Dont see that every day.

In a box i thought was only ( electrical ) car parts, a 10MB ( i think.. might have been 20MB. not going to open the case just to see ) scsi drive, attached to a ASCSI adapter. 

Atari was ahead of their time in adding a SCSI port on the back of the ST, but it had to be slightly different, so you had to have an adapter card.    At least the MIDI port was standard.

Perhaps not 'ancient' but 'really damned old'

PCMCIA to scsi adapter 

oooo an entire bag of PCMCIA cards.  Everything from a 2mb flash memory to WiFi...   if i remember right the 2mb cards came out of an onsite analog pbx system that was perhaps 6'x20' in size, 3 or 4 cabinets of it. would have been running perhaps 500 phones, if not more. 

And a bag of laptop DDR..   averaging 512.    and a couple of really odd broadcom wifi cards.  Not sure what they went into.   Guessing 300 pin, with a single pin 'key'.    ( i know what they go into now tho, 'the trash'  lol )

and a bag of DIMMs..  looks like for old servers.  looked at a couple - 128mb.

I should have sold them when they had value instead of keeping them as spares and then forgetting i had them. i bet that bag was a few thousand bucks at one point. 

Is recycling electronics for the gold, copper etc still a thing?