Viewing profile — Taniwha

In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit: http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the…

This is probably the place to say if you want to come play in this space you really ought to go to KawaiiCon - AoNZ's kinder/nicer DEFCON - in Wellington over the Halloween weekend…

Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the bord…

You might is they included DFT (design for test, stuff to make sure when you make a chip all of it actually works) - a scan chain thru all the internal flops will provide you with …

In fact if you have the sky130 libraries installed (it's where I'm working) you can get a spice netlist out of it in about 10 seconds - really they should have flattened it

I take it back, it's a sky130 .gds the gates are explicitly in there

I'm a chip designer, back in the early 90s I visited a small silicon house who were doing some work for us, their boardroom table had been taken over by a giant sized photomicrogra…

yes, but at the transistor level .... it has no idea at that level how those transistors are arranged into gates directly

It's even easier in this case because they've included the original verilog source ....

I think the real watershed wan't bitcoin, it was the internet bubble, before that the rule of thumb was you couldn't go public without 5 consecutive quarters of profit - you really…

Yes exactly, sure they need to know about "Pride and Prejudice" but they have no way to tell it didn't happen, nor any way to tell that all people of that age lived that way (most …

I think that one of the main problems with LLMs is that we're shoveling everything in to them, without any guidance as to what is "real"/"true"/"factual" - crazy anti-vaxxer-cooker…

The article kind of misses out on the networking standards of the time - there were many of which TCP and IP were just one, most of the rest were either proprietary (DNA SNA BNA et…

On TinyTapeout you can add more tiles up to 16 times the size of this (at which point you likely jump to waferspace)

I'm in 2 minds, I'm strongly in the RISC camp these days, I know how hard it is to build a truly performant CPU and think that simpler is better as far as ISAs go. Adding segmentat…

It was more than 40 years ago, before I had the skills to build chips, I'm afraid I've kept nothing of that design

Thing is capability machines (like this and the 432 and lots of research machines) were very much the thing at the time - cutting edge even. The research literature was full of the…

StarLAN was a 1Mb twisted pair networking system that was pre twisted pair ethernet

Pretty sure it's "But I LOVE what he did for the Australian flag." - he is a kiwi but that's arguably the Aussie flag with the colonial bit replaced with the local one

Like Greenland,the Faroe Islands are a self-governing, autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. I'm sure this is highway funding from the mainland.

In context, around 1980 we bought 1.5MB of memory (core, real core, hand threaded core) for our Burroughs mainframe, we paid more than $1M (1980s) dollars for it. With 3MB our 1MHz…

You don't really fetch 66 bytes instead of 64, what real implementations do is read cache lines (of whatever size) and hold on to 2 bytes from the previous cache line if there was …

It's possible that later A/UXs required booting MacOS - but when we started we got 1/2 the initial prototype production run of Mac 2s (no cases, bugs in pals, probably no standard …

I'm pretty sure the ROMs loaded a boot sector booter and jumped into that, it's been a long time but I'm pretty sure that's what we handed over to Apple

Not really (I wrote the mouse/display drivers and kernel event queue driver for A/UX 1.x) - A/UX has it's own kernel ADB (and mouse/kbd on top of that) and display drivers, it will…