i am fascinated by this typeface history. as it turns out, Gerald Giampa was the owner of the LTC Spire typeface when it was licensed for use in the GeoWorks operating environment.
i had no idea that he was canadian, and moved his foundry to Prince Edward Island before it was destroyed in a tidal wave. P22 bought his font faces, and designed this absolutely gorgeous traditional web site called The Giampa Tour. it disappeared from the web over 10 years ago, and this is probably the first time it has been seen in a decade. it's full of incredibly nerdy typeface history, including some fantastic rants on how shitty Adobe was to deal with, even back in the late 1980s. 😆
this is what the world wide web was made for, and i'm so glad WBM managed to preserve a working copy, as P22 has been out of business for many years - and its website gone with it.
i've rebuilt the entire site using the WBM's snapshot for public viewing here, where it will remain as an online museum and tribute to Gerald Giampa's incredible work:
I have a really big wish to create #Amiga related videos on YouTube, but I am having a hard time figuring out the required free time the extra production will take (I already have one YT channel). And everyone told me not to mix topics on one channel because viewers hate that.
I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.
The PDP-10, a computer from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), played an important role in early computing. It made time-sharing common, and even helped build the early ARPANET, the precursor to modern internet. On this day May 17 1983, DEC announced the cancellation of the PDP-10, marking the end of an era. The PDP-10 legacy lives on in hacker folklore, and the ALT key on your keyboard is a legacy from WAITS, an operating system that ran on the PDP-10. #RetroComputing#DEC#PDP10#OnThisDay
This is probably the only Gravis UltraSound-related thing I'll sensibly collect. This is the Gravis MIDI and Joystick Adapter, and I'm super thrilled to have picked one up for a reasonable price in this condition. At some point I'll carefully pull things out for a closer look, including scanning the paperwork, but in the meantime - did you ever have/use one of these? What'd you use it for/with? Let me know!
Tonight's Edinburgh Hacklab : Repairing a tiny little 1992 Philips Minitel/Viewdata terminal as used by Bank of Scotland for the HOBS home banking system. #retrocomputing
I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.
And there we have it: replacement 6502 and 6522s from Rockwell for the gutted 1541 I repaired a couple of weeks ago. Now the drive is back into full working order!
The 6522 chips are relatively new and not MOS branded, but I think it's better than a non-working drive! #retrocomputing#commodore#c64#floppydisk