Very cool that it emulates the phosphor "burn" fading away like the original vector graphics hardware. You can see and play the real thing at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
Actually, the real thing can be seen (and played) at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View/CA. [1][2] As far as I know, there's only one restored and functional PDP-1.
(There are some unrestored, like at the Smithsonian, but these are stored away in boxes.)
Regarding the CRT tube and phosphor: The display uses a CRT tube developed for RADAR, which uses P7 phosphor. This features a short, responsive activation in bright blue and a long sustain in greenish-yellow. (It's actually a 3D display, as in X/Y and time. It also features 8 intensities of brightness, which do not scale too well, for which Spacewar! rather manages apparent brightness by refresh rates.)
It was quite different before the internet. I'm still holding out hope of finding some of my old BASIC programs from the 80s on a 5¼-inch floppy disk in my parents' basement. But they are probably gone.
I found some of my first BASIC programs recently, written in 89/90 on an amstrad464. They're on cassette tape. I have a tape deck with line out, but I don't even know how to start trying to get data off an "audio" cassette tape these days?
The programs weren't fancy: one was for picking lotto numbers for my mam (the national lottery had recently launched in Ireland so it was a novelty.) Also I was 10.
Eh, not really. Even before source control was widely used by non-professionals, there was still the habit of copying all your stuff over whenever you upgraded to a newer hard disk. I've got random stuff sitting on my hard drive that probably dates to my first PC in around 1996.
I wish I had the Logo and BASIC programs I wrote for the c64 in the early 80s. I still have the disks, so there's vague hope. Even more, I'd love the animations and images I made on the Amiga later in the decade, but that's more unlikely.
I have the sources to "JHU UNIX" which were a direct fork of one of the earliest BSD's, though I don't recall hearing which. They were recovered off data tapes (and are still in an arcane raw binary format) from the late 70's / very early 80's.
This past week, orgs were announced for the 20th anniversary of the Google Summer of Code. Anyone new to open source (not just students anymore) can submit a proposal to remotely work on an open source project for a few months and get paid. Best advice: communicate early, communicate often.
Cheers!
Disclaimer: GSoC admin and mentor since '07. BRL-CAD, BZFlag, Haiku OS, RTEMS, ... good times.
I'd be happy to host the site in perpetuity on one of our dedicated hosts (for free). Have hosted the sites for a number of notable open source communities for decades.
Can you add some context on what T-splines are and why it's a big news? I kinda know splines in a trajectory planning sense but never heard of T-splines. Thanks!
The important part is that compared to B-splines, it lets you reduce the data size of a closed form surface by reducing the amount of data needed to describe it.
Love that you’ve included other nutritional facts. Would be cool to also incorporate review scores and/or taste somehow, however subjective.
Really nice work.