Welcome to our links page!
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Welcome to our links page! |
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| One really nice little number that came to our attention is an
emulator for the COSMAC Elf, which was a simple 1802- based microcomputer project that
originally appeared in the August and September 1976 issues of Popular Electronics. You
can find this rather pert little beauty by hopping over to Bill Richman's pages at http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r
(that's "bill<underscore>r"). This is a really clever implementation that
comes highly recommended! This one is mega-COOL! As part of their 50 Years of Computing celebration, Manchester University in England are holding a programming competition. This is your chance to write a program for one of the world's first stored program computers -- the Manchester Mark 1. You can download an emulator of this 1948 machine (affectionately known as the "Baby") from their site at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/prog98. You create and test your program on this emulator, and the winner will get to run their offering on a replica of the real machine. |
The Altair 8800 was a simple (phenomenally successful) 8080-based microcomputer kit that was advertised in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. (The name "Altair" originated in one of the early episodes of StarTrek, but we don't have a clue why they called it an 8800.) The original Altair 8800 was programmed using a switch panel and contained only 256 bytes of RAM (a short video of an Altair 8800 appears on the CD-ROM accompanying our book: Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) (sorry, we couldn't resist). For those who are interested, you can find an Altair emulator sojourning on Michael Hyman's pages at http://www.nwlink.com/~tigger. |
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| Here's another rather cool little number. The MicMac emulator by Brett Blatchley is written in Java, runs directly on your Web-browser, and comes with complete source-code and project notes. Note that your browser needs to be Java-capable, but if it is you're in for a treat. MicMac is a computer emulator and integrated development environment for both microcode and assembly language programs. This very clever implementation is well-worth a look at http://linus.highpoint.edu/~bblatchl/MicMac/MicMac.html. |
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| Why not bounce over to the http://www.beigebag.com pages, where you'll find a sophisticated digital logic simulator along with a rather useful analog simulator. | Another site that's worth a peek is at http://www.softronix.com, where you can check out their MMLogic utility. This cunning little shareware number lets you design and simulate logic circuits. This is well worth taking a look at, and you can download a demo version to check it out. |
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| Strange as it may seem, relatively few reference sources seem to be aware of the real genius behind television as we know it today. In 1922 at the age of 14, Philo T. Farnsworth from Rigby, Idaho conceived the idea for a fully electronic television system. By the early 1930s, Philo was transmitting moving pictures, and modern televisions are directly descended from his designs. Philo's story is told in loving detail by Paul Schatzkin at http://songs.com/noma/philo/intro.html. | If we were to award prizes for cool products, then one contender would be the battery-less "wind-it-up" radio you can discover over at http://www.durhamradio.ca/baygenb.htm. Cranking a handle on the side of the radio for about twenty seconds is supposed to generate enough electricity to power the little beauty for about thirty minutes. This gizmo could be ideal for power blackout situations. |
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| Alan Freedman has spent years compiling his Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, whose loyal followers now number in the tens of thousands. The CD-ROM version contains more than 10,000 definitions and more than 1,000 illustrations, and it covers an amazing amount of ground. But don't just take our word for it -- leap over to http://www.computerlanguage.com from whence you can download a demo version to peruse and ponder. This really is a useful tool -- highly recommended! (Don't forget to mention that "Max and Alvin" sent you.) |
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| Inventure Place -- The National Inventors Hall of Fame -- which can be found at http://www.invent.org is a nice complement to the Biography pages (see column to the right). On perusing these pages you will discover brief biographies of inventors who made their mark upon the world. | The newly expanded Biography database, which can be found at http://www.biography.com, contains data on over 20,000 of the greatest names, past and present. Sad to relate, many of these entries do not contain as much detail as one might hope (many entries are rather lean to be brutally honest), but this site can still be a really useful resource to check key facts, dates, name pronunciations, and so forth (and the Biography of the Month is usually well worth a read). |
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| The home pages of the Computer History Association of California (CHAC) are, not surprisingly, to be found at http://www.chac.org (don't use a ".com" extension to this URL whatever you do). This site contains nuggets of information on all sorts of things pertaining to the history of computers, links to similarly focused sites, and lots of other jolly good stuff. CHAC is also the home of the Analytical Engine magazine, which usually manages to crawl through one's postbox once a quarter (give or take a few months). This magazine contains a lot of good stuff, but none better than its in-depth interviews with the heroes who created the early computers. You can email the executive director, Kip Crosby, at engine@chac.org for more details, and feel free to mention that "Max and Alvin" sent you. |
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| The guys and gals at LLH Technology Publishing http://www.llh-publishing.com
are really great, and we're not just saying that because they published our first book, Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional
Guide to Electronics). In addition to being nice folks, their claim to fame is that
they publish technical books with personality (sometimes with an attitude), plus they're
real pleasant to work with. If you think you've got a non-boring technical inside you, why
not whip off an email to Carol Lewis at c_s_lewis@compuserve.com and bounce your ideas off her (you might care to mention that "Max and Alvin" sent you). |
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| Our second masterpiece was Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) which was published by those chaps and chappesses at Doone Publications http://www.doone.com Doone pride themselves in publishing books that feature a unique blend of graphic and technical content, and they were the 1997 Small Press Book Award Winner for Science & Engineering. If you feel the urge to pen something yourself, you can email the boss, Anne Smith at asmith@doone.com (feel free to mention that "Max and Alvin" sent you). | If your taste runs to a bigger publisher, you could do a whole
lot worse than strolling over to the Butterworth-Heinemann pages at http://www.bh.com. These bad boys
and girls are an international publisher of books, software and electronic products
targeted at students and professionals in technology, medicine and business (phew!). We've
found to our cost that many big publishers are somewhat straight laced, but Newnes (which
is the the "brand," or "imprint" for all of Butterworth- Heinemann's
electronics books) were a treat to work with when they published our third book, Designus Maximus Unleashed. If you're interested in talking to Newnes about an electronics book of your own, then feel free to email our chum Pam at pam.chester@bhusa.com (and, wait for it ... wait for it, don't hesitate to casually mention that "Max and Alvin" sent you). |
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| It's common to see references to ZIP or ZIP'ed files on the Web, along the lines of "Click Here to download my ZIP file containing ....." On the off-chance that this doesn't mean anything to you, the term "ZIP file" refers to a file that's been compressed so as to make it smaller. If you don't have a tool to unzip (uncompress) these files (whose names end with ".zip"), you can use WinZip(R) by Nico Mak Computing (http://www.winzip.com) or PKZIP(R) by PKWare, Inc. (http://www.pkware.com). Both of these products are available for you to download in tryout/evaluation versions. |
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| Computer Currents is a magazine that comes in a variety of flavors. The print version appears in many large cities across the country, while its Web-based companion is to be found at http://www.currents.net. To our mind Computer Currents is one of the more sophisticated online magazines whose primary focus is on computers -- buying them, using them, choosing peripherals, and so forth. These pages offer an extensive range of daily news, reviews, technical help, training, a "buy and sell" area, links to software, books, and user groups, and a whole lot more! | The Thread is a monthly online magazine you can find at http://www.thethread.com. This little number certainly includes game reviews and interesting "cyberspace links," but it isn't just for computer nerds. If you care to wander over to these pages, you'll discover book, movie, and music reviews along with a smorgasbord of features and columns. It's also kind of interesting watching The Thread as it seems to mutate into a completely different style on a regular basis. | |
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| And now for something completely different, as Monty Python would have it. The stomping ground of the geeks is to be found at http://www.ugeek.com, and quite a place it is too. The site features some interesting information about processors, a useful glossary of computer and electronics terms, book reviews, games reviews, graphics card reviews, and a whole lot more. One thing that sets these guys apart is the quality of their hardware, software, and book reviews. Unlike lesser reviewers who could obviously care less, the UGEEK reviewers go into a lot of detail, make comparisons to similar or related products, and explain exactly why they awarded whatever scores they decode on (the score consists of readability/usability and "Geekness" components, where "5 Geekheads" indicates "A masterpiece!"). | ||
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