Posts for 2019-02-19

The Obscuritory delves back into the Age of CD-ROM, and the Eyewitness Virtual Reality Earth Quest in particular. I remember a lot of this stuff from when it was the latest thing, but now it seems downright quaint compared to the World Wide Web.

You know smoking is bad for your health, right? Did you also know it’s damaging your computer’s hard disks as well?

(H/t Violet Blue, from her latest cybersecurity roundup.)

“RIP Dr Peuto, Zilog and Sun’s bright SPARC*“

Andrew Orlowski at The Register wrote this obit for Dr Bernard L Peuto, his work at Zilog (makers of the 8-bit Z80 and 16-bit Z8000 processors), the Processor Wars, and more.

Dr Peuto graduated in Paris and completed PhDs at Berkeley in 1969 and 1974. He joined Zilog in 1976, and for the next six years managed 120 component products. He led the design of the MMU, Z Bus, and the Z8. He founded ViewTech in 1984 and led the SPARC graphic team at Sun Microsystems from 1987 to 1991. He was later a member of the executive committee of the Computer History Museum. Dr Peuto was badly injured at a road intersection in San Francisco some years ago.

(*Gotta love El Reg’s headline writers.)

Written on Facebook just now:

Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” then gives you a tiny little box to write your thoughts into. Yes, I know it expands, but the implication, to me, seems clear. “We can’t have you thinking for too long, otherwise you might start to wonder why you’re putting your longform writing here in the walled garden.”