BC TECH
Saved by @Alex1Powell

I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...

 but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!
and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.
It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.
The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.
FastLynx has a cool mode where you can use it between two DOS machines and you only have to install it on one of the machines, it bootstraps itself over the serial port to the one without it.
dang it. They're communicating enough to bootstrap, but not enough to actually work in fastlynx mode
ah-ha! It's this "Serial Accelerated (7-wire) Mode".
Turning that off makes it work.
COPYING! starting on the most useless files
I stopped it and reconfigured the serial port.
even with only 21mb, 9600 baud is way too slow
huh, gnu manuals? didn't expect to see that on a DOS machine not touched since 1994
and it's done copying! you can go to your rest, poor old hard drive.
the next computer I'm gonna work on is... another T1200!
This one is fully dead. No error blinks, nothing.
It's a surprisingly simple machine inside. Not super-cramped like a lot of portables.
it's got a cmos battery and a little speaker over here
Which is weird because the system has another battery over here.
neither of which are the main battery!
This one is also the same sort of setup where it's a floppy drive and a hard drive.
You could also get this in a dual-floppy model.
This little add-on here is the hard drive controller.
This was a weird thing. It kinda looks like it'd be a trackpad but it's on the bottom and this machine has no trackpad.
Turns out: it's RAM!
The whole motherboard
The floppy drive is by Toshiba, it's an ND-352S-A, or FDD4271G0W, or even a JAH1058939.
And it looks like a normal floppy drive but it's got the wrong connector. 26-pin IDC, for some reason.
The hard drive is even weirder.
It's by JVC! Yes, that JVC.
It's a JD3824G01-4.

And it has NO DEFECTS, woo!
And it turns out it uses the same 26-pin connector as the floppy drive.
the bottom of the hard drive is interesting
It's some kind of self-parking system.
This one also has something not in the other one:
A modem add-on!
The bottom.
That chip has an interesting pinout.
The sides have 10 pins, but they're arranged as two sets of 5, with a gap.
It's an HD637b05v0f, which is an 8-bit Hitachi microcontroller
Anyway I was hoping to combined these two into one machine, maybe even image the other hard drive?
But sadly I can't get machine 1 to power on anymore.
So I currently have two dead machines.
and I think that's all I'm gonna work on for tonight, so I'll have to hopefully pick this up some other time.
I have a third one in storage, but it makes these two look like they're in good shape
ooh, found a service manual:
https://t.co/E1I5AAzVuh
BTW a fun thing about this system is that the back of the power supply has two power switches.
One of them is for the system, and the other one is for the hard drive!
you can seriously boot up the laptop with the hard drive turned off. it's amazing.
also it has a function called "hard ram", which is why it has so many batteries.
You can set it up so that the expanded RAM is battery-backed, so you can set up a ramdisk that is maintained while the system is off.
Annoyingly the service manual doesn't explain the floppy or hard drive connectors.
It explains random pinouts for things like the display controller, but no hard drive/floppy pinouts.
oh neat. u/ConventionalMemories on retrobattlestations has built a CF-card adapter for these laptops, but it plugs into the expansion slot instead of the hard drive port.

https://t.co/WZXFPtnkGA

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foone
foone
@Foone
Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
Keybort

This one is a MicroWeb Touch-1 XT/AT. Kinda.


See if you look up that keyboard you find the Deskthority page on it, showing this.
It's clearly pretty similar, but there are some differences.


Also that one uses a PC/XT/AT DIN5 connector, and this one uses some kind of RJ connector.


This one isn't in the greatest of shape, but considering I got it from the Chuck Colby estate sale, it's surprising it isn't completely water-damaged.


It's got some minor rust damage inside, where the metal clips rubbed off on the PCB.
TECH
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foone
foone
@Foone
I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with


when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay


I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets


that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM


huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
Bad news:, everyone: I got my next keyboard


The front folds down


Honestly I've seen much worse keyboards


It's got buttons on top


The back is molded but has no functionality except the battery compartment
FUN

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Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
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Tinker ❎
@TinkerSec
Singing the Blues:
Taking Down an Insider Threat

"I had all of the advantages. I was already inside the network. No one suspected me. But they found my hack, kicked me off the network...

...and physically hunted me down."


Many pentests start from the outside, wanting to see how the perimeter might be breached.

This pentest started from the inside. My client wanted to assume they had already been breached, and, if breached, how far could an attacker go.

Could they stop me once I was inside?

So they snuck me in. Disguised me as a new employee. Gave me a work computer, an ID badge, an account in their system... hell, I even had a cubicle w/my assumed name on it.

The only person who knew who I really was was their CISO. Everyone else thought I was Jeremy in Marketing.

During most of the first morning, I completed onboarding, made introductions, and completed menial tasks.

But I had to act quick. I only had a week onsite. I had to hack their network while not raising suspicion.

So I set about it.

You have to understand... most "Internal Pentests" are straight forward. The hard part is breaching the network, but once you're inside, it's a target rich environment. End of Life computers, default passwords, everyone a Local Administrator...
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Antonio Garc\xeda Mart\xednez
Antonio García Martíne...
@antoniogm
Observing the public conversation around FB, and the private ones happening among techies and ex-FBers, I think the mutual misunderstanding is worse than when I set out two years (and 500 pages) ago to (in a small way) bridge that gulf.

We're basically fucked.

The tech world has gotten so huge, self-reinforcing, and insulated from reality they can no longer even vaguely look at themselves (and their actions) as others do. They just live on a different planet than most people.

Conversely, the average tech consumer doesn't understand the technology that has slowly taken over their lives, and their designated emissaries to figure it out--politicians, pundits, regulators, journalists--understand it barely better than they do, and have their own agendas.

To say more than generalities for a moment, here's what I think is likely the core problem.

Techies take weird, improbable visions, and make them realities: some BS pitch deck to a VC, mixed with money and people, really does turn into some novel thing.

Most people work inside a legacy industry that's evolved that way over time (usually for good reasons), and they think about the future via some analogy with their present (which is a function of a long-ago past). The interruption that tech will introduce is often hard to grasp.
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Tobie Langel
Tobie Langel
@tobie
Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.

🧵 A thread.

1/18

There's a lot of talk in the open source community about the cost of forking.

2/18

- "Forking is best avoided."

- "Forking is a last resort option."

- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."

3/18

Forking is seen as impractical and extremely expensive.

And that's a Really Good Thing(tm).

It's a forcing function for figuring out solutions that are broadly acceptable across the community.

4/18

The thing is, the cost of forking is mostly a function of three things:

1⃣ the size of the community that you can bring along with you,
2⃣ whether you need to rename your fork (who owns the trademark), and
3⃣ how much infrastructure you need to rebuild.

5/18
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Zed A. Shaw, Writer
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@lzsthw
When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".
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