ULA1 nextgen idea...

Nagging hardware related question? Post here!
User avatar
NormanDunbar
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2251
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:04 am
Location: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by NormanDunbar »

Yes, one could use LoRa etc, but that's being used by government for surveillance implants over your flat, office etc.
Right! In that case then, where's the tin foil? I need to make a hat! ;)


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
Derek_Stewart
Font of All Knowledge
Posts: 3929
Joined: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:40 am
Location: Sunny Runcorn, Cheshire, UK

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by Derek_Stewart »

Hi,

A nice specification, which I agree with most of the points, except, the QL Network, I know many people who connect QL-QL-Q68-QXL-QPC2 with this networking system.

What about future expansion?

The specification while good and nearly concise, is missing a few points that define a QL.

Personally, I would like all the things defined, but objectly, people who buy the QL, want to tinker and experiment with it.

I would not call the Raspberry PI rubbish, with over 36 Million sales, are they all wrong wrong.


Regards,

Derek
User avatar
NormanDunbar
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2251
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:04 am
Location: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by NormanDunbar »

I'm interested in this:
Which makes it attract every moron to use it for purposes that it shouldn't be used for.
It sometimes painful to watch some of these "projects".
Surely, if someone finds that a Raspberry Pi (or indeed, anything at all) is usable/suitable for "purposes that it shouldn't be" then that's a good thing? As opposed to making someone a moron?

Define, for the sake of your argument, what the Raspberry Pi is not suitable for, because to me, it's a small, single board Linux computer. Computer being the operative word, it's suitable for a multitude of things and while possibly not a complete desktop replacement, it's certainly a fun bit of kit which reminds me of my early computing days with a ZX-81 and a 16K Spectrum. I can even turn LEDs on and off almost at will with it!

At least, nobody has put BASIC on it, have they (other than BBC Basic of course)! ;)

Just wondering why you thing people are morons for finding uses for a bit of kit.


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
User avatar
Pr0f
QL Wafer Drive
Posts: 1298
Joined: Thu Oct 12, 2017 9:54 am

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by Pr0f »

I think you may want to go look at some of the stuff you've been posting on here - talk about left of field and adventures in wonderland!

I like the idea of a plugin replacement for the ZX8301 - we may well need it soon, if it can do more than just the original video modes - that's even better - but perhaps put some realistic boundaries around it or create a new thread for what sounds like some crazy idea of a mixed vendor machine that never was but could have been...

It becomes difficult to follow the threads after a while because they veer so violently off on tangents. :roll: :roll:


User avatar
Pr0f
QL Wafer Drive
Posts: 1298
Joined: Thu Oct 12, 2017 9:54 am

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by Pr0f »

Well - I think a canned beef shortage is very much a possibility in the current time stream...

I am not a moderator either

I would imagine most peoples skulls are probably too thick to allow reasonable transmission of RF waves - unless you could fire mass neuron storm to amplify the signal enough to escape the cranial cavity

I decided not to order the reply in any way - as I was simply testing my memory of the key points of your last post - which was also Off topic.

Back on topic - ULA1 - ZX8301 - did we get anywhere with a list of requirements / wish list for it that relate to it's function as Video producer / Address space decoder? I think lumping in additional I/O functions is probably not such a good idea.

It also occurred to me that the position of the Zx8301 is right next to the CPU - so a plugin board that fit's both sockets would easily get around several of the issues about additional address lines and better decoding... - sort of a heart and lungs replacement for the processor / memory and video.


User avatar
NormanDunbar
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2251
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:04 am
Location: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by NormanDunbar »

Brane2 wrote:
NormanDunbar wrote: Define, for the sake of your argument, what the Raspberry Pi is not suitable for, because to me, it's a small, single board Linux computer. Computer being the operative word, it's suitable for a multitude of things and while possibly not a complete desktop replacement, it's certainly a fun bit of kit which reminds me of my early computing days with a ZX-81 and a 16K Spectrum. I can even turn LEDs on and off almost at will with it!
Cheers,
Norm.
How about taking this in incremental steps ?
Start making OT contributions with real value in the theme that you are supposed to moderate and then we'll see where this leads us ? ;)
I was only asking, sorry if I went a little OT there, by asking a question about your posting on this thread. never mid, I'll go back to sleep now and give myself a slap on the wrists.

Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
User avatar
NormanDunbar
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2251
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:04 am
Location: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
Contact:

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by NormanDunbar »

If it works, it would surely delight Sir Clive.
One thing I learned recently about Sir Clive, once a project is designed and into production, he's off onto the next one, and doesn't really care much at all about what came before.

It's almost like getting really excited about having kids and then not giving a sh!t about them after they are born, I suppose.

Hope it works, regardless of Sir Clive.


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
User avatar
bwinkel67
QL Wafer Drive
Posts: 1187
Joined: Thu Oct 03, 2019 2:09 am

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by bwinkel67 »

NormanDunbar wrote:
If it works, it would surely delight Sir Clive.
One thing I learned recently about Sir Clive, once a project is designed and into production, he's off onto the next one, and doesn't really care much at all about what came before.

It's almost like getting really excited about having kids and then not giving a sh!t about them after they are born, I suppose.

Hope it works, regardless of Sir Clive.


Cheers,
Norm.
Technology is a tough area since there is need to fix broken things but also a desire to update old things. When I had my own business for the Apple Macintosh, where I basically added QL functionality to the early Mac, I never liked the idea of upgrading my software. I did it once because a distributor asked me to, but mostly I treated it more like art than a commodity. So I understand where Clive is coming from. His mindset was to create the next thing. I think one shortcoming was that his focus wasn't on a single technological area (i.e. computing) but rather on more than that (like transportation). I admired that in him but unlike Steve Jobs, who had laser focus, its not good for business.

Me personally, I loved creating the things I did, am still proud of them, and happy people now share them freely, but had no interest in upgrading and updating them constantly (though that's a great business model). So I would say it's less about abandoning things and not caring about them, rather just a different mindset of wanting to, like an artist, create new things but still being proud of the past things you created. Imagine if art were like software (or hardware), where each year an updated painting of the Mona Lisa came out.

I use Windows 7 and skipped Windows 8. I looked at Windows 10 and tried to see how closely I could get it to work like Windows 7. Now Windows 11 is coming out and I need to figure out when I "have" to finally upgrade to Windows 10 so I'm not too far behind. It was the same with transitioning from Windows XP to Windows 7. I don't get excited when I hear a new OS is coming out, I just sigh and groan. Same with Linux...I mean the way I use either Ubuntu or RedHat is no different than the way I used Unix in the 80's and 90's. I'm fine with hardware getting faster and so I realize that software needs to be modified and updated to work on the new hardware, but OS updates aren't just about that and I've always found that part tedious. But where would Microsoft be (my former employer) if they never introduced a new OS...that's the business they are in.


User avatar
bwinkel67
QL Wafer Drive
Posts: 1187
Joined: Thu Oct 03, 2019 2:09 am

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by bwinkel67 »

Brane2 wrote:
bwinkel67 wrote: Me personally, I loved creating the things I did, am still proud of them, and happy people now share them freely, but had no interest in upgrading and updating them constantly (though that's a great business model).
WRT to avoiding upgrades in SW land, I find this totally unrealistic. Totally incomprehensible to me.
After all these years, I can't think of ONE piece of software that didn't sorely need an upgrade.

Your Win7 example is totally killing your case. How many upgrades and updates did it need ? Countless.
What would happen if it was baked in ROM media that you can't easily change ?

ALL the programs, especially ones that I ever really needed and depended upon were cr*p in first version.

Back OT: this is also the reason why all the new stuff (HW and SW) has to be publicly open for modifications, development and updates.

If someone invests significant time using your program and ties significant data to it, what is s/he supposed to do if/when you decide to pull Clive on them and pursue other avenues ?
I'm in the process right now of installing Windows 7 on my wife's machine that had its disk fail after running for 5 years. On all my installations, the first thing I do is turn updates off. I've never used updates on any of my machines and don't have any compatibility issues (I run the latest version of Chrome as well as other apps with no problem). The nice things about not using updates is you don't eventually experience a system slow down.

I'm not concerned about any security holes because part of that is mitigated in how you use your machine. Note that I do work in the security field as part of my research so I'm not oblivious to security issues. I've actually been working on implementing DES (the older Data Encryption Standard which is still used in some hardware) on the QL in Digital 'C' SE as a fun project, though with school back in full session that project, among many, has been pushed to the back burner -- maybe spring...AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) may be a bit too resource intensive but DES is an easy algorithm. I had my students run it by hand for a block they had to encrypt...just a bunch of bit twiddling.


User avatar
bwinkel67
QL Wafer Drive
Posts: 1187
Joined: Thu Oct 03, 2019 2:09 am

Re: ULA1 nextgen idea...

Post by bwinkel67 »

Brane2 wrote:
bwinkel67 wrote: Technology is a tough area since there is need to fix broken things but also a desire to update old things. When I had my own business for the Apple Macintosh, where I basically added QL functionality to the early Mac, I never liked the idea of upgrading my software. I did it once because a distributor asked me to, but mostly I treated it more like art than a commodity. So I understand where Clive is coming from.
That _could_ be some ratinoal POV if Clive's things have had actually worked.

There is old saying "Masters make excercizes and excersizes make masters".
As old fighting (Myamoto Musashi?) legends have oobserved, ti takes at least 10.000 painstalking hours to master any art.

If you just go around, making mess of every project and then bailing out, you might be doing more harm than good, to yourself and tho others.

In principle there is nothing wrong in landing on your a** every now and then. To me, not doing that would mean that you are not really stretching your capabilities.
But it can't be endpoint of your every project and your enterpreneurial art shulodn't be feeling the right moment to catapult out of your "life-changing adventures".

FIne, they effed up microdrives etc, who wouldn't ?
But did they ever got them right ?
Had they ever got to the point "OK. We are now comfortably controllign the matter of magnetic recording ?"

HAdf they done that for QL ?
Or C5 ?
Did he EVER reveal anything fundamental about EV transport ?
After C5 debacle, were there some really great leftover ideas and technical solutions that were to be kept for further projects ?

I'm really not trying to piss over his name, especially now, but I feel going the other way and praising his technical accomplishments to the stratosphere would be eoulogizing totally different man.
Also,. how many of those were done by him ?
Seriously, could he redesign part of the Spectrum if his life depended on it ?

There is no grave sin in making mistake or series of mistakes. Development is full of it.
Actually, they are part of the "game terrain".

Quite the opposite IMHO - lying about them in the name of some "sacred" cause is denigrating the whole art.
You have to call a spade a spade here. No way around it.
It's all in the eye of the beholder. Many things Clive created have very strong support almost 40 years later, so I wouldn't call his work a mess or failure. I get you don't like many things on the QL, but the things you complain about actually draw me to that machine. I found it cool in 1990 when I got it and I find it even cooler now, over 30 years later -- i.e. like the microdrives, thought they were the coolest thing back then when everyone else had 3 1/2 inch floppies, and think they are even cooler now. You can have an argument on this at nausea but in the end its like arguing with someone why vanilla is better than strawberry ice cream...kind of pointless.

If you look at what could have been and why Sinclair Research didn't become Apple or Microsoft, then sure, it was a failure. But it would be curious how many of us would devote time and energy to a forum, YouTube channels, websites to follow that. I mean, personally, I don't follow Microsoft (other than to see how my options are doing) or Apple these days at all. In fact, I'm so disappointed in the modern Apple that I recently put my 5 year old MacBook Pro on a shelf and got out an old Compaq Core 2 Duo machine because I couldn't find an easy-to-use, equivalent Paint program (Paint Brush comes close but kind of sucks). And then there is TextEdit, the furthest thing from a text editor on the planet. It literally could not open a text file that had some embedded <HTML> tags without it going into smart mode (the old 90's Mac TextEdit is what Notepad is now and that's what it should be, just edit ASCII text and stop trying to be a mini browser...so annoying). Yes, I'm sure I could spend time finding something that worked (Atom, BBEdit) but why can't the default software on it work well?! How did Windows beat the Mac now at what it used to be good at (i.e. Paint).


Post Reply