Hello and welcome to my website - I should really try to join one of those Web 1.0 webrings, does anyone run one anymore?
A new post?
(date 2022-09-17/18)
This website is definitely not compliant oops. Tonight I had some... thoughts about the state of public/commercial buildings. I posted them elsewhere but now they are here too!!
Something I've noticed is that commercial and public interiors are not really memorialised like public ones.
We have full houses preserved by National Trusts and other organisations from every decade of last century. Public buildings, on the other hand, are sold off and only the facade kept, while commercial buildings are regularly completely scrapped, renovated to death. Did the Sydney GPO or the Dept. of Education building need to be turned into luxury hotels when the city is full to bursting of them? Modern minimalism destroying nice wood panelling in favour of plain white walls is another bugbear of mine even if it does admittedly brighten up the space.
Question from me: where are the fandoms for these public and commercial interiors of last century? Architecture and domestic design from every decade have huge followings, where is the enthusiasm for the places where life was and is lived, the milk bars, the banks with lines halfway out the door to cash cheques, the sorting offices where strong young people throw sacks of hand-sorted mail into the back of post trucks, the telegraph offices making the world seem smaller? Supposedly of course a lot of these places have been made redundant by online living (when do we see anyone on a soap-box in the Domain anymore?) but I am less sure.
For me the 1980s facades are probably the best, along with those really old holdouts of pre-war design. Mechanical-automatic wall calendars and the rest of it all, places now rapidly being renovated out of existence to make way for more modern minimalism with no neat curves and no colours.
Anyway... the TEC was finished a long time ago, works pretty well honestly, for such a low-spec machine. I upgraded it to be a bit more flash, so it has an 8x8 LED display AND a 16x2 character display!!! I'm really living it up as you can tell.
Tell me what you think, mailto link is at the bottom of the page. All my best, speak to you soon!
The TEC-1 computer
(date 2020-11-30)
Over the past few weeks, I have been gathering components in order to build the TEC-1 microcomputer (model D).
Its specs are as follows:
- 4kB ROM
- 2kB M
- 6-digit display
- Variable-speed Z80 (vaguely 500kHz)
Hopefully it will all go well! Speak to you once the PCB arrives.
An initial post
(date 2020-10-02)
It
is a lovely spring afternoon, well now I suppose one would call it the evening, and I am set up with a book,
some tea and cake, and if not for fear of mosquitos I would probably be outside looking at the stars. We're
finally starting to really see the effects of lengthening days down here, and so the evenings stretch on and on.
It'd be partying weather I think, but for the present situation. Hope you all keep well.
Site in progress:
last update 2022-09-19.
This page best viewed at 80 columns in a
terminal connected to the Super Dimensional Fortress networked computing system.
ps this page uses hand-typed HTML because I am a masochist.
CONTACT ME! email a.ernest@sdf.org