FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

(logo credit, with modifications by @[email protected])

founded 5 months ago

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Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?

When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about "artificial life" — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like "when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant," I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I thought the sounds the floppy disk drive made as it loaded my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS (that made Doom work with my 4 MB of RAM) sounded like a pretty rad beat.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

we need to bring back storage with distinctive noises! it’s why I’m keeping the floppy drive in my Amiga even though all its data is probably coming from its accelerator’s SD card

I semi-recently set up a load of enterprise hard drives in my office and the sound they make on access makes me weirdly nostalgic — the drives are overbuilt so the internals are heavier than normal, and they’re nitrogen-filled, so they clunk and buzz a lot louder than most modern hard drives. and weirdly enough, they were a lot louder for their first 24 hours of runtime (maybe something to do with the nitrogen shifting around inside during shipping?) which made them sound exactly like early 90s hard drives

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

that sounds neat, I haven't heard any noises out of new spinnies I've dealt with lately, although sample size 3 in 5y

(the only other spinnies are the wd pocket-sized series, and they're just boring whirr)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

ah the music of the spheres (or at least ball bearings)!

PS: I remembered hearing about this thing a looong time ago. This convo reminded me of it, and it has become something amazing.

The Floppotron 3.0 Computer Hardware Orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCXRerqaJI