The AlphaStation 500 is a workstation from Digital, circa 1996. Mine is a 500 MHz model and has an Alpha 21164A processor (aka EV56). And the way it boots is weird.

On your common-or-garden PC, there has always been some kind of ROM chip. It holds a piece of firmware known as the BIOS. This ROM chip is available at a well-known location in the processor’s address space (remembering that any PC processor boots up in 16-bit, 8088 compatible mode, with a 1 MiB address space, just like an IBM PC 5150) and the processor just starts executing code in it after reset.

The Alpha (or at least this AlphaStation 500 - although I think they mostly worked like this) is different.

There is a serial ROM (SROM) on the main board, and after reset, some logic internal to the CPU kicks in to generate a clock pulse. This drives an (external) counter, which provides consecutive addresses into the ROM. The 1-bit output of the ROM is sent into the processor, in sync with the clock pulse. The Alpha processor stores this data in its internal Instruction Cache. Once the code load is complete, the processor then executes the code, from its cache. The code is just enough to get the processor to configure its external memory bus, and find a memory-mapped parallel ROM, which it will then hand-over execution to.

But wait, how do you find a 1-bit wide ROM chip? Aren’t most ROM chips at least 8 bits wide? Yes, they are.

Well that’s certainly an interesting take on booting. The rest of the post is about trying to decipher an SROM dump in order to work out why a system might not be booting. It even includes some DEC Alpha assembly—that’s not something you see everyday.

Mihai Parparita:

Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X, with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that era.

As Mihai notes they take a while to boot, but are fairly usable one up and running. It was a great blast from the past to poke around these this evening. There’s some familiar apps on the Infinite HD—a good reminder of how many great indie apps were available from really early on.

Mac OS X was what got me back into the Mac after a few years on Windows 98. I started with Public Beta and continued with each new release until 2017.

I was surprised to be reminded of how quickly the UI evolved. I knew that it was iterated upon with every major new version, but even by 10.3 here it’s looking quite clean. Not sure the brushed metal holds up but the refined version of Aqua is pretty great.

Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

• Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white [e-Paper] display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
• Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour [e-Paper] display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

I passed by the original Pebble watches, dismissing them as weak compared to the Apple Watch. However, in the years since I’ve come to have much more appreciation for hardware that affords its owner large amounts of customisability, especially when paired with open-source firmware. The new rePebble watches are both of these things, so I have pre-ordered a Core 2 Duo in white.

Eric also has a related post setting expectations for iOS users:

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared - there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

It’s things like this that help make my switch to Android last year feel worth it.

Neut is a functional programming language with static memory management.

Its key features include:

• Full λ-calculus support
• Predictable automatic memory management
• The absence of annotations to the type system when achieving both of the above

Neut doesn’t use GCs or regions. Instead, it takes a type-directed approach to handle resources.

This looks quite full-featured and complete with documentation, formatter, LSP server, and a handful of sample applications written in it. It’s good to see another language offering some of the benefits of Rust, but potentially easier to learn and write.

I haven’t been able to try it myself yet as I’m travelling with my Windows ARM laptop and there’s no Windows support at the moment. Also the pre-compiled binaries appear to need glibc, so it doesn’t run in my Chimera Linux WSL instance. It’s implemented in Haskell, but ghc hasn’t been packaged for Chimera, so can’t build from source either.

Peter Marheine:

I often find that imposed limitations make it easier to create things: it’s easy to aim for perfection if you can expend as much effort as you like on something and thus end up with nothing that you’ll ever call good enough to share. Over on Cemetech in the final months of 2023, we held a programming contest: write a screensaver, any kind of screensaver. I’m not often one to do any kind of competitive programming, but as a prompt for a constrained project this was a good one for me. As a result, I wrote a program I called WEB1999, that won second place.

Inspired heavily by the Realistic Internet Simulator (“Kill the Pop-ups”), WEB1999 invokes the spirit of pop-up advertising and Internet culture around the turn of the millennium in the form of a program that runs on Texas Instruments’ TI-84+ CE color-screen graphing calculators.

Some of the earliest programs I wrote were on my TI-83 in high school, so I have a soft spot for TI graphing calculators. In fact, my TI-89 from university still lives on my desk and sees regular use.

This WEB1999 project combines nostalgia for TI graphing calculators, and the early web, what’s not to love.