A Windows Control Panel Retrospective Amidst A Concerning UX Shift

September 3, 2024 by Maya Posch 152 Comments

Once the nerve center of Windows operating systems, the Control Panel and its multitude of applets has its roots in the earliest versions of Windows. From here users could use these configuration applets to control and adjust just about anything in a friendly graphical environment. Despite the lack of any significant criticism from users and with many generations having grown up with its familiar dialogs, it has over the past years been gradually phased out by the monolithic Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based Settings app.

Whereas the Windows control panel features an overview of the various applets – each of which uses Win32 GUI elements like tabs to organize settings – the Settings app is more Web-like, with lots of touch-friendly whitespace, a single navigable menu, kilometers of settings to scroll through and absolutely no way to keep more than one view open at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all.

Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer?

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DEC’s LAN Bridge 100: The Invention Of The Network Bridge

August 27, 2024 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

DEC’s LAN Bridge 100 was a major milestone in the history of Ethernet which made it a viable option for the ever-growing LANs of yesteryear and today. Its history is also the topic of a recent video by [The Serial Port], in which [Mark] covers the development history of this device. We previously covered the LANBridge 100 Ethernet bridge and what it meant as Ethernet saw itself forced to scale from a shared medium (ether) to a star topology featuring network bridges and switches.

Featured in the video is also an interview with [John Reed], a field service network technician who worked at DEC from 1980 to 1998. He demonstrates what the world was like with early Ethernet, with thicknet coax (10BASE5) requiring a rather enjoyable way to crimp on connectors. Even with the relatively sluggish 10 Mbit of thicknet Ethernet, adding an Ethernet store and forward bridge in between two of these networks required significant amounts of processing power due to the sheer number of packets, but the beefy Motorola 68k CPU was up to the task.

To prevent issues with loops in the network, the spanning tree algorithm was developed and implemented, forming the foundations of the modern-day Ethernet LANs, as demonstrated by the basic LAN Bridge 100 unit that [Mark] fires up and which works fine in a modern-day LAN after its start-up procedure. Even if today’s Ethernet bridges and switches got smarter and more powerful, it all started with that first LAN Bridge.

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The Famous Computer Cafe Has Now Been Archived Online

August 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

You might think that TV stations or production houses would be great at archiving, but it’s not always the case. Particularly from the public access perspective. However, if you’re a fan of The Famous Computer Cafe, you’re in luck! The beloved series has now been preserved on The Internet Archive!

If you’re not familiar with the show, it was a radio program broadcast from 1983 to 1986. It was pumped out of a variety of radio stations in southern and central California in the period. The creators making sure to keep a copy of each episode in reel-to-reel tape format. For years, these tapes were tragically lost, until archivist [Kay Savetz] was able to recover some of them from a recent property sale. From there, a GoFundMe paid for digitization, and the show has been placed on The Internet Archive with the blessings of the original creators.

This is quite the cultural victory, particularly when you observe the list of guests on the show. Timothy Leary, Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel, and even Douglas Adams made appearances in the recovered recordings. Sadly, though, not all the tapes have been recovered. Episodes with Gene Roddenberry, Robert Moog, and Ray Bradbury are still lost to time.

If you fancy a listen, 53 episodes presently exist on the archive. Take a trip back in time and hear from some technological visionaries—and futurists—speaking their minds at the very beginning of the microcomputer era! If you find any particularly salient gems, don’t hesitate to drop them on the tip line.

A Field Guide To The North American Substation

August 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Drive along nearly any major road in the United States and it won’t be long before you see evidence of the electrical grid. Whether it’s wooden poles strung along the right of way or a line of transmission towers marching across the countryside in the distance, signs of the grid are never far from view but often go ignored, blending into the infrastructure background and becoming one with the noise of our built environment.

But there’s one part of the electrical grid that, despite being more widely distributed and often relegated to locations off the beaten path, is hard to ignore. It’s the electrical substation, more than 55,000 of which dot the landscape of the US alone. They’re part of a continent-spanning machine that operates as one to move electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s consumed, all within the same instant of time. These monuments of galvanized steel are filled with strange, humming equipment of inscrutable purpose, seemingly operating without direct human intervention. But if you look carefully, there’s a lot of fascinating engineering going on behind those chain-link fences with the forbidding signage, and the arrangement of equipment within them tells an interesting story about how the electrical grid works, and what the consequences are when it doesn’t.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Speedometers

August 22, 2024 by Al Williams 29 Comments

In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly digital and driven by the computer that has to monitor all sorts of things anyway. But how did they work before your car was a rolling computer complex? The electronic speedometer has been around for well over a century and, when you think about it, qualifies as a technlogical marvel.

If you already know how they work, this isn’t a fair question. But if you don’t, think about this. Your dashboard has a cable running into it. The inner part of the cable spins at some rate, which is related to either the car’s transmission or a wheel sensor. How do you make a needle deflect based on the speed?

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The First Mass Produced DRAM Of The Soviet Union

August 21, 2024 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

KE565RU1A (1985) in comparison with the analogue from AMD (1980)

Although the benefits of semiconductor technology were undeniable during the second half the 20th century, there was a clear divide between the two sides of the Iron Curtain. Whilst the First World had access to top-of-the-line semiconductor foundries and engineers, the Second World was having to get by with scraps. Unable to keep up with the frantic pace of the USA’s developments in particular, the USSR saw itself reduced to copying Western designs and smuggling in machinery where possible. A good example of this is the USSR’s first mass-produced dynamic RAM (DRAM), the 565RU1, as detailed by [The CPUShack Museum].

While the West’s first commercially mass-produced DRAM began in 1970 with the Intel 1103 (1024 x 1) with its three-transistor design, the 565RU1 was developed in 1975, with engineering samples produced until the autumn of 1977. This DRAM chip featured a three-transistor design, with a 4096 x 1 layout and characteristics reminiscent of Western DRAM ICs like the Ti TMS4060. It was produced at a range of microelectronics enterprises in the USSR. These included Angstrem, Mezon (Moldova), Alpha (Latvia) and Exciton (Moscow).

Of course, by the second half of the 1970s the West had already moved on to single-transistor, more efficient DRAM designs. Although the 565RU1 was never known for being that great, it was nevertheless used throughout the USSR and Second World. One example of this is a 1985 article (page 2) by [V. Ye. Beloshevskiy], the Electronics Department Chief of the Belorussian Railroad Computer Center in which the unreliability of the 565RU1 ICs are described, and ways to add redundancy to the (YeS1035) computing systems.

Top image: 565RU1 die manufactured in 1981.

Australia Didn’t Invent WiFi, Despite What You’ve Heard

August 20, 2024 by Lewin Day 59 Comments

Wireless networking is all-pervasive in our modern lives. Wi-Fi technology lives in our smartphones, our laptops, and even our watches. Internet is available to be plucked out of the air in virtually every home across the country. Wi-Fi has been one of the grand computing revolutions of the past few decades.

It might surprise you to know that Australia proudly claims the invention of Wi-Fi as its own. It had good reason to, as well— given the money that would surely be due to the creators of the technology. However, dig deeper, and you’ll find things are altogether more complex.

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