These days, paying for TV programming is a fact of life. You pay your cable company or some streaming service and the only question is do you want Apple TV and Hulu or would you rather switch one out for NetFlix? But back in the 1960s, paying for TV seemed unthinkable and was quite controversial. Cable TV systems were rare, and the airwaves were a public resource, so allowing someone to charge to watch TV on the public airwaves was hard to imagine. That was the backdrop behind the Telemeter — an early attempt to monetize TV programming that was more like a pay phone than a modern streaming service.
Rear view of the telemeter and coin box
[Lothar Stern] wrote about the device in the November 1959 issue of Popular Mechanics (see page 220). The device looked like a radio that sat on top of your TV. It added a whopping three pay-TV channels, and inside was a coin box, and — no kidding — a tape punch or recorder. These three channels were carried from a Telemeter studio over what appears to be a dedicated cable strung on existing phone poles.
Of course, TVs with coin boxes were nothing new. But those TVs were found in public places, airports, and hotels. The money was simply to turn the TV on for a set amount of time. This was different. A set-top box unscrambled channels delivered over a dedicated cable. Seems like old hat today, but a revolutionary idea in 1959.
The temptation to “take the money and run” was apparently too much for the leadership of the AlphV ransomware crime ring. You may have heard of this group as being behind the breach of Change Healthcare, and causing payment problems for nearly the entire US Healthcare system. And that hack seems to be key to what’s happened this week.
It’s known that a $22 million payment made it through the bitcoin maze to the AlphV wallet on the 1st. It’s believed that this is a payment from Change Healthcare to recover ransomed files. An important detail here is that AlphV is a ransomware-as-a-service provider, and the actual hacking is done by “affiliates”, who use that service, and AlphV handles the infrastructure, maintaining the actual malware, and serving as a payment processor. That last one is key here.
A couple days after that big payment landed in the AlphV account, a seizure notice went up on the AlphV TOR site, claiming that it had been taken down by the FBI and associated agencies. There was something a bit odd about it, though. See, the FBI did seize the AlphV Tor site back in December. The seizure notice this time was an exact copy, as if someone had just done a “save page as”, and posted the copy.
There is precedent for a ransomware group to close up shop and disappear after hitting a big score. The disruption AlphV enabled in the US health care system painted a big target on them, and it didn’t take a tactical genius to realize it might be good to lay low for a while. Pocketing the entire $22 million ransom probably didn’t hurt either. The particularly nasty part is that the affiliate that actually pulled off the attack still claims to have four terabytes of sensitive data, and no incentive to not release it online. It’s not even entirely clear that Change Healthcare actually received a decryption key for their data. You do not want to deal with these people.
Solar power is already cheap and effective, and it’s taking on a larger role in supplying energy needs all over the world. The thing about humanity, though, is that we always want more! Too much, you say? It’s never enough!
The problem is that the sun only outputs so much energy per unit of area on Earth, and solar cells can only be so efficient thanks to some fundamental physical limits. However, there’s a way to get around that—with the magic of tandem solar cells!
What do the HP-1000 and the DEC VAX 11/730 have in common with the video games Tempest and Battlezone? More than you might think. All of those machines, along with many others from that time period, used AM2900-family bit slice CPUs.
The bit slice CPU was a very successful product that could only have existed in the 1970s. Today, if you need a computer system, there are many CPUs and even entire systems on a chip to choose from. You can also get many small board-level systems that would probably do anything you want. In the 1960s, you had no choices at all. You built circuit boards with gates on the using transistors, tubes, relays, or — maybe — small-scale IC gates. Then you wired the boards up.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that it would be great to offer people a CPU chip like you can get today. The problem is the semiconductor technology of the day wouldn’t allow it — at least, not with any significant amount of resources. For example, the Motorola MC14500B from 1977 was a one-bit microprocessor, and while that had its uses, it wasn’t for everyone or everything.
The Answer
The answer was to produce as much of a CPU as possible in a chip and make provisions to use multiple chips together to build the CPU. That’s exactly what AMD did with the AM2900 family. If you think about it, what is a CPU? Sure, there are variations, but at the core, there’s a place to store instructions, a place to store data, some way to pick instructions, and a way to operate on data (like an ALU — arithmetic logic unit). Instructions move data from one place to another and set the state of things like I/O devices, ALU operations, and the like.
In an era dominated by broadband and wireless cellular networks, it might come as a surprise to many that dial-up internet services still exist in the United States. This persistence is not a mere relic of nostalgia — but a testament to the diverse and uneven nature of internet infrastructure across the country.
Yes, dial-up internet, with those screechy, crackly tones, remains a useful tool in areas where modern, high-speed internet services are either unaffordable or unavailable. Subscriber numbers are tiny, but some plough on and access the Internet by the old ways, not the new.
There was a time when the gulf between a new computer and one a decade or more old was so large as to be insurmountable; when a Pentium was the chip to have an older computer had a 16-bit 8086 or 286. Here in the 2020s, though, that divide is less stark. While a machine from the mid-2000s may no longer be considered quick, it can still run modern and useful software.
The problem facing the owner of such older hardware though is that as operating systems advance their requirements and eclipse their machine’s capabilities. A perfectly good machine becomes less useful, not because the tasks it needs to be used for are beyond it, but because the latest OS is built with higher-spec hardware in mind. The subject of today’s test is an operating system designed to make the best of older hardware, and it’s one with a pedigree. Damn Small Linux, or DSL, first appeared in 2005 as a tiny distro for the old machines of the day, and after a long hiatus it’s back with a 2024 edition.
I found myself in Milton Keynes, UK, a little while ago, with a few hours to spare. What could I do but rock over to the National Museum of Computing and make a nuisance of myself? I have visited many times, but this time, I was armed with a voice recorder and a mission to talk to everybody who didn’t run away fast enough. There is so much to see and do, that what follows is a somewhat truncated whistle-stop tour to give you, the dear readers, a flavour of what other exhibits you can find once you’ve taken in the usual sights of the Colossus and the other famous early machines.
Click this image to play in your browser.
We expect you’ve heard of the classic text adventure game Zork. Well before that, there was the ingeniously titled “Adventure”, which is reported to be the first ‘interactive fiction’ text adventure game. Created initially by [Will Crowther], who at the time was a keen cave explorer and D & D player, and also the guy responsible for the firmware of the original Arpanet routers, the game contains details of the cave systems of Mammoth and Flint Ridge in Kentucky.
The first version was a text-based simulation of moving around the cave system, and after a while of its release onto the fledgling internet, it was picked up and extended by [Don Woods], and the rest is history. If you want to read more, the excellent site by [Rick Adams] is a great resource that lets you play along in your browser. Just watch out for the dwarfs. (Editor’s note: “plugh“.) During my visit, I believe the software was running on the room-sized ICL2966 via a VT01 terminal, but feel free to correct me, as I can’t find any information to the contrary.
A little further around the same room as the ICL system, there is a real rarity: a Marconi TAC or Transistorised Automatic Computer. This four-cabinet minicomputer was designed in the late 1950s as a ‘fast real-time computer’, is one of only five made, and this example was initially installed at Wylfa nuclear power station in Anglesey, intended as a monitoring and alarm system controller. These two machines were spare units for the three built for the Swedish air defence system, which were no longer required. Commissioned in 1968, this TAC ran continuously until 2004, which could make it one the longest continuously running computers in the world. The TAC has 4 kwords of 20-bit core memory, a paper tape reader for program loading and a magnetic drum storage memory. Unusually, for this period, the TAC has a micro-coded CISC architecture, utilising a whole cabinet worth of diode-matrix ROM boards to code the instruction set. This enabled the TAC to have a customizable instruction set. As standard, the TACÂ shipped with trigonometric and other transcendental functions as individual instructions. This strategy minimized the program size and allowed more complex programs to fit in the memory.
