For no reason at all, the bsky that I set up as a continuation of my work here is linceight.bsky.social. It’s currently empty and I’m not following anyone but would appreciate follows / recs from vintage tech & computer history people to find things over there.

May Bradford Shockley - Wikipedia

Sequence Control Mechanism, Mark I computer, photograph, ca. 1945 - Harvard Library Hollis Images.

I received this SCAM, and reported it to Tumbler.

Tumblr verified it was a scam, but NOT BY TUMBLR.

Tumblr has since removed this scam account.

Thanks, (REAL) Tumblr Support! 👍🙂

Technology Is Great…When It Works

Automation has been the goal of enterprises for as long as machines have existed. The idea being that if we have machines to do our work for us, we won’t have to. Never mind that it doesn’t actually work that way. Because no matter how well designed a machine is, it cannot do better than the human mind for things like judgment or creativity. Or for catching flaws. A single mistake in an automated production line can rack up numerous blemished copies before it’s caught, where a human mistake can be caught by the next person or handful of people who looks at it. Quality control exists for a reason. But we’ve automated that, too.

Once upon a time, software required a physical copy in order to run. There was no internet to download from, and no installation wizard. One had to go to the store, buy a copy of whatever, and install it by hand. Some programs took knowledge and skill to run properly, leading to the formation of IT as a department and the common view of computer nerds as having a particular type of aesthetic. I remember those days; I was one of them. (Still am, truth be told. That blue hair in my icon isn’t there as a joke. Neither is the fact that my icon is an avatar image and not my real face.)

As a child on our first family computer I learned HTML right alongside learning how to navigate a program with the arrow keys and control+shift commands. Because there was no mouse. The monitor was 8-bit monochrome (green on black). The disc drive held a five and a quarter inch floppy. It was 1984. I watched the evolution of devices from that Apple IIC to today’s iPhones in real time. I’m well aware that I am an endangered species when it comes to true computer literacy.

Because all of that changed with the advent of automation in digital environments. For a while, one still had to go to the store to buy a program, but now installing it was a matter of clicking ‘Next’ when prompted by the installation wizard. No further oversight or specialized knowledge was required. And then came the internet. ‘Throw away your discs’ was plastered in the advertisements. Downloading became the way to get programs. There’s an app for that! Software-as-a-service was born. We no longer owned a physical copy; we were renting it in digitized form. Licensing agreements, keys, accounts and passwords, these all became the new standard. We now have an entire generation of people who’ve never known anything different.

Where am I going with this? Well, with that nascent internet automation came the other side of the coin: exploitation.

Let’s fast forward to my cyber news feed of this morning and the three separate articles regarding backdoor vulnerabilities and weak password generation by LLM’s posted there. At their heart, they are all about automation.

• Microsoft has a report on a coordinated campaign that uses trojanised Next.js repositories disguised as job assessments to compromise developers. One of the vectors is automatic startup of files when folders are opened during development stages.
• Researchers from Irregular did a study on AI-generated passwords. Several types of LLM chatbots were given the prompt to create a strong password, and while they did individually, repeated prompting led to the discovery that they follow similar patterns in terms of actual letters and symbols used. Ultimately, the passwords are weaker than they appear, because that pattern can be deciphered and cracked.
• And finally, Socket Threat Research posted about a Go module that impersonates a widely used legitimate library while backdooring ReadPassword to capture credentials, which it then sends back to the threat actor to initiate command-and-control. Go’s security team is aware of the problem and has placed a block on the proxy module so it has lower exposure to the public, but that does nothing for the damage stemming from the already harvested data.

Automation has become so ingrained and embedded that mitigating its issues is less costly and time-consuming than actually reversing the trajectory of having machines do all the work for us. Regardless of the fact that they make more work for us. I miss the days when I had to physically install a program and didn’t have to worry about it expiring or being hacked. But without that evolution, I wouldn’t have a job. Yes, it’s a conundrum. Automation has changed our cultures, our media, even our educational standards. It’s amazing how different the digital landscape is after just 40 years. The convenience is hard to argue, as are the innovations. But are we really better off for it?

Posted, 2/27/26

I took my DLCC website’s content down last Halloween. Microsoft continues to attempt to hack that nonexistent content and look for DLCC WordPress accounts that have never existed. I don’t get what their fascination is with my (long removed) DLCC content.

Before removing my site’s content from the Web, I made local backups of my previous full website containing over 26,000 files. These local backups do not reside in the cloud or on a network and are inaccessible online.

So, Microsoft ID10TS, keep looking for things you will never find… 😆

“fff” to you, too, Microsoft… 😁

ALT

0.4 mm is definitely too thick, and the 0.1 mm looks like a nightmare to deal with. The 0.2 mm seems fine though.

I ordered 0.3 mm and 0.25 mm. One of those should be more workable.

“When you are done, remember, libertarians are people who think they sprung from their own asshole, the free market is a plot to exploit your sorry ass, and all the real elite programmers are wobblies.”

Craig Brozefsky via a 1999 USENET post. Archived on the ratpoison WM page.

Thought some of you might like that one, tumblr.

I ordered 0.1 mm, 0.2 mm, and 0.4 mm enameled wire. I’m hoping the 0.2 mm and 0.4 mm pair well enough that the cores sit loosely on the junctions, but the 1mm should work, if the joint is too tight. Though, if the measurements of the cores provided by the seller are accurate, it shouldn’t be an issue.

I have no way to butt weld such fine wire to a steel needle, the way they would have done in the before times. However, we have fancy CA glues and epoxies now (not really new, at all, but they’re much more available). Surely modern material science can help me here, somehow.

ALT

Look at all that memory!

Visited the centre for computing history in Cambridge yesterday. Kudos to my patient husband who put up with me going off non stop about the exhibits. A way larger selection than I expected, including a huge silicon graphics computer and several of the BBC micros made by Acorn.

Visited the centre for computing history in Cambridge yesterday. Kudos to my patient husband who put up with me going off non stop about the exhibits. A way larger selection than I expected, including a huge silicon graphics computer and several of the BBC micros made by Acorn.

Experiments in Motion Graphics (Video, John Whitney Sr., 1968)

You can watch it here.

There’s so much that I want to talk about, but a lot of it requires some amount of background knowledge to really understand, and it’s hard for me to pick a singular thing to start with.

I wish I knew what others would be interested in learning about. I could go on for hours about programming, Linux, OS design, computer history, and all sorts of obscure, technical knowledge, but I have no idea where to start.

I’d ask what everyone wants to see, but I already know that I don’t have the reach to get a real answer. My head is filled with information that I’d like to be able to share, but I have no clue how to organize it for others to be able to understand. It’s like trying to give order to blades of grass in a field.

No cheating, please! Answer the trivia question to the best of your ability, then check below the cut! Please do not give away answers in comments or tags!

Answer below:

The world’s first webcam was set up to monitor the coffee pot in the computer lab at Cambridge University.

SOURCE

Game developer and occasional artist ❧ Freshly brewed games

In progress:

Dive into the world of your very own PC’s grandparents with Mainframe Men! Meet the handsome personifications of iconic computers like ENIAC as you explore the museum in this visual novel.

You’ve won a VIP ticket to the Computer History Museum’s new exhibits. Soon, they’ll show you just how interactive they really are…

Store page links [including Demo available to play now!]

Steam: Mainframe Men

Itch.io: Mainframe Men

went to the computer museum and saw the noogler

#HackerManifesto #CyberSecurity #1980s

The Hacker Manifesto - 8 January 1986

And the adventure continues! 👍

I have added Scripture Stories (2011, Win32 & Macintosh) to my digital and physical DLCC legacy software archives.

DLCC’s first preserved title for 2026!

And the preservation continues! 👍