Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair is the site of an electronics author known for cookbooks, PostScript, and hydrogen energy writing.
HN commenters remember him fondly after his death, praising his TTL and CMOS cookbooks as accessible, lasting technical writing, and his PostScript work.
We humans have an uncanny ability to reshape our lives to meet the demands of our intellectual and physical creations. Hence: obeying the needs of cell phones, cars, POS software, airplanes, pretty much everything. It's like asking a fish about water.
Few of us do anything more creative than what you could do with Wordstar on CP/M, and many writers could barely fill a 250 meg disk drive.
But we adapt!
Now, I'm not knocking the genuine benefits of technology. Having missed my Mom at SFO long ago and having no way to contact her until she showed up at my place via a taxi, I love these gizmos. And there was no cell phone lot before cell phones.
Compare the experience of being an individual, with unique knowledge, experience, neural "wiring" and emotions to observe, experience, interact with and contribute to society - with an amalgam of everyone's knowledge, experience, processing and emotions (as they can be expressed in worlds or art)
I liken it to cat food. Cats may like chicken, liver and tuna, so some genius figured out "if they like the three, why not blend them so they can be happy at every meal?"
I love to interact with my daughter and son-in-law, who are amazingly and wonderfully diverse! If I take landscape photos, they take underwater critter photos. If I cook Italian, they cook Indian.
If and when I search the web, I am either looking for odd images that I can GIMP up for fun, or (being older now) when I get that "5 second lag" trying to remember some name…
I agree that 32-bit chips (and decent instruction sets) make everything much easier.
You wouldn't necessarily have to interpret G-code on the 8-bit microcontroller itself, although it's about the same difficulty as interpreting BASIC on it. Keep in mind that keeping the motors of a 3-D printer busy only requires a few speed changes per second, maybe 10 at most. By contrast, the 8051 in an Epson MX-80 printed about 80 characters per second and had to actuate the 9 hammers in the print head with a new set of voltages 9 times per character, for a total of about 700 deadlines per second.
When Don Lancaster was trying to figure out how to build 3-D printers and other "flutterwumpers" in the 01990s, his idea was to use a bigger computer to rasterize curves into a set of one-byte step commands that would be interpreted by an 8-bit microcontroller, for example in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf, as I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080682. His first explanation of this concept may have been his July 01993 "Hardware Hacker" column in Electronics Now (previously in Radio Electronics and Modern Electronics) https://www.tinaja.com/glib/hack66.pdf where he's exploring the possibilities opened up by Parallax's BASIC Stamp:
> One potential use for the BASIC Stamp is shown in figure four. I’ve been doing a lot of work with the stupendously great PostScript general purpose computer language. In fact, this is the only language I use for all of my electronic…
Don Lancaster passed away in 2023 at 83.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster
Don Lancaster has died (gilaherald.com)
https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/
HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595
Woody Baker was one of his biggest fans on comp.lang.postscript!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546584
DonHopkins on July 1, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Don Lancaster has died
I have always been a huge fan of Don Lancaster's wizardly writing about PostScript, who not only regularly published in Computer Shopper, but also generously ran a free PostScript help line at his own personal phone number. But Woody Baker was by far his biggest most enthusiastic fan of all (and highly eccentric in personality and coding style), and he would regularly extol and evangelize Don Lancaster's virtues and ideas on comp.lang.postscript.
Once around March 4 1990, I gave Woody Baker some feedback on his comp.lang.postscript faq, including the suggesting that he might consider leaving Don Lancaster's personal phone number out of it, but he replied:
>Again, I want to thank you for your contributions. You and D. Cortesi have been most helpful. The two of you gave me very in depth feedback. I have moved almost all the editorializing to the end. I have moved the style stuff to the end. As for DON LANCASTER, I left his phone number in. Don publishes it regularly in the computer shopper, as a free PostScript help line. He is…
Who cares about mass except NASA? H2 is terrible by volume, a liter of gasoline has more hydrogen in it than a liter of liquid H2 and the gasoline is a lot more safe.
Some little PDFs about the hurdles of hydrogen from one of my favorite tech writers:
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/resbn88.pdf
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf
A hydrogen economy might be possible one day, but not until we find a natural H2 source that is as "free" as crude oil. Man made hydrogen will not work on a large scale. Electrolysis is one of the worst ways to make hydrogen, though it does have the highest "gee-whiz!" factor.
If we did have unlimited hydrogen spewing out of the ground people would seriously consider first cracking the H2 into hydrocarbons to make it easier to transport.
The acoustic modem is back in style [1]! And, of course, same frequencies (DTMF) [2], too!
DTMF has a special place in the phone signal chain (signal at these frequencies must be preserved, end to end, for dialing and menu selection), but I wonder if there's something more efficient, using the "full" voice spectrum, with the various vocoders [3] in mind? Although, it would be much crepier than hearing some tones.
[1] Touch tone based data communication, 1979: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/tvtcb.pdf
[2] touch tone frequency mapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTMF
[3] optimized encoders/decoders for human speech: https://vocal.com/voip/voip-vocoders/
The IIe, IIc, and IIgs had a means to track the vertical blank signal, but the original II did not.
So a hack was discovered to let the 6502 see the video data being clocked out. It's described in great detail in Don Lancaster's book.
https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/enhance_vII.pdf
The gist is that the last byte of each horizontal raster is not displayed on-screen, but with the hack the 6502 can see it. So if you set the low bit of the last byte to 1 for every horizontal line except the last one, now you know when the hardware has sent out the last byte of the last line. Vertical Blank comes right after that.