#decwrites

[whitewaterpaper]

This is the terminal (a Digital DECwriter III) that received the first e-mail in Sweden. Found in storage at Enea and are to be donated to Tekniska Museet on 19 oktober.

The e-mail (originally sent 7 april 1983) read:

Subject: Hello You are now hooked to the mcvax. This is just a test. Reply, we will be calling you again soon! Ignore any references to a machine called "yoorp", it is just a test. Mail should go to mcvax!….". Regards, Jim McKie. (mcvax!jim).

Source: IDG/Computer Sweden.

[decantae]

The Lepidopterist is a short story I wrote for a writing contest on a different slice of the internet –– it did win! This was my first attempt at writing microfiction (and surrealist horror) and I really enjoyed working on it.

Not a lot of my work (read: none of it) has been posted on this blog before. This story is very much a standalone piece disconnected from all of my WIPs, but if you happen to like what you see, I do have a seldom-used taglist to dust off, and I’ll be writing more under the tag #decwrites. 

WORD COUNT: 500 (On the dot!) Full piece below the cut. 

Lepidopterology is the study of butterflies and moths to the exclusion of all other insects. A strange lepidopterist lives in a termite-infested house on the edge of town, neighbor to nothing and no-one.  If he had room in his heart for beetles and spiders and other forms of creeping, crawling life, he would be an entomologist and not half as strange, but his consuming obsession does not extend to anything else. Only butterflies and moths. Coyotes used to prowl through the tall yellow grass behind the house, but the lepidopterist is long in the tooth and knew just how to scare them away so that they wouldn’t come back. The ravens and the crows were next, then the speckled eggs in the cradle of the nest: all still and flightless when his work was done. He is no ornithologist, either. Removing them made room for his favourite things to breathe and fly free, and by the might of the same blunt tools, a butterfly garden was soon erected in the backyard. Inside the house, there are dozens of wooden cases with glass fronts, designed for displaying preserved butterflies and moths. Most lie as bare as his kitchen cabinets, which makes him a strange lepidopterist: he hasn’t the stomach to keep any. Those that remain are ragged monarchs chewed up and spat out by whatever creature tasted their bright, bitter wings and thought the better of it. He stores his blunt tools next to a bell jar on his workbench. The glass contains decomposing leaf litter and wilting flowers, and has imprisoned within it a single specimen of the genus Dryas. This one he has nicknamed Julia, because her species is the D. iulia; a bad joke inherited from the entomologist who lived in the house before him. Difficult to swallow without smiling. Now, the lepidopterist lifts the bell jar like the lid of a serving dish and extracts her with feather-light expertise. Several of her brothers and sisters have made their home beneath the poplars in the butterfly garden, as common as mud. He often watches them from the kitchen window whenever the southern sun grows hot enough to dry him out, but one day Julia came in to keep him company, clinging to his green-checkered shirt rather than the greenery outside. A kindred spirit, she too chose the safety and security of a short life indoors over the nasty, brutish freedom God intended. Julia trusts his gnarled finger is a twig to rest on, sprinkling the ridges and wrinkles with her sweet pixie dust. Her passionfruit wings are long and tucked in protectively against her abdomen. Some would describe them as gossamer, but they are far more delicate than that. Like rice paper. He has heard that edible confetti is made out of it these days so that when it’s thrown at weddings it doesn’t harm the local wildlife. It just dissolves away to nothing in the rain. Melts in the mouth. He swallows the butterfly whole and fluttering.

[canary3d-obsessed]

I am this old. 

Anyone?

[musif]

Ceramic capacitor, from a Digital DECWriter III, 1979 #dec #digital #electronics #pdp11 https://ift.tt/2nsFq0w

[oldguydoesstuff]

DIgital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8/e 12-bit mini-computer, very similar to the one our high school had which I learned to program in BASIC on.  Ours was able to support 4-5 users on DECwriter printer terminals (keyboard and fan-fold paper for output) simultaneously, on something like 32K of core memory.  I once saw the invoice for it in our school office, they paid $70,000 for theirs in the mid 70′s!

[gayrudeboys]

when will you continue the book. I must kn o w.

whenever i’m not in major writers block™️ (updates will be on @decwrites whenever they exist)

[imsureiforgotsomething]

300 baud is less than 40 8-bit bytes per second. A tiny bit faster than writing a letter.

My first programming course in high school started with students booking time on the sole card punching machine so we could hand our stacks to the teacher. Overnight he took our stacks to a "nearby" state university to run our stacks on their mainframe. He'd collect our output and return them to us the next day.

That only lasted a couple weeks until we got a teletype machine hooked up by 300-baud modem to that same university's computer. It could chug along at 10 characters per second, and by chug I mean chug like a jackhammer. It was deafening.

The next year it was replaced with a DECwriter dot matrix printer that literally screamed out 32 cps, and by scream I mean an amplified distorted high-pitched ripping sound that made the area between your eyes hurt.

USA 1987

[sub-media]

DEC LA36 DECwriter II Terminal, 1974 - OMG, my first computer experience - used little yellow tape that it punched holes in - I wrote a program for Yahtzee and loved it. Why didn't I stay with the computers?!! https://ift.tt/37iQgZz

[musif]

Glass capacitors, from a Digital DECwriter III, 1979 @verdebinario #electronics #vintagecomputers #circuits #engineering#computer#circuit#maker#laboratory#programmable#electronics#tech#tecnology#projects#vintagecomputer#broadcasting#oldhardware http://ift.tt/2H7l56f

[musif]

Digital DECWriter III LED display, detail, 1977 @verdebinario http://ift.tt/2EpVGE4

[gayrudeboys]

okay so i’m gonna be posting this on my writeblr because it’s an original work and most people here follow me for starkid stuff so it’s been posted to @decwrites

I just finished the first chapter/prologue sorta thing for my story and i believe quite a few people were wanting me to post it so i was wondering where it would be easiest for you all to see updates (i’ll be posting it chapter by chapter or else i’ll forget to write it at all) 

[musif]

Digital DECWriter III LED display, 1981 #pdp11 #digital #dec http://ift.tt/2jjUj1a