There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me.
They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time.
I mean, wtf.
World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.
That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then.
Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.
The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe.
(The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)
The more likely risk with a 6845 is creating a way out of spec vertical sync that can cause the monitor's frame flyback transformer to fail. Although how you describe the PET monitor's beam being "parked" suggests it's actually the same effect.
So many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.
I learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article.
When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.
I enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).
This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.
When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
I have worked on systems that have a thermite charge under the RAM and EPROM chips, wired up to GPIO for 'terminate and stay that way' instructions. It is not an urban legend - just a highly protected secret. Those products which require this feature are not usually discussed in consumer circles ..
>The cryptographic module shall contain tamper response and zeroization circuitry that shall continuously monitor the tamper detection envelope and, upon the detection of tampering, shall immediately zeroize all plaintext secret and private cryptographic keys and CSPs.
I used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators.
There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..
Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)
One cool thing about this is that there are places where old compilers feared to tread, on the 6502 for example any opcode (apart from $A2, LDX #imm) ending in 2 would be a JAM instruction - CPU just stops. The later CMOS versions still did that for most of the $x2 instructions but some were converted to NOP.
So if you're implementing a 6502 in an FPGA, and you want to add (say) stack-relative addressing, there's a nice set of opcodes that you know won't ever be in conflict with the usual ones, because any 6502 ever issuing it would immediately halt (but not catch fire).
Reading the post, I was immediately reminded of the Big Red Button that was a prominent feature on 80s/90 PCs because of their tendency to end up in a state where a hard reset was the only way out of the lockup. And of course there were the rare cases where even that didn’t work and the only solution was to power-cycle the machine. It’s been years, maybe decades since I’ve encountered that situation and when I have it was a hardware failure, not a software failure as was the case back then.
29 comments
[ 1519 ms ] story [ 1415 ms ] threadThey introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time.
I mean, wtf.
World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.
That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then.
Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.
(The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)
https://www.cheapcharts.com/us/itunes/seasons/1745389594
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
Go watch it. Great show.
When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.
I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.140-2.pdf
Some more discussion here: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...
There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..
Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)
So if you're implementing a 6502 in an FPGA, and you want to add (say) stack-relative addressing, there's a nice set of opcodes that you know won't ever be in conflict with the usual ones, because any 6502 ever issuing it would immediately halt (but not catch fire).
1960s era. Humorous instructions for the IBM 360/69.
If the image link doesn't work, I've OCRed it:
IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 69 FEATURES AND DEVICES
Early Card Lace
1401 Incompatibility
407 Emulation
Chinese Character Set
Branch on Burned-Out Indicator
Branch on Blinking Indicator
Branch and Hang
Branch on Chip Box Full
Branch on Power Off
Branch on Sleepy Operator
Inquire and Ignore
Reverse Parity and Branch
Branch on Bug
Read While Write While Ripping Tape
Add Improper
Divide and Overflow
Subtract and Reset to Zero
Add and Reset to Zero
Scramble Program Status Word
Pack Alpha and Drop Zones
Pack Program Status Word
Punch Invalid
Rewind Card Reader
Backspace Card Reader
Read Print and Blush
Forms Skip and Run Away
Stacker Select Disk
Write Wrong-Length-Record
Write Noise Record
Seek Record and Scar Disk
Eject Disk
Rewind Disk
Backspace Disk
Punch Disk
Punch Operator
Execute Invalid Op Code
Read Card and Scramble Data
Select Stacker and Jam
Read Invalid
Rewind and Break Tape
Write Record and Run Away
Make Tape Invalid
Reverse Drum Immediate
Transfer and Lose Return
Print and Smear
Read Chads
Sharpen Light Pencil
Transfer and Drop Bits
Erase Card Punch
Read Inter-record Gap
Read Noise Record
Erase Read Only Storage
Destroy Storage Protect Key
Update and Erase Record
Move and Drop Bits
Circulate Memory
Move and Lose Record
Move and Wrap Core
Move Continuous
Execute No-Op and Hang
Develope Ineffective Address
Halt and Catch Fire
Scatter Print
Re-initialize Meter
Update Transaction
Reduce Thruput
Print and Break Chain
Lose Message and Branch
Burst Selector Channel
Invert Record and Branch
Illogical "or"
Illogical "and"
Bite Baudy Bit and Branch
Triple-Pack Decimal
Slip Disk
Stacker Upset
Uncouple CPU's and Branch
Scramble Channels
Edit:formatting.