Top all-time · #3166
Loom Communications
Personal blog · loomcom.com/bloghardwaresystems
Loom Communications is a personal blog at loomcom.com about hardware and systems. Since 2013, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this weblog for retro computing: emulators for AT&T 3B2 and DMD 5620 terminals, Lisp machine Genera installs, and posts on Washington fiber and Comcast internet experiences.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-26
- Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-28
- Understanding the Network Interface Card2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-03
- Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-13
What Hacker News says?
In Washington state, this is only permitted in rural counties. The public utility district is allowed to lay fiber, but not to sell access to it directly to consumers. The law requires them to provide common access to the infrastructure at a rate that reflects their operational costs, but only to ISP companies. Someone wrote about their experience here ( https://loomcom.com/blog/0098_fiber_optic_bliss.html ). Meanwh…
Comment linking /blog/0098_fiber_optic_bliss.html
on “The internet should be a public utility”Submitted It’s Comcastic, Or: I Accidentally Bought a House Without Cable as a story · 221 points
HN discussionMost (non-strongly-typed?) languages have weird edge cases of this sort. There's a very funny presentation by Gary Bernhard highlighting some of these for Ruby/Javascript: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat If you look hard enough, you'll probably find some site that shows surprising behaviors of your favorite language. Examples: Python: https://github.com/cosmologicon/pywat Javascript: https://loomcom.com…
Comment linking /blog/0097_the_wats_of_javascript.html
on “What's new in PHP 8?”Submitted Fiber Optic Bliss as a story · 132 points
HN discussionThat they ended up emulating Genera instead of porting it should tell you something. Maybe. Also, look at the trouble people go through to do that: http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html Then there's this that makes it look easy but also shows the keyboard problem LispM was probably referring to: http://www.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html What I find on getting them running without LISP hardware is somewhere betwee…
Comment linking /genera/genera-install.html
on “Systems Past: software innovations we actually use (2014)”Submitted Emulating the AT&T 3B2 Computer as a story · 94 points
HN discussionThe author started out with no broadband at all: http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-ac... If you're going to have to pay to run some kind of Internet to your house, I guess you might as well get fiber. The bandwidth is probably a free bonus.
Comment linking /blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-accidentally-bought-a-house-without-internet/
on “Fiber Optic Bliss”Submitted Understanding the Network Interface Card as a story · 61 points
HN discussionhttps://loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html Was gonna try this but haven't yet. After it's up, then what?
Comment linking /genera/genera-install.html
on “A Brief History of Lisp Machines (2008)”Submitted What Makes a PDP-11/35 Tick? as a story · 32 points
HN discussionThe Blit (begat of Jerq, productized as the DMD 5620) was an interesting system: The thing could be a normal text terminal, but the magic came when the host sent it software to run locally. In short, if the IBM block-mode terminals were the equivalent of filling out HTML forms, the Blit was closer to WASM. https://loomcom.com/blog/0115_emulating_the_dmd5620.html
Comment linking /blog/0115_emulating_the_dmd5620.html
on “Crabs: The bitmap terror (1985) [pdf]”Submitted Emulating the DMD 5620 Terminal (2018) as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThe 3b2 didn't have a built-in screen. You'd typically use a serial terminal with them, of which there were a near infinite many to choose from in the era. One combination that was popular would be to pair up a DMD-5620 bitblit serial terminal with the 3B2. There's already an emulator for the DMD-5620, written by the same guy that has written an emulator for the WE2000/3b2 setup. https://loomcom.com/3b2/dmd5620_emul…
Comment linking /3b2/dmd5620_emulator.html
on “The Unix PC 3B1 system font, for modern computers”Submitted Recovery from Burnout as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html
Comment linking /3b2/emulator.html
on “The Unix PC 3B1 system font, for modern computers”Submitted Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://loomcom.com/3b2/ Emulate it to your hearts content.
Comment linking /3b2/
on “Smart terminals: Personal computing’s true origin? (2023)”Submitted Fiber Optic Bliss as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReminds me of http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-ac... (Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269657 )
Comment linking /blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-accidentally-bought-a-house-without-internet/
on “Comcast failed to install Internet for 10 months then demanded $60,000 in fees”Submitted A 6502 Home-Brew Computer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jacques Vallee on Artificial Intelligence (2022) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding the Network Interface (NI) Card on the AT&T 3B2/400 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Xerox Alto Emulator in the browser as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Retrochallenge Summer 2013 (VT100 to USB keyboard conversion) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
