mass:werk / Blog

“Now Go Bang!” is named after a source comment in Spacewar!, the first digital video game.
It marks the very instance, when a spaceship which has been dragged into the gravitational star starts to explode. What follows, is impressionist pixel-dust floating along the ship’s former trajectory in a sparkling bloom of phosphor activation.

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A few tags:computerhistory, infographics, software, pet2001, basic, pdp-1, archeology, retrochallenge, mixed-bag, long-read.

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• Funny Games on a PET 2001N (or B)

  March 26, 2024

  A curious case of jumper settings for PETs with the dynamic system board.

• The PET 2001 Emulator Debugger

  March 22, 2024

  A visual tour.

• The Commodore PET INPUT Bug-Feature

  March 17, 2024

  Adventures in MS BASIC (Commodore PET edition).

• Shiny New 6502 Thing

  February 22, 2023

  New 6502 emulator feature: Instruction preview with resolved operands.

• PET 2001 Dark Mode & Themed Range Sliders

  September 29, 2023

  Also, how to style range inputs using CSS, including accent colors.

• PET Business

  September 14, 2023

  PET 2001 emulator up to business.

• The Skiatron and Early Dark Trace CRTs

  September 6, 2023

  A glimpse of an alternative display technology.

• PET 2001 Emulator: Option ROMs

  August 31, 2023

  Just to let you know, in case you were interested...

• PET 2001 Emulator + 6502 Updates

  August 23, 2023

  Yet another software update notification.

• PET Keys — Series 2001 Edition

  August 3, 2023

  A closer inspection of the keyboard(s) of the Commodore PET 2001.

• Fear and Loathing in the Face of the Missing 4^th Commodore BASIC Variable

  July 9, 2023

  Some early results of our hair-raising experiment.

• The Case of the Missing 4^th Commodore BASIC Variable — Bonus Episode

  March 15, 2023

  Yet another hair-raising experiment.

• The Case of the Missing 4^th Commodore BASIC Variable (and the 5^th Byte)

  March 15, 2023

  Yet another detective story.

• Link Your Time

  January 20, 2023

  An Update to the previous update.

• December Updates

  December 16, 2022

  Assorted site news.

• On Philosophia Mechanica

  June 6, 2022

  'World, Fact, Case' explained.

• Philosophia Mechanica

  June 4, 2022

  An introduction to analytic philosophy.

• Catching Up

  May 31, 2022

  Catching up on some software updates.

• Digital Library Update

  May 23, 2022

  Expanding the catalog of questionable media for the sake of literature.

• Minskytron Refurbished

  April 5, 2022

  Classic PDP-1 'display hacks' emulation brought up to new standards.

• Spacewar! is 60 Today!

  April 2, 2022

  The first digital video game just became 60.

• Nerdy Reading

  July 26, 2021

  Time for a summer romance.

• Virtual 6502 — Another Update

  July 5, 2021

  A few new features for the 6502 online disassembler.

• New Old Game: Gravi-o-roids!

  June 30, 2021

  Presenting a new old-school video game just a few years late, totally unironically.

• Virtual 6502 — Update Round 2

  June 24, 2021

  Another major update to the venerable “Virtual 6502” emulator – assembler – disassembler suite.

• 6502 “Illegal” Opcodes Demystified

  June 5, 2021

  A closer look at the “illegal” opcodes and undocumented instructions of the MOS 6502 MPU.

• More 6502 Updates

  June 1, 2021

  Further improvements on the Virtual 6502 suite.

• A Quick CSS Tip Regarding Legacy Image Tables

  May 20, 2021

  Dealing with legacy image tables and modern web standards.

• An Update to the Virtual 6502 Suite

  May 20, 2021

  Improving one of the oldest 6502 tool sets on the web.

• Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics

  April 30, 2021

  Tales of the early days of the first digital video game.

• Rare Retro-Computing Find

  April 1, 2021

  Atari Heavy Sixer running System V.

• Great, A Boat is Stuck!

  March 26, 2021

  Finally, something to agree upon.

• PDP-1 Spotting — The Mystery Solved

  March 10, 2021

  Update: Solving the Amherst Mystery.

• PDP-1 Spotting — The Amherst Mystery

  March 2, 2021

  Yet another PDP-1 riddle, extended mode.

• Trainspotting (I)

  February 28, 2021

  A story of trains, computers, and two images.

• Update of the MOS 6502 Instruction Sheet

  February 22, 2021

  Some work for better accessibility.

• Copy & Paste for PET 2001

  February 17, 2021

  A quick update on the PET 2001 online emulator

• Big Sur System Update — Cargo Cult in Progress

  February 12, 2021

  A few notes on the system update process in Apple’s Big Sur (macOS 11)

• A Modernist Christmas

  December 29, 2020

  Festive architecture & optimism

• Season’s Greetings

  December 27, 2020

  Better late than never, an old-school e-card…

• Visual Story Telling: Revisiting Minard’s Map of Napoléon’s Russian Campaign (1812–1813)

  June 15, 2020

  Another view at Minard's famous flow map.

• meSpeak.js Update, v. 2.0.7

  April 23, 2020

  TTS in JS, and a curious bug. Also, Safari desktop compatibility.

• PET 2001 Emulator — V. 1.1

  April 10, 2020

  Proudly announcing version 1.1 of the PET 2001 online emulator.

• IBM Punched Card Typography

  April 6, 2020

  The surprising mechanical store for exchangable fonts of the IBM card punches

• Stay at Home Edition — Permalink

  April 1, 2020

  Five retro computing related long reads to keep you from getting bored at home

• Stay at Home Edition: Refraction for the Atari 2600

  April 1, 2020

  RetroChallenge 2018/04: Writing a proper Atari VCS / 2600 game

• Stay at Home Edition: Personal Computer Space Transactor 2001 (2017)

  April 1, 2020

  RetroChallenge 2017/04: Computer Space for the Commodore PET 2001.

• Stay at Home Edition: Ironic Computer Space Simu­lator (DEC PDP-1, 2016)

  April 1, 2020

  RetroChallenge 2016/10: Programming a 60 fps video game for early 1960s hardware.

• Stay at Home Edition: Maze War for Olivetti M10 and NEC PC-8201A (2016)

  March 30, 2020

  Implementing a 3D dungeon crawler in MS BASIC for RetroChallenge 2016/01.

• Stay at Home Edition: Inside Spacewar!

  March 26, 2020

  A Software Archeological Approach to the First Video Game.

• Lehman Bros., Liquidity, Austerity, COVID-19, and the Inevitable Rise of John Maynard Keynes

  March 26, 2020

  Veering off of our usual topics for a bit of political economy.

• PET 2001 Emulator — V. 1.0

  March 17, 2020

  Proudly announcing version 1.0 of the PET 2001 online emulator.

• PETSCII Revealed

  March 12, 2020

  A closer look at the logic behind Commodore ASCII, AKA PETSCII, and the PET 2001.

• Calm Panic in the Face of Influenza

  March 9, 2020

  Learning from history: How to keep calm while panicking and carry on with face masks

• Writing a PET 2001 Ten-Line Canyon Run Video Game

  March 7, 2020

  String exploits and a reasonably paced video game in just 10 lines of Commodore BASIC.

• BASIC Variables & Strings — with Commodore

  March 1, 2020

  Investigations into the memory utilization of Commodore BASIC (PET 2001, VIC-20, C64)

• BASIC (Re)Numbering — with Commodore

  February 27, 2020

  How to thoroughly renumber Commodore BASIC programs (PET 2001, VIC-20, C64)

• Announcing meSpeak.js 2.0

  August 10, 2019

  TTS in JS, now even better.

• LGP-30 — A Drum Computer of Significance

  July 20, 2019

  Affordable computing by rotating bits at 3700 rpm.

• Recommendation: Astronaut.io

  July 15, 2019

  YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views.

• The Peculiar Case of a Self-Referential Computer Instruction (DEC PDP-7, 1964)

  July 13, 2019

  Or, how to lift Kurt Gödel’s hat by −0.

• Instant PET: Commodore BASIC as Data-URL

  July 2, 2019

  mass:werk proudly presents: Running BASIC on a virtual PET 2001 from URL-data.

• Digital Video Game Firsts — Michigan Pool (1954)

  June 23, 2019

  On the origin of digital video games and the complexity of classification.

• A Curious Bug in the Commodore BASIC Tokenizer Routine

  May 10, 2019

  Investigations into a lesser known bug in Commodore BASIC abbreviations.

• Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC)

  February 20, 2019

  A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.

• Binary Grain — The Hare in the Mandelbrot Set

  February 5, 2019

  Images from the outer limits of numeric precision.

• Forgotten JavaScript: Object.handleEvent()

  February 1, 2019

  Tales of event-handling in JavaScript and some historic oddities of Netscape Navigator 4.

• Legacy Graphics Range for Char8.js

  January 28, 2019

  The Char8.js 8-bit character generator library supports the newly proposed legacy graphics range.

• Anatomy of a Wordpress Backdoor

  January 26, 2019

  Reverse engineering the command and control structure of a Wordpress attack.

• Design & Engineering

  January 24, 2019

  Yet another tech related internet cartoon.

• Snowflake Archeology (DEC PDP-1)

  January 10, 2019

  Software archeology of an early computer animation (1960s) for the DEC PDP-1.

• Portraits and Selfies

  January 3, 2019

  Recommended link: An ironic (re)mix of classic portrait art and selfie posture.

• Snowflake: The Original Virtual Christmas Ornament

  January 2, 2019

  A program which ought to be remembered.

• Minard / Morse / Tufte and Authenticity on the Web

  September 13, 2018

  Observations on information spread and authenticity of well-known objects on the Internet.

• Observing Minard Observing Napoléon

  August 17, 2018

  Observations on textual strategy in infographics by the example of the "Greatest Infographic of All Times".

• Anatomy of a Random Number Generator

  August 3, 2018

  Tales from the realms of software archeology.

• Not xkcd: Failing the Nerd-Test

  August 2, 2018

  Yet another tech related internet cartoon.

• Visual Vacation

  July 28, 2018

  Visual vacation... (link)

• A New Website and a Blog

  July 18, 2018

  Initial post.

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