Slashdot Mirror
Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine?
MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"
A fantastic hobbyist type magazine. Our community college has a student subscription for it, definitely worth it. Edited by Steve Circia, name should ring a bell!!
From O'Reilly is about the only one which I can think of.
Make magazine is a wonderful DIY with electronics projects etc.
Try looking at http://www.nutsvolts.com/. It has electronic and some programming at very low level.
Maximum PC is a great magazine.
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
If you are intent on bit banging... the available options these days are pretty much limited to microcontrollers, unless you want to end up in huge projects or small modifications on huge projects.
Most of what you can do with these tends to be robotics projects, since there aren't a lot of 8-bit general purpose computers available out there any more.
There are a lot of web sites that provide small source code for special purpose robotics projects which you could apply much in the same way as typing in BASIC games from Compute! or Byte magazine, and then playing with them.
If your intent is to provide a project for a kid, you could do a lot worse than going some place like Weird Stuff, buying up a handful of Compute! magazines and a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive, and a box of 10 floppies. There are plenty of analog TV's out there still to use a monitors which are otherwise sitting unloved in peoples garages.
-- Terry
If you're looking for a replacement to the likes of Software Developer, Dr. Dobbs Journal, then please check out Pragmatic programming. As a hobbyist programmer, I enjoy the different articles, from metaprogramming to Facebook app development.
Personally I prefer working with ATmega's directly rather than with Arduino, but ... if you want to futz around and LEARN, Arduino is a good place for it. Lots of tutorials and others willing to help. Lots of neat plugin boards for sensors IO. Lots of choices of example software from FreeRTOS to VGA output on a pin (both of those aren't designed for the arduino framework, but porting them should be rather trivial once you get to the point where you would consider porting them.
If you're using Windows, I'd suggest just using the AVRstudio from Atmel and WinAVR (GCC for AVR chips if you want to use C/C++ instead of just ASM). You can start with the Arduino development environment and move up later. Its free. The Arduino environment is really just a replacement for your main() with a while(1) loop on the standard AVR toolchain anyway
Arduino has lots of examples and information, but from a debugging standpoint, its the worst there is.
AVR Studio from Atmel has a nearly perfect simulator, and if you use something like HAPSIM you can simulate other hardware as well, such as serial ports, buttons, leds and a specific LCD.
If someone would add some decent debugging abilities to Arduino it'd be a useful development environment for me, but debugging through the simulator might be a little overwhelming for a newbie I guess.
I used to roll my own boards for ATmegas, now I just use Arduino boards, price is more than the processor, but cheaper than rolling the whole board yourself unless you do it in numbers, the Arduino hardware is the best way to go if you're talking quanities less than 10 for sure, probably cheaper all the way up to the 100s if you're hand assembling.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
As others mentioned Make is a good one and 2600 also has a lot more computer/network oriented material lately.
http://www.arduino.cc/
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Nut's and Volt's is also a good one. And, I just love the name.
Apparently I don't remember very well because I think it was Compute!'s Gazette. I wonder what else I am misremembering from my youth.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Virtually every issue from the 1980s is a gem.
It did exist in the mid to late 1970's too. Every issue from the 70's was just a gem as well. Articles, programs, algorithm discussions, electronics, reviews on things like the late 70's computers from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Cromemco, etc. and the software for them. Great stuff back then.
I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line-by-line, and figuring out how sound, graphics and input devices worked along the way.
They only existed in the 80s because the device manufacturers had no way to distribute large multi page paper documents for free. Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.
Nowadays, if you want to learn how to make sound, or program a LCD, or run a A/D converter, you just download the appnotes from the manufacturers website, typically you get a PDF explaining in great detail how it works, schematics, and example code to get you started out. Some manufacturers go further and sell demoboards for a really modest (probably subsidized) fees.
Either the manufacturer's appnotes are so simple and clear that a "D" student could figure it out, or they go out of business and are replaced by a manufacturer with better tech writers. The quality level is generally excellent.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
c't (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C't ) is pretty good, if you read German.
The high-end 40-pin DIPs compare favourably to entire home computers from the Byte era. They are programmed in C, can interface to USB, can be set up with their own bootloaders. The code to interface them to SD cards is well known and if you dan't want that, a 4MBit eeprom has more capacity than a 360kB floppy disk. And that's without even getting to the 32bit controllers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You must be very young. I can remember when even Computer Shopper had some decent technical articles. I learned a lot from it.
I can also remember when there were multiple magazines about anything technical. From computers to hotrodding you could find a lot of very technical how-to projects that took months for the magazine to complete. Every aspect of the project was gone over in great detail, unlike the vast majority of what you find on the internet today that is very, very cursory information. Back in the day a good article on hotrodding would tell you how to cc and modify the cylinder head combustion chambers to provide even power from all cylinders in your engine, or tell you how to completely rebuild and strengthen the transmission or rear differential in your car, or how to build drive train from beginning to end to get the most performance and longevity out of it. The last type of article would teach you to understand cam lobe technology and how it affects the power band of your engine, how to match heads and intake manifold, to the cam. How to match compression ratio to all of that, and then how to match your clutch, transmission, and rear end to the engine. The amount of knowledge those magazines made available was incredible.
The old computer magazines were just as thorough in their approach to computing as the good hotrod magazines were to hotrodding. Even Radio Shack had a decent reputation for technical projects. Now they're nothing interesting at all. Thirty years ago you could buy almost anything you could think of in electronic components from them. They'd even sell you a build-from-scratch computer kit. Not the greatest computer in the world even for that time, but a great learning project. Nothing like it even exists today.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I used to enjoy reading Silicon Chip years ago
just did a quick search and it appears they're still around. Online version of the magazine now as well!
http://www.siliconchip.com.au/
...as the guy who manages it today and is still every bit as enthusiastic about tech as I was when I was working at SharkyExtreme.com, when Tom was still running *his* site. :-P
Another one:
http://www.phrack.org/