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Tired of “modern” systems with millions of pixels, gajillions of bytes of RAM and other whatnots, we were delighted to find this technical article by wunderkind Stephen Wozniak on his own baby, the Apple ][.

This information, in turn, leads us through a commodious vicus of recirculation (otherwise known as “the internets”) to Old Computers and environs. Much rejoicing commences.

Much gratitude to the ever-searching wonders at BoingBoing.

The official 5.25″ disk sleeve archive. Fond memories.

A gentleman walks, or a gentleman rides. A velocipede is hardly a device for a gentleman; but we are not quite sure how to classify the Hudspith Steam Bicycle:

It all began in 1972 when I first had the notion of making a steam bike, thus combining my interest in cycles and motor cycles with my fascination and love of steam. I reallsed that in order to be able to see the water level, the boiler and engine would have to go in front of the rider. I experimented using a pannier bag loaded with four house-bricks hung from the side of a rack, mounted over the front wheel of a bicycle. Finding that I could still ride OK, providing the load was rigidly fixed, I desigued a tall, narrow boiler, to keep the centre of gravity as close in to the wheel as possible. The next few years were spent obtaining the materials and means of making the boiler and it took me until 1989 to complete it in its initial form. It is a semi-flash type, having a lower section of concentric spiral water tubes fed by a central downcomer, surmounted by a fire-tube header which has 24 × 3/8″ flues in a 4″ diameter, copper cylindrical shell. The whole assembly is silver soldered throughout, and contains less than 1 litre of water in total. The boiler is fired from below by a pressure-fed paraffin burner of the Optimus type.[….]

It is with relish and perhaps not a bit of poorly-concealed glee that we read the tale of Chris Elliot (yes, the scion of Bob&Ray Bob Elliot) including Boilerplate, the pseudo-Victorian metal-man, in his latest novel — believing that the robot was a Victorian-era hoax.

The Strange Case of the Spoofer Captured by a Spoof
By EDWARD WYATT

As a comedian, actor and satirist, Chris Elliott has made a career out of blurring the line between truth and absurdity. As a novelist, he has unintentionally fuzzied things further by falling for an online spoof and incorporating a fictional robot into his book as a historical figure.

Now, Mr. Elliott finds himself in a comic nightmare, bending over backward to avoid being accused of a comedian’s cardinal sin - lifting someone else’s joke - and agreeing to a financial settlement with the robot’s creator to head off potential litigation.

“The Shroud of the Thwacker,” Mr. Elliott’s debut novel, published in October by Miramax Books, tells the tale of Jack the Jolly Thwacker, a serial killer terrorizing New York in the late 1800’s. A spoof of period mysteries like Caleb Carr’s “Alienist,” the book also nods to the thrillers of Patricia Cornwell and, perhaps inevitably, to “The Da Vinci Code.”

But it does so in characteristic Elliott fashion, mixing historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt, here seen as a disturbingly flatulent mayor of New York (a wink at those who know that Roosevelt was a police commissioner of New York, but never mayor), with fictitious creations like the police chief, Caleb Spencer. Some inhabit a kind of time-warped middle ground, like an intrepid reporter named Liz Smith who writes for a paper called The Evening Post and a time-traveling investigator named Chris Elliott.

To his satirical 19th-century mix of gas-powered wooden cellphones and imagined New York landmarks like the original Ray’s Pizzeria, Mr. Elliott adds a minor but intriguing character named Boilerplate, a robot said to be developed by the inventor Archibald Campion in the late 1800’s. According to a deliciously detailed Internet site that tracks the robot’s history (bigredhair.com), Boilerplate was designed to replace humans in combat; it took part in Roosevelt’s campaign at San Juan Hill, joined the hunt for Pancho Villa, and fought in and, ultimately, disappeared during World War I.

But in fact, Boilerplate never was. It is the creation of Paul Guinan, an illustrator and graphic novelist in Portland, Ore., who with his wife, Anina Bennett, is the author of “Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate,” published in July by IDW Publishing.

Read more…