←back to thread

401 points chromy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.24s | source

A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer.

I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras.

This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place.

[1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184

1. sizzzzlerz ◴[] No.45031978[source]
Well this made my day. Randomly clicking on the covers, I hit on November 1979. It turns out that this issue had an article on software to solve SOMA cubes and Pentominoes written in 6502 machine code and Basic for the Pet PC. When I originally read this, 46 years ago, I had an Apple II+. So I made some adjustments to the code for the Apple in both the machine code and basic and got it working. That article (along with Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth) started my obsession for Pentominoes that exists today. I've taken that code and rewritten and improved it in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, and Python. I'd copied that article and carried it with me for years until it got lost in an office move. What a treat to stumble across it today!