posted on february 21st, 2022
with tags
mac,
openbsd, and
retrocomputing
last updated on march 26th, 2022
Since recording a handful of
C Programming on System 6
videos, I've occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily
programming being done on my Macintosh Plus.
After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted
broadcasting setup.
If I happen to be programming on my Mac right now, you can watch
here at my website.
Introducing my
Wallops
IRC client, then returning to work on the BBS adding a serial module to join the
console and telnet inputs to allow calls through a modem.
I got stuck for a while trying to figure out why writes to the serial port would
hang the machine.
A bug in
Amend
caused it to crash during a commit, which corrupted the repo beyond repair.
I quickly came to realize that using resource files as a database for Amend and
my new BBS was a bad idea.
I NIH'd the problem and created my own file format that will be a bit more
resilient to crashes and partial writes.
I review some recent commits covering user authentication and telnet
negotiation, then write some ANSI output code and a broken function for
returning a number's ordinal suffix.
It's been almost a year since my last
confessional video.
A few weeks ago I started working on a small revision control system to handle
my C projects developed on my Mac and it's now at the point where I can at least
manage commits to the tool itself.
The Cidco MailStation is a series of dedicated e-mail terminals sold
in the 2000s as simple, standalone devices for people to use to send and receive
e-mail over dialup modem.
While their POP3 e-mail functionality is of little use today, the hardware is a
neat Z80 development platform that integrates a 320x128 LCD, full QWERTY keyboard,
and an internal modem.
After purchasing one (ok, four) on eBay some months ago, I've learned enough
about the platform to write my own software that allows it to be a terminal for
accessing BBSes via its modem or as a terminal for a Unix machine connected over
parallel cable.
I've created an adapter for the
Cidco MailStation
Z80 computer which adds the ability to use WiFi for data transfer, code
uploading, and to act as a WiFi modem for my
msTERM
terminal emulator.
On the modern web, everything must be encrypted.
Unencrypted websites are treated as relics of the past with browsers declaring
them toxic waste not to be touched (or
even looked at)
and search engines de-prioritizing their content.
While this push for security is good for protecting modern communication, there
is a whole web full of information and services that don't need to be secured
and those trying to access them from older vintage computers or even through
modern embedded devices are increasingly being left behind.
Returning to the development of my IMAP client, I add SOCKS5 support to be able
to connect through a network proxy, particularly the one I made that is able to
convert TLS-encrypted data from my real mailserver into plaintext that the
Mac's slow CPU can support.