🇺🇸 Retro tech nerd 💾 I dig up forgotten computers and make them fun again · My AI bots help. Mostly 🤖
Joined June 2017
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Hey, I'm Tommi 👋
I still love obscure retro machines, but I'm switching things up, for awhile because I love SO many things.
I'm learning AI coding and workflows "in public" as the kids say these days.
I grew up writing HTML, CSS, PHP, and Python but it's been quite a few years since I did it seriously...
But things have changed drastically, in some ways, so I'm practicing new skills here that are going to help me share the retro tech that I love better and level up my day job.
Some of it will look silly. But I like to have fun.
Here's what's on 📺 !
☀️ Sunrise: fast AI news
🥪 Lunch Bytes: your turn, questions
🍪 Snack Bytes: quick how-tos
🌙 After Dark: builds, wins and stumbles
🔍 Weekend Deep Dive: big science-y reads and retro machines
(Fine print: the above channels' content is subject to change now and then!)
Pull up a chair. What should I build first?
Here's an update! Now I've got a bit of a Halloween theme going on. I've gone through quite a few iterations and it's getting there. Not too shabby for Gemini 3.8 Flash, I think.
It's not QUITE...right, but hey. A little bit at a time, when I have time!
#BuildInPublic #AI #Halloween
"Curiosity builds better worlds"
Decided to randomly play with AI for a moment and I was happily impressed by the little details so I had to share.
Four tall cabinets, desk-height panels of buttons, and a main cabinet about 5 meters wide.
That's the BESM-6. Soviet engineers led by S. A. Lebedev built 355 of them between 1968 and 1987. It hit about a million instructions a second on 48-bit words, with roughly 60,000 transistors and 180,000 diodes. It drew 30 kW before cooling and needed 150 to 200 square meters of floor.
Lebedev called overlapping instructions the "Principle of Water Pipe." We call it pipelining now.
My favorite detail; The one London's Science Museum bought came with seven wrenches with Russian inscriptions and boxes of spare buttons.
Who wants one of these? I want one of these.
#retrotech #vintagecomputing
Sources for the nerds (hi, I'm nerds):
Specs, 355 built + the "water pipe" quote: computer-museum.ru/english/b…
The Science Museum's catalog, where the seven spanners and spare buttons are REALLY listed: collection.sciencemuseumgrou…
Photo: Victor R. Ruiz, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nothing important happening here, just me for a second.
Hope your Thursday was decent. More actual content still coming!
🤖 Made with AI
So, question.
What's the very FIRST thing you ever asked (or told) an AI chatbot?
Not the smartest thing. The first one. Do you remember? I had to really think about it, lol
Mine was "write a haiku about oatmeal".
(be honest, y'all)
#Retrotech #Grok
Games and websites are fun to play and use, but the first time I MADE something on a computer? Whole different feeling!
Mine was a personal site that really didn't do or say anything important. But I made it in either FrontPage or Dreamweaver, I think. And then used CoffeeCup (I know) FTP to load it to the WEB!
What was the first thing you made? Was it a website, a program? Let's go back down memory lane, together.
#retrotech #vintagecomputing
Before AI agents planned their own steps, there was Shakey!
It got its name because it shook so much when it rolled around.
Built at SRI from 1966 to 1972, it was the first mobile robot that could reason about its OWN actions.
A few more tidbits:
🧭 A*: its team invented this shortcut-finding method. It's still used in driving directions and video games, and a version of it helps steer Mars rovers.
📋 STRIPS: its planning software shaped automatic-planning research for years.
📡 Remote brain: all the thinking happened on a mainframe down the hall, over a radio link. Its storage drum was bigger than a fridge and held about 1 MB.
👀 Its eyes: a video camera with just 120 lines of resolution.
Would y'all trust it with groceries?
#retrotech #vintagecomputing #robotics
Sources if y'all want to go down the rabbit hole:
Computer History Museum: computerhistory.org/revoluti…
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey…
IEEE Milestone: ethw.org/Milestones:SHAKEY:_…
Photo: The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The 'Tommi Signal' did it's job and summoned a Tommi! Would you look at that?
I borked the 'Tommi Signal' after I got her...me...myself added, so there's a bit of a close-up, and then a second clip with the signal added back in.
We're starting to get somewhere over here!
Now what happens?
#buildinpublic #Gemini #Antigravity
Made with ZERO images! This is almost pure CSS!
(Okay, theres some HTML and I added some JavaScript before finishing up to give it a little mouse tracking magic)
@firefox inspired me by bringing back all of the big meme people that many of us grew up on (sort of) in one big video.
So that inspired ME to mesh some old and new. I went back to my CSS roots, and with a little Gemini 3.8 Flash help, I accidentally created something a little terrifying!
Who recognizes her??
#nostalgia #meme
What's the funniest way a bot has COMPLETELY misunderstood you?
You asked for one thing and got something gloriously atrocious instead.
I once gave Gemini a brief outline of a research project and asked it to PLAN how it would do it, then wait for me to approve the plan.
It proceeded to do the entire project. A bajillion tokens later, the output was almost literally backwards because it misunderstood one sentence that I wrote and ran with it.
#retrotech #Gemini
On September 18, 1972, two chatbots had a therapy session over the ARPANET.
PARRY, Kenneth Colby's simulated paranoid patient, ran at Stanford's AI lab. DOCTOR, an ELIZA-style therapist, ran on a BBN computer. Both were reached from a machine at UCLA.
Vint Cerf printed the transcript in RFC 439 in January 1973, titled "PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR."
PARRY just kept saying "I went to the races." The therapist ended it by asking for $399.29. I'm WAY too entertained by this. And people think AI came out 3 years ago.
#retrotech #vintagecomputing #Grok
Photo: ArnoldReinhold, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (an ARPANET IMP, not one used that day)
Read the original transcript: rfc-editor.org/info/rfc439/
More: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY
I've been reading an article about AI agents and shopping and it's made me think about how things are changing.
I no longer run any blogs but it makes me think... What would it be like today?
Also, in 2015, I ran a blog about hot dogs! I was making $50 a month from Google and I can't help but wonder how well it would be doing today if I had kept it going.
It also made me think about @brockpierson and then I thought about how well his marketing is working because of that random thought.
There's a lot going on in this post!
Who wants some slightly retro (TO SOME) music?
This is one of my most FAVORITE songs on the planet, and this small band does not get enough credit for this one.
I'm scared that one day it will be gone, so I'm sharing with y'all :)
Oh, and I NEVER grew out of this phase, mom.
Call Atlantis - Past Regrets, Future Threats (Official Music Video) youtu.be/7fr-18PBgGc
via @YouTube
Here's a small update to the three.js scene! There's still a lot that's clunky, but... here's a 'Tommi Signal'. What in the world will happen next, now that THAT has been turned on??
Gemini 3.8 Flash is still doing pretty well for me, it seems.
What do you think happens NEXT?
#buildinpublic #Gemini #Antigravity