Pierre and his Poor Pathetic Page

Computers section

Science! - Computers - Arts - Miscellaneous

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CoCo - Programming - Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)
Miscellaneous

CoCo

My first computer was the CoCo 2 (a Color Computer, from Tandy) in 1984. I learned to program in Basic and in assembler on this machine, which I found fascinating and remember fondly. It is thanks to my CoCo if I am a programmer today.

CMOC: a 6809-generating cross-compiler for a subset of the C language
May 31, 2015

This is my cross-compiler, which I used to implement Color Eights and Color Verbiste.

Color Eights
May 31, 2015

A card game of Crazy Eights for the CoCo, written in C and compiled by CMOC, my 6809-targeting cross-compiler for a subset of C.

Verbiste for the CoCo
September 6, 2014

I have done partial port of my French verb conjugator to the CoCo.

Rainbow Magazine issues
September 5, 2014

PDF copies of most issues (1981-1993).

CoCopedia
September 5, 2014

A wiki on the Color Computer.

CoCo mailing list
September 5, 2014

A mailing list hosted by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, publisher in the eighties of Undercolor magazine.

Emulating the CoCo 3 on a GNU/Linux system
June 17, 2012

This page gives a practical procedure to install and run an emulator for the Tandy Color Computer 3 under a GNU/Linux operating system.

Homebrew 6809 Computer: First Test
April 11, 2010

This YouTube video shows a user entering a hand-assembled machine-language program into a 6809 processor's memory, one byte at a time using switches, and then executing the program successfully.

CoCo Game List
July 5, 2001

This site maintained by L. Curtis Boyle lists hundreds of video games for the CoCo.

Programming

Critical Program Reading
December 27, 2022

A short film (17m49s) from 1975 on the importance of reading one's own code critically.

A functioning Turing machine
March 27, 2010

A man from Wisconsin built a classic Turing Machine with a thousand instruction tape.

Csh Programming Considered Harmful
April 12, 2005

The C shell, and even tcsh, are irreversibly handicapped. It's hopeless.

Verbiste: a French conjugation system
May 30, 2003

This GPL C++ library that I wrote can conjugate and deconjugate French verbs. It comes with two command-line utilities.

BoolStuff, a library for the Boolean Disjunctive Normal Form
November 7, 2002

BoolStuff is a small C++ library that I wrote and that supports a few operations on boolean expression binary trees, like parsing, and computing the Disjunctive Normal Form.

Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
October 21, 2002

This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. "If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote."

The Rise of "Worse is Better"
October 19, 2000

This is an article by Richard Gabriel, a designer of Common Lisp and CLOS. It claims that striving for perfection may not always be the best approach:

I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

Duff's device
October 13, 2000

The most dramatic use yet seen of fall through in C switches, invented by Tom Duff en 1983. He was trying to bum all the instructions he could out of an inner loop that copied data serially onto an output port.

The dumbing-down of programming
September 12, 1998

An article by Ellen Ullman that tells how installing GNU/Linux on a PC that had heretofore been equipped with Windows made her discover the archeological marvels of PC history. She deplores that systems like Windows try too much to protect us from ourselves and even tend to use insulting childish language...

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

Montréal BBS List for November 25th, 1988
September 1, 2002

This list was maintained by the Montreal BBS Juxtaposition, which started maintaining such lists in 1985. (Thanks to Paul Guertin for preserving and contributing this list.)

Montréal BBS List for July 21st, 1989
July 7, 2002

This list was maintained by the Montreal BBS Juxtaposition, which started maintaining such lists in 1985.

A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
October 6, 2001

Jason Scott wants to film a documentary on Bulletin Board Systems in order to preserve their history. The Web has kept very few traces of this very dynamic world.

In my case, I was a member of several BBSes mostly from 1988 to 1991. The main ones were Alpha-Byte, Cheers!, InfoDoc-Montréal, Infolie and C-PC.

Bulletin Boards are online world's good old days
December 21, 2000

A Montréal Gazette article about the Montréal BBS scene as it was in 1997. The original link was this one, but the page disappeared. Fortunately, I kept a copy of the text.

The History of BBS's
December 6, 2000

This is a 1986 article by Thomas Ark that talked about how stupid users were polluting bulletin board systems. I translated this article in French in 1989. I have searched the Web with the name Thomas Ark but failed to find any mention of him. I would be curious to know more about what made him write this article.

textfiles.com
February 27, 1999

A collection of text files that used to circulate on the BBSes of the seventies and eighties.

"Batman" strikes again
January 26, 1998

I was a member of several Bulletin Board Systems, typically under the alias La Galette, from 1988 to 1991 (first with a 1200 bps modem on a CoCo, then with a 2400 bps on a PC...). One of them was called Alpha-Byte, and its sysop was known under the alias of S.T. Garp; I was a co-sysop for that BBS for about eight months. My alias was La Galette.

There was on Alpha-Byte a section where a few users would write a "never ending story": each user write a message that adds something to the story. I kept an example of one of the worst contributions (in French) made by one of the idiots that unfortunately polluted that fine BBS.

Miscellaneous

The Incredible Machine
March 28, 2025

A 1968 film detailing advancements in computer technology, featuring the "Graphic 1" computer system at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents
July 11, 2021

An August 2015 talk titled "Lies, damned lies and scans" about scanners and copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line that randomly altered written numbers in scanned pages.

Octo-puce (Bits and Bytes)
March 4, 2007

Octo-puce was an educational television series about computers. It was the French version of Bits and Bytes. These series of twelve half-hour episodes were produced in 1983 and aired respectively by the Radio-Québec and TV Ontario educational channels. They taught computer science to the general public and even dared to teach programming. Since about 2008, Google Video has offered this video of Octo-puce and Octo-puce Plus.

SEA vs PKWare
April 22, 2002

The court decision where PKWare was forced to stop using the .arc format, created by SEA, followed by some comments on the affair.

The Right to Read
March 22, 1998

A work of fiction on where the copyright system could lead us if we let it out of control... I wrote a french translation which appears on gnu.org.

Brush With Greatness: Dennis Ritchie answers me
November 29, 1997

An article by Dennis M. Ritchie in response to a question that I asked in the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers about the attitude of AT&T towards the Unix versions created by the University of Berkeley.

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