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When it comes to space, there have been many firsts in the history of Russian science and engineering. And without opening Pandoras Box of for and against, good and bad, success and failure of Russian versus American space technology, there have been some true marvels of Russian engineering that went down completely different paths compared to their western counterparts.

If I ask you for the first programmable calculators, I guess, names like Texas Instruments TI-59 or Hewlett Packard 41-CX immediately spring to your mind. But did you ever hear of the MK-52?

This Russian programmable calculator with reverse polish notation and an EEPROM to store written programs was really a thing in the 80s and inspired many people, before personal microcomputers became more widely available. And not to be neglected, this piece of hardware flew to space as part of the Soyuz TM-7 mission as a backup for docking trajectory calculations!

Manual docking trajectory calculation on a 32 key calculator when sitting in a spacecraft with an orbital speed of 30.000 km/h! This just screams for a Chuck Norris joke.

Paul Hoets published an in-depth article and there is bit more of information to be found on this Hackaday project which also links to a teardown video.

Thank you Paul & Удачного полета!

Imagine, it is the year 1961. You are an engineer who got recently hired by the NASA and the task to which you are assigned reads as: design a line of digital logic ICs to replace the SN502, but with 10 times the speed and one-tenth the power requirements to help NASA reach its goal of increased computer power and reduced weight. And NASA wanted it in 10 months.

The official Texas Instruments Story is a perfect fit for our Spaceweek™ and lines out all the facts about Charles Cook and Jack Kilby developing the first integrated circuits to ever orbit the Earth.

This wonderfully curated piece of space history by an unknown author is a short read. Nevertheless absolutely worth your time.

If you were like me, you slept in history lessons in school. Of course, things of the past, why would I worry. It was the other way around with math and physics but today we found a gem which combines all of them.

Pete Foley is one of the early Apple engineers who worked at Apple’s IC Technology Group in the beginning of the 80s. He sat in the same building as the Mac 1 team and was involved in the development of the Macintosh Clock Chip, the Apple Sound Chip and a number of other projects that you can read about in this detailed insight into the personal development of an engineer at Apple at that time.

What differentiates this article, is first hand memories regarding Steve Jobs and the somewhat colorless presentation should in no way hide the extraordinary quality of the writing. In case you think of your history teacher right now - do her and yourself a favor, wipe the sleep from your eyes and check out the article. 

It is amazing to see, how much love old school platforms like the ZX Spectrum and its processor Z80 still receive today. And rightfully so, it is one of the outstanding devices of its era. Since - like most other 8-bit machines of the time - it came with an expansion port. And plenty of peripherals have been available. A special one is the Dandanator Mini built by an individual going by the name Dan Dare. Buy it or build it yourself, plug it in and immediately your dated beast awakens ready for new deeds.

The device comes with 512k of fast access memory and provides numerous features. You can load programs instantly from a simple menu, load new games and programs easily, you can pause, snapshot and restore every game state you wish and the homebrew cartridge can be used as a CP/M plug&play system as well as a Hard Disk of 460Kb. So exciting! 🤩

The Youtube channel More Fun Making It just published a very relaxing introduction video, which you definitely want to see, if you own a Spectrum or one of its clones. Should that be your cup of tea, also have a look at Multiply built by mad3001 which provides an SD card add-on and is a perfect fit here.

Do you remember Prolog? If not feel highly encouraged to delve into this '72-ish language. What makes Prolog special and noteworthy, is that it is a declarative language in which the program logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules. After entering those, one can dynamically query the system and have it compute everything that can be successfully derived from the … facts and rules. Cool stuff. And since especially declarative programming is a thing today, you might want to check out the language.

brew install gnu-prolog immediately gives you a runtime environment on a Mac and there are implementations for every red, green and pink processor architecture, that you can imagine. 

If you want to give it a spin, or just need some brain food, you have to join David Strohmaier’s journey to create a solver for standard Sudokus using Prolog.

Be warned, it definitely takes some time, but is absolutely worth the effort.

MIT students are amongst those, who change the world. MIT Professors on the other hand plant the seed, nurture and care, water and protect their students. And eventually one of their protégés becomes exactly that, a person to change the world … when she/he has dried off again from the water.

Charles Leiserson is one of these professors, and he is a really cool one. Quote: That's the great thing about algorithms. As long as you are rigorous and precise, you can be as sloppy as you want. 😏

This video on Assembly Language & Computer Architecture is a must-see for everyone getting into how computers work. It is an introduction to how assembly - or better machine code - is actually executed on a CPU. It is part of MIT OpenCourseWare and even if I assume, that you studied CS and know how that works, give this lecture a try. You will like it. Very much. Indeed.

Time for hardware again. Yeah! Are you familiar with the COMX-35? No? It was one of the few early micro/home computers, that were powered by an RCA 1802. This chip - which is less capable than for example the later Zilog Z80 or MOS 6502 - was actually the first CMOS microprocessor. And in 1983 (when I was still running around the Christmas tree with the drums in my hand) Hong Kong based COMX World Operations Ltd. released the machine into a number of countries from Australia over Europe to the former Republic of China!

TubeTime picked up from here and built that thing again. Say an inner Welcome to the COMIX-35 Home Computer. What a beauty! 

If you are bored of all your 6502 and Z80 based homebrew projects, try something new … ehm, old I wanted to say. The 1802 is harder to program due to ... #reasons, but we love challenges, don’t we? 👋

The project is super complete, comes with schematics, a bill of materials and fab files. And should someone come up with a 3D printed case … dang.

And another one to make you nervous. The MSX2 was a lovechild of Microsoft and the ASCII Coproration and was conceived in June 1983. The purpose of the machine and architecture was to somehow unify different standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period. Imagine: Like VHS but for home computers. 

The MSX later became popular especially in Japan, where around 5 million MSX-based units were sold. Holy Moly. Today of course, very few machines are to be found in working condition.

Sergey Kiselev to the rescue. My hero! The CPU is a a Z80. Garnish it with numerous 74XX series logic chips, add a little bit of time to the mix and profit. When you eventually make it, you'll be rewarded with a series of games that were initially developed only for MSX (I only say Metal Gear). 

Have a look.

Whoa, Jim Butterfield! When you hear the intro music of this one, you immediately want to buy a cinema ticket for E.T. get your BMX bike out of the garage and charge up the batteries of your WalkieTalkies. And for those who don’t know, what a BMX bike was, yes, these vertical black bars in Youtube fullscreen mode somehow resemble our TV viewing pleasure of those times. Aspect Ratio: 4:3. 📺 Who the heck needs 21:9?? Seriously … don’t get it.

Lovely piece of pixels-in-a-square-in-lots-of-frames-per-second-art published in the channel of Syd Bolton.

In Issue #08 last week you had the chance to build a brand new Apple ][. This week we travel back further in time. Retro Hack Shack aka Aaron Newcomb started to build an Apple 1. This machine is truly one of the most iconic pieces of hardware and was sold for $666.66 in 1976.

Even though this was 45 years in the past, you can still build one. Aarons video is more about the history and tips for builders, but there is more to come. Give it a try.

MS-DOS on an 8-bit Commodore? Never I hear you shout. Still, it is possible but needs some hardware. Michal Pleban does the trick and eventually you will see Norton Commander running on Commodore hardware! What a feat. Very well done Michal.

Enjoy.

Since we are a little bit more on the fun side of things today, it needs to be Mario again. Who does not love Mario?

CodyCantEatThis - a gentleman with a whopping 372.000 subscribers on Youtube - was obviously bored again. And so he decided to build a version of Mario Bros. In 3D. Yes … 3D.

In this short video he goes into surprisingly many details of the implementation. Imagine only to re-create a 3-dimensional voxel version of Mario from a 2D bitmap. Unfortunately he can not release the product - for obvious reasons. But just watching him during development is plenty of fun.

No, that is not a joke. Do you see Chuck Norris anywhere? See. The lovely team of element 14 presents did just do that: They developed their version of a working Tricorder.

Ha! Should not you know, what a Tricorder is … No, it was not Star Wars!

James - your host for the next 19 minutes and 17 seconds - builds what he calls the Baldcorder 👨‍🦲. Inspired by the Tricorder’s design, his device can measure light levels and temperature. Decide, whether this is for you. It is definitely funny.