I have a few more posts to write about the current Bitcoin and cryptocurrency situation, but first I want to write about a few topics that are dearer to my heart: retrocomputing and the hybrid of old and new that is IBM Z, an architecture that’s backwards compatible with software written for the original System/360, IBM’s first mainframe architecture designed for longevity. That longevity is what interests me. The first systems shipped in 1965, and z/OS can still run object code compiled back then, for customers who require that ability. Why does it use EBCDIC? Because it always has.
I also want to write about my history with the Commodore Amiga computers and why and how I decided to start writing my own new Amiga 4000 emulator, using the mature and capable QEMU as the backbone and to provide the m68k CPU emulation. I’m working on just the chipset emulation, but that is much, much trickier than you might expect, because everything is intertwined and there are a lot of unusual graphics capabilities that have to be emulated perfectly.
One other post I need to write soon will be a quick recap of the steps I took to set up this blog on my Pi 400 and get IPv4 and IPv6 working, along with SSL, from the router port forwarding to setting up Apache, WordPress, the plugins, Postfix email in/out (using Gmail for SMTP since outbound port 25 is completely blocked by my ISP), Akismet spam filtering, Google Analytics, and so on.
Feel free to comment below if there are any particular things you want me to write about in the coming months. I feel very energized by having my own blog that’s running on a little self-contained PC that uses about 4W of power. And it’s sitting 99% idle right now. Computing power is so cheap as to be practically free, and the crypto clowns are pretending that it’s something precious to hoard and pretend that the receipts from having squandered it matter to humanity in some way. They don’t.
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