FoxBall☭

Thinking about one of my all-time favourite news stories, where a guy accidentally found out his wife is a world champion Tetris player and catalogued their trip to a competition to set a record

"It's funny," I told Flewin. "We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She's weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem."

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

"Oh, my!"

After I hung up the phone, I went to the bedroom and woke my wife, Lori.

this is an Olivetti ETV2700, a typewriter/word processor from 1988 that runs MS-DOS on a 286. It is a completely ordinary PC-AT inside, as far as I know; I suspect the typewriter is just connected over an internal parallel port, or at least they've supplied a TSR for it, because I can output to it with the print screen key, or by echoing stuff to > LPT1.

per the files that came with it, this was still being used in 2019 by some business. that's over 30 years of service, and the damn thing still works PERFECTLY, daisywheel printer and all. The software is also fairly sophisticated, and it includes a TSR to enable the custom keys even in other DOS apps, so you can hit the TPWR button at any moment to pull up the live typewriter interface as an overlay over whatever else you're doing. Very, very cool, especially for 88!

sadly, the original CRT has been lost. I thought this used composite output, but it's actually (very surprisingly!!!) a completely proprietary video format! It uses an RCA connector but runs at what I think is 70Hz; I suspect it's essentially "MDA with composite sync." I tried literally 8 or 10 different displays and capture devices with no success, until I finally had the idea to plug it into my Extron scaler on the green pin of a VGA adapter; the Extron, naturally, snapped into sync instantly. Beast of a device. King of devices.

my only regret: this isn't the earlier ETV-260, which was a CP/M machine. i could have run fucking rogue on that. i mean. i can run rogue on this, but, comma,

youtube giving me even more reasons to use youtube-dl