Book Review - You Are Not Expected To Understand This

Yes, that's the title of the book.

"You Are Not Expected To Understand This.  How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World".  Edited by Torie Bosch

Read the other Amazon reviews.  I'm not the only one who thinks this book is a pile of Woke Revisionist History.

I understood this to be a series of stories about the early days of computers written by various people, so I wasn't surprised at the disjointedness of the book.  But I was sickened by the stories as seen through the Reality Distortion Field of the Woke.

The first few chapters left somewhat of a bad taste in my mouth as the authors downplayed all roles by men and focused on the roles by women, no matter how small.  That a woman left the field was put down to "being pushed out by the men" as opposed to their decisions to do something else - oh, like raise a family.

But chapter 5 - Basic and the Illusion of Coding Empowerment - really made me put this book into the Goodwill pile.   The Woke trash just in the first paragraph was nauseating.  I skimmed the rest of the book and the last chapter is "Encoding Gender" and that's all I need to say there.

On top of that, the stories were poorly researched.  If I had done any of these for my Computer Science classes when I was in college, I would have failed the class.

NuXT - update

The new PS/2 keyboard arrived.  I hooked it up and it seems to solve the "glitchy" problem that I saw on the other keyboard.  So that's good.

I also picked up a good floppy cable.  I verified it worked with the current 3.5" drive.

I retested the 360K and 1.2M floppy drives and they all still failed.  The 360K drive just wouldn't spin when accessed.  The 1.2M drive would spin, but "track 0 bad" kept coming up when formatting a known good disk - and that's after I gave the drive a good cleaning.  Like I said before, no surprise.

But I did discover why I was getting some strange things in testing before.  I had left the resistor packs on and I had them hooked up before the twist in the cable (i.e. in the middle).  Ya, that won't work because those resistor packs terminate the bus.

Anyway, a new (smaller) case is coming.  I may bid on the new 360K IBM drive that's on eBay just to have a real vintage-like system (we'll see).

Overall, I'm still happy with the NuXT, but if I knew then what I know now, I might not have purchased it.

Another update:

I was doing some research and I ran across this video titled "Why most 5.25" Floppy Drives seem broken, but aren't!"  So using that data, I retested my 1.2M and 360K floppy drives and they both work!  Yay!

Now the hard part is figuring out which one I should use.

Update:

The 360K one.  It has a black face, which matches the case.

NuXT - first impressions

So the case arrived and so did the NuXT.

The plan:

• Use my old 5.25" disk drives to give it a vintage flavor.  I also need a way to create boot disks since there's no USB on it.
• Use the VGA card that I have.
• Use the Sound Blaster card that I have.

dl;dr  The Plan didn't work out well.

First, the 5.25" drives and/or floppy cables are bad.  I have a new cable arriving soon - so it's a known good, and not confused with an MFM control cable (which has the twist in the wrong place).  So I'll check out the drives once again.

I did get a 3.5" disk drive working, though.

The Sound Blaster is coming out for the simple reason that the programs that I wanted to use with it simply won't work on the NuXT.  Either too slow or need a 386 system to run.  But that's not a surprise.

Other software is off for the same reason: too slow or needs a better CPU.  But that's expected.  The vast majority of the games that I really want to play work fine, though.

On a positive note: The Sierra games work fine.  On my FreeDOS system, the text is garbled due to VGA incompatibilities.

The only other problem is the keyboard.  I have only 1 PS/2 keyboard.  It's a keyboard off a old portable.  It's XT/AT switchable (currently set for AT) that I've used on the FreeDOS system just fine.  But on the NuXT, if I type too fast, it glitches.  I've tried the troubleshooting steps in the NuXT manual and nothing yet.  I ordered a new PS/2 keyboard to see if that fixes the problem.

Overall, I'm happy with it, though.  But I purchased way too big a case for it.

NuXT

I finally decided to get a NuXT.  This is basically an IBM-XT motherboard, built out of modern parts.

The FreeDOS setup is nice, but it's missing some things:

1. Sound Blaster.  FreeDOS can't emulate a Sound Blaster, so you have to put a real one in.  I picked up one for the PC hardware that I have, but it doesn't work with DOS.  The hardware is too new and the Sound Blaster will only work with Windows (think WinModem sound card).

2. Speed.  Bad to say, but the FreeDOS set up is too fast.  That's nice for some things, but overall use is sort of painful sometimes.

Price wasn't too bad.  I have an ISA Sound Blaster and an ISA VGA card.  So all I needed was the NuXT (minus the VGA board) and a case.

My hope is that it will allow me to get the feeling that I want without the annoyances in the FreeDOS system.