Incredible low contrast font color in use there. Looks like about 0x002000 on pure black (per Mk-1 eyeball).

What possesses people to go for these barely perceptible color schemes?

.. a few minutes later ..

Ok, the crazy low contrast was on the initial landing page. Things have somewhat improved after prodding somewhat blindly at it.

I'll let the question stand though, bc why do that for what's going to be people's first impression?

That 6809 bewitched my middle school self. Having already learnt Z80 assembly language, the 6809 just looked so much more elegant. It had index registers that were actually useful! It had position independent code! It could do multiplication in one instruction! So when faced with choosing a CoCo or a C64 .. of course I chose the machine with the MUL instruction. Naturally, within mere months, that horrid 32x16 black on green display forced the harsh realization that a computer is more than just the CPU, that the support chips could actually be far more interesting. Who cares about a multiply instruction, when you could have sprites and 3 voice sound?

My worst hardware choice (later) was to save with a monochrome VGA screen to afford a 24pin Fujitsu dot matrix vs the 9pin Epson. It forged the person I am today.

Go fast and break things, meet go slow and make things.

Yes, in the old systems, you'd get about 90 volts AC down the line to ring the mechanical bell ringer. Once saw a guy nearly fall off a ladder, splicing phone lines with bare hands. He thought the relatively low voltage was safe enough, but then someone rang him in the middle of the job.

I know 30+ years ago as I kid I learned this in my parents basement as I was rigging something up.

It is more the surprise, as if one is ignorant to this fact it is not expected at all.

I had to refresh my memory about the hybrid use of AC and DC current in telephone networks.

The Alternating Current signals could be used over longer distances and were effective at making the bells ring, moving the clapper back and forth. This back-and-forth is exactly what makes AC so deadly in the body, should it cross through your cardiac muscles, for example, and set the muscles twitching at 50 or 60 times per second.

There’s nothing inherently deadly about AC nor anything inherently safe about DC. If there’s enough voltage available to drive current through your body, then electricity is deadly regardless of if it’s AC or DC.

In general AC tends to be a little safer than DC, because the voltage is constantly reversing, which means it’s constantly passing through 0V, creating moments where you don’t have current driving through your body and forcing all your muscles to contract. Those 0V crossings create moments where you can let go of whatever is electrocuting you. DC on the other hand has no such 0 crossings, if there’s enough voltage there to drive current through you, then all your muscles will be stuck contracting until either the power is turned off, or until they’re all so fried they’re not physically capable of contracting anymore.

That could probably be one failure mode.

I'm well familiar with 6502 shenanigans, but never really looked into 2600 programming before. Looking into that source file though, I got the impression that Atari mapped the I/O right into zero page? Kind of surprising, but I guess with the 6507 the effective address space was only 8K, so why not. Certainly if you're trying to get all your computing done in the blanking intervals, it'd help if banging the video chip could be done that much quicker as well.

Half of zero page is the TIA, yes (although the registers only go up to $3D IIRC). The other half is RAM.

  >> If you ignore a dependency and try to fix it later, it will be more expensive. More time, more effort, more thinking. And it will require the same level of coordination that you tried to avoid initially.

Would add that, if you only address fixing these dependencies one by one, as they manifest, i.e. continue in the evolutionary way, you risk resolving those parts of your Big System into some local minima; over time, you go from lots of little presumed-independent bubbles, to an intermediate stage with fewer but larger medium sized bubbles. When those get into conflict, the pain will be correspondingly greater.

What do you do with an impossible situation? You do what you can. This maniacal robot stove somehow evokes a sense of desperation we can instinctively empathize with. A fiction of an intelligent machine, facing doom, deserving of pity. Or at least I like that idea better than just some mundane physical explanation.

Is whole-word dyslexia a thing? I thought I saw "Making Ferrite Inductor Cores", and got excited to learn DIY techniques for making custom shapes/blend cores. Still a good article, though.

It was about 110 chips on the original II wasn't it? Or maybe it's the II+ I'm thinking of. Anyway, it was a boatload of MSI parts.

I only remember the II+, but both were dense with chips. The IIe had fewer chips as I recall. That level of complexity wasn't unheard of at the time. When the IBM PC came out, only a few of the chips were in sockets (the CPU and RAM/ROM), and people were nervous about repairability, but IBM pointed out that they had studied it to death over the years, and that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.