Virtual Internet Teletype

I came across this page, while hunting down the source code to WinVN before NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre picked it up.

Do you remember those old movies where the news is coming across the ‘wire’? Or better they are using the wireless?

I’m not sure if they still do broadcast over the air, I suspect they do, but you’ll naturally be required to have all kinds of special radio and teletype equipment. Which naturally takes times, money and effort. And my attention span is WAY too short for that kind of thing.

To get this to run, I’m using VLC, and MMTTY. If you don’t want to go deaf, or you don’t want the ‘full’ experience, then I’d suggest Virtual Audio Cables.

So basically it works like this. You can click on one of the two links below and

http://65.243.191.51:8000/listen.pls
http://65.243.191.51:8030/listen.pls

Which will then kick off your streaming audio player… If you can withstand the noise, crank it up so your microphone picks up the noise… 🙂

Then launch MMTTY and it will listen on the microphone, and suddenly start to translate the bauddot!

mmtty in action

If you have issues, or wish to finagle the audio devices, or perhaps to use VAC so you don’t have to listen to it, first set VLC to use a different audio output (Tools -> Preferences) then I used the Direct X output feature so I can specify which audio card to use.

VLC audio preferences

Then to configure MMTTY, go under Options -> Setup MMTTY, click on the sound card tab, and you can set the input.

mmtty preferences

And there we go.

The Itty news feed is user driven, so feel free to get the mailer mentioned on the page, and try to submit some news.

There is a lot going on today, esp with the earthquakes that are ongoing in Japan, and the unrest, and populist uprisings in the ME.

But now you can ‘enjoy’ the news in a really old fashioned way.

funny joke…

Well I bought some “SolarNet” netscout from SUN that allows Win16 clients to tunnel TCP/IP over an IPX network to a Solaris 2.4 x86/sparc box to access the internet… It is interesting in that it has NAT like functionality over a different network..

Sometimes we have to remember that LOTS of people in the mid 90’s only had IPX routers and an exclusive Netware environment so all this ‘internet’ talk had to be phased in, and a product like this would have allowed for a rapid deployment of people on the internet….

Anyways going thru the manual, it’s kind of funny. It’s FULL of Buckaroo Banzai jokes, talk about overthrusters, and whatnot. Then in the email client, there is this gem:

From: [email protected] (P.D.)
Subject: Careful with that Shop-Vac, Eugene!

Cleaners Vacuum Family’s Cat
—————————-
From the Ottawa Citizen, 14 May 1991

Sudbury, Ont. – Cleaners who used an industrial-strength vacuum to clean air ducts at a local home were surprised to learn that their vacuum had sucked up a cat named Pebbles.

 

“We got a call from one of my guys that the truck was meowing,” said Colin Firth, owner of Sudbury Air Duct Cleaning Systems. Firth said he thought the workers were joking until Pebbles’s owner Kristina Anderson called to say her cat had been missing since the ducts were cleaned.

Naturally SUN had credited John Whorfin for sending the whole thing..

Anyways I thought it was interesting to see what happens when tech writers run amuck.

Sadly John Bigboote didn’t seem to get any mention…. I guess management drew the line somewhere.

Oh those zany internet people!

Unix v7 for the x86!

Ok so this isn’t exactly emulation, since you can already run Unix v7 via simh’s PDP11 emulator, however you cannot overlook the coolness factor of this. They have ported v7 to the i486 cpu.

http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/index.html

In other news I’ve done a very preliminary port of the SLiRP stack from Qemu to SIMH. What is cool about this, is that it allows user mode networking so that you do not have to configure any drivers on the host. Currently I have 4.3BSD-Reno running under the MicroVAX II simulator. I’m going to add some extra utilities (gzip/gcc/gnumake/ircii-4/lynx?/wget?/apache?), convert the SMM into PDF’s, and make it into an install package, much like the 4.2BSD on sourceforge.

If anyone want’s to alpha test it, let me know, otherwise the next post will most likely be the release of 4.3BSD-RENO with NAT!

Happy Thanksgiving!