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Personal computer CPU pioneer Chuck Peddle dies at 82
Chuck Peddle, one of the most important engineers of the early home computing era, has died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 82. He's best known as the lead designer for MOS Technology's 6502, a low-cost processor (just $25 in 1975) that found its way into first-wave home computers like the Apple II and Commodore PET. Variants of that core design found their way into influential consoles like the Atari 2600 and NES. If you have nostalgia for the days when 8-bit computers were cutting edge, you likely owe a debt of gratitude to Peddle.
Metalab wires its Blinkenwall to run from Commodore 64, gives no word on the obligatory Tetris port (video)
We've seen some ambitious Blinkenwalls in our time. Nearly all of the attention is unsurprisingly focused on the wall, however, and not on the often clever hardware and software behind it. Vienna's Metalab wants to shift the limelight by kicking it old school. Instead of the thoroughly modern Arduino and Fonera hotspot that normally light up Metalab's 45-block glass wall, the team's Blinken64 project swaps in a Commodore 64 with a cassette drive and the unusual Final Cartridge III feature extender. Getting lights to strobe requires dusting off more than just hardware -- all the animations have to be written in assembly-level MOS Technology 6510 code that even our nerdy parents might forget. The result you'll see in the video after the break is a far cry from the relatively easy, web-accessible hardware that normally powers such blinkenlight creations, but it's also a testament to how relevant classic technology can remain when it's in the right hands.
A new player for Ministry of Sound's fifteenth birthday
Ministry of Sound has dropped a new player to celebrate the brand turning fifteen, and it turns out you'll have to plunk down £179.99 to show your love to the prolific party host. In return, you'll get the MP055C6, which features 6GB of "internal memory" (flash? hard drive? who knows.), a color screen and a docking station that matches the player's shiny "piano black" casing. Voice / insanely loud club music recording comes standard, along with ten tracks from the MoS's collection. Another notable (but not new) player that we spotted on MoS's site is the MP3 player-in-a-clip MP097 Clipstix. Coming in both 256MB and 512MB, pink and black varieties, this little player looks like a rebadge of Evergreen's player from late last year. As the Ministry would say -- if it were a real Ministry -- this concludes our MoS broadcast for the day.[Via TechDigest]
