Imagine the dry humor of Hitchiker's Guide crossed with a generally Middle Earth setting, but with a good bit of contemporary (well, 90s/00-ish) cultural references mixed in, and multiply by the fact there are literally dozens of Discworld books, and it's incredible that finding another Pratchett fan is so rare.

About the worst mal-ware it can have is a boot sector that installs a "terminate, stay resident" (TSR) that copies itself onto any floppy that gets inserted.

I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine until idk about 2006, at which point something happened (muons?) and it would go into some kind of panic state just after bringing up the desktop. Hive corruption. I tried on and off for a couple of years to repair it, no luck. It wasn't just about the files on the HD, it was easy enough to transplant the drive and read/write anything, it was that I really liked the way I had the environment configured. Sure, it was all kind of moot, but it became a kind of personal windmill to resurrect this old thing. In the end, I booted an XP CD in it, and selected 'upgrade', and voila, it was Duncan Idaho, back from the dead.

Anyway.. loved win2k, but not a fan of the hive.

Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.

But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.

From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.

The vertical deflection drive appears to have some feedback, so maybe that could constitute an oscillator, but I can't see any feedback at all in the horizontal section, it looks entirely feed-forward. I get the impression they were just integrating the square wave into a ramp. The diagram shows 15us low out of only 50us total line time, which seems like quite unlike the typical 15.75 kHz sync of the time. I recall getting hold of the 6845 datasheet and trying in earnest to understand how to program that chip, and was baffled that the reference set of register values wouldn't produce a display. The fact I was missing at the time was that one had to start from 20kHz for the horizontal refresh.

(The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)

command_not_found_handle() { echo ?SN ERROR }

OK, so I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Evidently they play a series of beeps all at the same pitch except for the occasional oddball at a different pitch, to see if or when the hippocampus takes notice. Except the owner of said hippocampus is otherwise unconscious. Fascinating..