Michael Steil

LodgeNet Reverse Engineering

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Many hotels (at least in the USA) equip their room TVs with a “LodgeNet” entertainment system. The TV will show regular free television channels, but also have an interactive channel controlled by the remote that features video on demand and video games. read more

Bringup History of Mac OS X

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The heritage of different operating systems has been discussed many times. Mac OS X includes code from Mach and BSD, AmigaOS is based on TRIPOS, MS-DOS is a CP/M-86 clone and Windows NT is modeled after VMS. But what machines and operating systems were used for cross-compilation and bringup of these systems? In order to find this out about Mac OS X, I talked to a few people working at NEXT and Apple, and people that worked on Mach and BSD. read more

Amiga/Lorraine Mugs

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Every touristy place has them: Souvenirs with given names on them. If you have an uncommon name, or a friend with an uncommon name, you might look through the whole collection – and notice that they have generic ones like “#1 FRIEND” (i case you really don’t find your friend’s name), and, sometimes, generic ones in Spanish. read more

Zuse Z1 at the Deutsches Technikmuseum

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My last blog post showed the Zuse Z3 (1939-1941), the world’s first working digital Turing-complete computer. Let’s go back two more steps: The Zuse Z1 (1936-1938) shared its design with the Z3: It read its program from punched film and used floating point as its internal representation of numbers. But since it was all mechanical, it never worked reliably. read more