Twitt jr

infinity

#1 – 12:01 PM May 13, 2009

dang! the gauntlet has been thrown down! i feel challenged to fire up my old Commodore 64, fabricate an IEEE-488 to Ethernet adapter, (potentially) modify kontiki to cope with it and write a basic program to alternately post messages to my twitter account and display them in 40 column glory.

O_M

#2 – 1:11 PM May 13, 2009

...This is fracking brilliant! As an old "Peanut Hacker", if I still had my old heavily-modded Jr I'd be setting this up myself!

...One other thing I've found about Twitter is that it apparently accepts the full ANSI set of characters, which has me wondering how it would digest the "tokens" of a C-64 or VIC-20. Who knows? Twitter just might be the rebirth of all those old classic 4K boxes that have been sitting around collecting dust for two decades plus!

feedingfashionistas

#3 – 2:26 PM May 13, 2009

The way he does it is pretty darn crafty- there's a server box running Linux with custom Ruby code that pulls down tweets. The server and PCjr communicate via two modems (and two phone lines) every so often, sending the new hotness to the BASIC prog on the jr.

I have to admit, I was hoping he'd found some way to make the jr actually participate in an honest-to-god network, like all the C64 hackers and their homebrew ethernet cards.

dculberson

#4 – 4:35 PM May 13, 2009

FeedingGashionistas, it really is participating in a network - just not an Ethernet network. A modem and phone line comprise a slow form of network.

I totally love this. It reminds me of all these things that I came up with to do with a pair of awesome serial terminals that I ended up giving away. Sigh - not enough time or space in the world for everything I would love to do.

strider_mt2k

#5 – 6:33 PM May 13, 2009

I love it.

They should have a land line twitter BBS.

Anonymous Anonymous

#6 – 9:56 PM May 13, 2009

Yeah, this really makes me wish my PCjr didn't get soaked when a set of pipes broken and then get left behind when we moved. I wish I would have kept its SCSI drive. :(

Tom M

#7 – 8:02 AM May 14, 2009

Now I have a proper project for my Tandy Model 100. If only I could find my Zoomer...

Anonymous Anonymous

#8 – 2:18 PM May 14, 2009

That's nothing. I tweet from my Merlin™!

O_M

#9 – 7:59 PM May 14, 2009

...Otay, who's going to get Twitter to work over a basic Micom & VT-52 next?

MBBrutman

#10 – 9:04 PM May 14, 2009

This isn't Twitter, but you can get IRC running natively on a 256K Jr complete with the TCP/IP stack. :-)

http://brutman.com/mTCP/IRCjr.html

But I will give Alex style points for using a stock machine and Cartridge BASIC - that brings back some great memories.