https://frn.sh/c/history/Recent content in History onHugoen-USCopyright © Fernando Simões.Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://frn.sh/tty/Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://frn.sh/tty/My birthday is next month, so I bought myself something I’d wanted for a while: a terminal keyboard. Last year I read this article about the history of the terminal and it fascinated me. I found a DEC-style Televideo terminal keyboard from the 70s or 80s (I can’t be sure of the exact date) and took advantage of the opportunity to learn a few things. These old terminal keyboards were sold alongside a “computer terminal,” which was essentially a dumb display and input device.https://frn.sh/packet-switching/Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://frn.sh/packet-switching/I got obsessed with circuit switching a few months ago and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Telecom engineers had to solve a hard problem: in the analog age, carbon microphones converted voice into electrical signals that traveled over copper wires, with amplifiers boosting the signal across distances. In the digital age the same copper wires remained, but the approach changed - the analog signal was sampled at intervals, quantized into bits, and transmitted.