Today I’ve got two sites of interest for the retro computing crowd. The first is the Retrozone: New school tech for old school gamers. Here you can find popular console gaming system controllers that have been converted to USB devices so you can use them for gaming on your PC (perhaps with an emulator for some of those old games). They also have kits to convert some of the less popular (or available) controllers you might own to USB. Such a kit might also be useful if you desired to build your own controller from the ground up.

Secondly, I recently heard about a possible connection between an early Atari interface and USB. The Atari museum website seems to agree:

Atari’s first two computers were called the Atari 400 and Atari 800 Personal Computer Systems. These computers had a large assortment of “Intelligent” peripherals which communicated through a custom bus called the “SIO” (Serial I/O) which compared to today standards is a rather simplistic version of the USB (Universal Serial Bus). In fact the USB and the Atari SIO have a lot more in common then many would think. One of Atari’s original computer engineers, Joe Decuir who created the Atari SIO bus is also one of the team of engineers at Microsoft to help design and holds patents on the USB.

While I don’t know the specifics of the SIO interface or how it compares with USB (other than just being a serial interface) it is an interesting tidbit of knowledge and something I don’t remember hearing anything about when USB was introduced.

Check out this BBC video of a test drive in the GM Highwire. This experimental car has a few interesting tricks up it’s sleeve. In fact, if I was in marketing I would call a production model the “GM Chameleon”.

Scott Bradner’s recent NetworkWorld column “What’s to become of the Internet?” pointed me towards two reports (1992 and 2006) by internet arcitect Dave Clark discussing how he feels a new, better Internet should work. Yet I disagree with some of the primary changes he proposes.

For example, Clark would like to see a basic security architecture that includes authentication of internet users. Certainly, this could bring about great changes such as the tracking and prevention of worms, viruses and spam. At what cost? Perhaps the cost of anonymity. While some would argue the benefists outweigh the costs and security requires authentication I would argue that much of the success of the Internet is based in our ability to be anonymous (or at least have the feeling of anonymity) when we choose. By building authentication into the architecture it would be much easier to track just where each user goes and what they do on the Net. It also legitimizes such tracking “in the name of security”. Just as importantly, how would people’s use of the Internet change if their identity was tied to their activities. Would the Internet be as successful or pervaisive as it is today?

Author Ross Anderson has convinced his publisher (Wiley) to let him make his book, Security Engineering, available for free online. I’ll let his reasons speak for themselves:

My goal in making the book freely available is twofold. First, I want to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I think that many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. I don’t expect to lose money by making this book available for free: more people will read it, and those of you who find it useful will hopefully buy a copy. After all, a proper book is half the size and weight of 300-odd sheets of laser-printed paper in a ring binder. (My colleague David MacKay found that putting his book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. Book publishers are getting the message faster than the music or software folks.)

If more authors and publishers felt this way the world would be a better place. If I’m going to read an interesting book I’m going to buy it and carry it around in dead-tree format but for searching quickly for something that “I know I’ve read somewhere” it’s hard to beat a digital format.