Unlike the today’s consumer computer market, the 1980s were the wild west in comparison. There were all kinds of different, incompatible operating systems, hardware, and programs, all competing against one another, and with essentially no networking to tie everything together. Some of these products were incredibly niche as well, only running one program or having a limited use case to keep costs down. Such was the Convergent WorkSlate, a computer that ran only a spreadsheet with any programs also needing to be built into a spreadsheet.

Upon booting the device, the user is presented with a fairly recognizable blank spreadsheet, albeit with a now-dated LCD display (lacking a backlight) and a bespoke keyboard and cursor that wouldn’t have allowed for easy touch typing. The spreadsheet itself is quite usable though, complete with formatting tools and the capability to use formulas like a modern spreadsheet program would. It also hosted a tape deck for audio and data storage, a modem for communicating with other devices, and an optional plotter-style printer. The modem port is how [Old VCR] eventually interfaces with the machine, although as one can imagine is quite a task for a piece of small-batch technology from the 80s like this. After learning how to send and receive information, a small game is programmed into the machine and then a Gopher interface is built to give the device limited Internet connectivity.

The investigation that [Old VCR] goes into on this project to get this obsolete yet unique piece of hardware running and programmed to do other tasks is impressive, and worth taking a look at especially because spreadsheets like this aren’t Turing-complete, leading to a few interesting phenomenon that most of us wouldn’t come across in the modern computing world. Since only around 60,000 units were ever made it’s difficult to come across these machines, but if you want to take a look at the spreadsheet world of the 80s without original hardware you can still run Lotus 1-2-3 natively in Linux today.

Thanks to [Cameron] for the tip!

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

From the “Tech Doesn’t Make Everything Better” department, we’ve got news of a vulnerability in high-end racing bicycles that opens up a new vector for cheating. While our bike has been sitting sadly idle for the last twenty-odd years, apparently shifting technology has changed a lot, to the point where high-end derailleurs are no longer connected to handlebar-mounted shift lever by Bowden cables but now have servos that are linked to the shifters via Bluetooth. Anyone with more than a few minutes of experience with Bluetooth accessories and their default “123456” passwords can see where this is going. While there are no specific instances of cheating detailed in the story, one can imagine the hilarity to be had with a Flipper Zero while sitting on the side of a road at a course upgrade. To be sure, there are other ways to cheat, but we’re not sure we see the advantages of wireless shifting that offset the risks in this case.

Only 94 percent? A recent study claims to have quantified business spreadsheet errors, finding that 94% have critical problems. They came to this conclusion by mining literature from journal articles dating back to 1987, but rather than looking for papers with associated spreadsheets and analyzing them for errors, they looked for papers that discussed spreadsheet quality assurance. So this is sort of a meta-study, which makes us doubt the 94% finding. Still, we’d say it’s a safe bet that there are a lot of spreadsheets out there with critical errors, and that spreadsheet abuse is pretty rampant overall.

They say that if you’re not looking for your next job, you’re just waiting to get fired. That’s pretty much a tautology since there are only two — OK, three — ways out of any job, but it’s still good to always be looking for your next opportunity. So you might want to check out eejobboard, which allows you to do a parametric job search in the electrical engineering space. Pretty cool stuff.

And finally, we don’t have any information on this other than what you see in the video, but we’d love to learn more about these hardware FFTs. The video shows two implementations, one using a Zync 7020 FPGA, and one that uses over a thousand 74HC-series chips to do the same thing. If anyone out there knows the OP on this one, we’d love to get in touch.