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During a recent visit to the
 Oldenburger Computermuseum (OCM) , I spotted two NorthStar Advantage computers in their reserve collection. I’d used a friend’s NorthStar Advantage to lay out our school magazine using WordStar back in 1983, so I was immediately intrigued. 
 We pulled them into the workshop and bench-tested them. One asked for a boot medium, while the other…
I love programming and people who know me also know that XSLT is my favorite language programming language. Just today, I had the opportunity to use it again and I was reminded why I like it so much: XSLT is the perfect tool for the tasks that it is designed for - It is a super sharp blade. 
 Today’s task was an integration task: I needed to devise a system in which the organizer of a…
I’ve been a systems programmer for most of my career and embraced several development paradigms. As a systems and backend focused developer, my exposure to AI systems has been small, but I worked with symbolic programming languages, rules based systems and graph databases. I have seen a lot of trends in technology, with the abundant availability of venture capital amplifying trends that promise…
I’m going to take my VAX 4000/105A to an upcoming retrocomputing
convention as part of my X.25 networking exhibit. I would also like
to provide a couple of serial ports for other exhibitors to connect
their machines too, and for that, I have a Lantronix ETS16P terminal
server. It is a relatively recent (late 1990ies) device with 16
serial ports on RJ45 connectors and…
Im April 2008 habe ich meinen Twitter-Account angelegt - Ein alter
Freund meinte, daß das toll ist und ich fand es auch sofort angenehm.
Da ich schon seit 40 Jahren chatte, war mir die Kommunikationsform
über kurze Textschnipsel gleich sympathisch, und ein gewisses Maß an
Memes und Katzenbildern in der eigenen Zeitleiste find ich auch
unterhaltsam. 
 Anfangs war Twitter…
Back in the 1980ies and before the Internet existed, the popular way
to go online were Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Typically, these were
home or personal computers owned by individuals and hooked up to a
telephone line through a modem. They ran some custom-made or later
off-the-shelf software providing functions like email, newsgroups,
file transfer and chat. Usually, they…

 When I was around 13-14 years old, home computers were just appearing
on the market. The first machines that I remember to have been sold
in the large department stores in Berlin were the Atari 400 and
800 as well as the
 TI-99/4A .
At the time, these machines were incredibly expensive, but me and my
friends often hung out in the stores to play around with…
XSLT, quite clearly. Followed by Common Lisp and Clojure — Hans Hübner (@HansHuebner) June 9, 2020 
 My reply deserves some elaboration, so here it goes: 
 What is XSLT? 
 XSLT is a document transformation language. It was conceived as part
of the Extensible Stylesheet Language
Family and was originally intended to
prepare XML documents for printing. While the…

 






 
 
 

 As luck had it, I was able to return to the Large Scale Systems
Museum and this time, I could spend four days
for an extended vintage computing retreat. Dave McGuire, the curator
and director of the museum, was kind enough to host me and let me
spend my nights in the museum, while he was asleep. 
 On my last…

 I have been tinkering with electronics since I was a kid, and since my
high school years I dreamt of building a computer from scratch. Back
then, my dream CPU was the venerable Motorola MC6809 and I spent my
lunch break drawing schematics and pondering what chips I would want
to use. That design work stayed theoretical, but recently I came
close to this dream when I…
In many cases, strings are not the right data structure, but in some
they are. I need to parse a command line into words, and as I’m
writing C++, I went shopping for the equivalent of split as it is
available in every other language. Not so in C++. The question,
obviously, has been asked a hundred times on Stackoverflow, and there
is a canonical blog
post…
I’m working on building a DAB+ radio to replace the one that I have in
our bathroom. The one we have is not terrible, but there are some
things that I don’t like. Also, it does not have the few features
that I really want, and I am not aware of any commercial solutions for
them: 
 
 Fast startup: I want the radio to turn on when I press the…
A dear friend told me that HUGO is how blogging
is done today and as it was time to finally move away from
 Blogger , I decided to give it a
spin. Hugo is a static site generator that uses
 Markdown as
its authoring format. While I certainly have my reservations against
Markdown (or anything that is not XML, for that matter), I’ll gladly
admit that it makes…
This is a personal blog on code, vintage hardware and electronics
written by Hans Hübner. 
 
 I am a programmer and electronics tinkerer. My hobby is also my
profession . In this blog, I mostly write about
stuff that I do in my free time. 
 You can find my open source code on
 GitHub . I’m also on
 Twitter . If you want to reach me
by email, write to…
I like to write debugging information to an ostream instead of calling
a logging function. 
 retry:
 if (write(_fd, request.buffer(), request.length()) != request.length()) {
 if (errno == EAGAIN) {
 _debug << "retry" << endl;
 goto retry;
 }
 throw system_error(errno, generic_category(), "Could not write to serial port");
 }
 
 By default, I don’t…