Projects

Atomic Number Generator
A the very dawn of electronic computing machinery, 1948, the Rand Corporation built an electronic machine with which to generate the content...

Atomic Number Generator
A the very dawn of electronic computing machinery, 1948, the Rand Corporation built an electronic machine with which to generate the content...

Book review: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
the RAND Corporation, 1955 Free Press Publishers, Glencoe Illinois This is a strange book, possibly the oddest book I own, and I have...

COLD WAR 1 U.S. INFORMATIONAL FILMS
This is the official distribution of WPS-approved informational films originally distributed by various branches of the U.S. governmen...

COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "mach...

Civil Defense Logo Dies at 67, and Some Mourn Its Passing
The Civil Defense symbol, left, born in 1939 and familiar to generations of Americans, has been replaced by an emergency ...

Civil Defense film strips
Below are some representative images from some Civil-Defense 35mm film strips I purchased from Xerxes Books' 'atomic ephemera' list....

Desktop Atomic Pile
The world needs a good, portable desk-top atomic pile, suitable for demonstration purposes. Used properly, harm to life and surroundings w...

Device test images from wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov
In the late 1990's LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) had a public web server running on what later turned out to be a classified machine...

EDE: portrait of Edward Teller
"He's a danger to all that is important. I really do think it would have been a better world without Teller" -- physicist I. ...

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
Below is a copy of John von Neumann's EDVAC Report, in 150dpi image form. For some reason I was unable to find a copy of this famous p...

Gas Tube Number Generator
(25 July 2012 page under construction; images are temporary, machine is not complete) Randomness isn't a property of anything. It isn...

INPUT/OUTPUT
by Tom Jennings Revised 27 July 1999 Input/output, I/O, is the klunky and crude write-off phrase for the only part of symbolic ma...

Model 47 Trinity Diorama
A measurable analog of the Trinity Site and surrounding area, as it appeared shortly after 6 July 1945. As is well known, land may te...

National labs
Likely all obsolete or get you on some post-9/11 blacklist for clicking on them....

Nuclear Films: Updated July 11, 1996
Note: Experimental films by independent film-makers are marked "EF". Films that are so marked usually aren't available at local vi...

Obsolete Forgeries
In winter 2000 I did a three-part cable TV show that "explained" the installation of objects I had installed in the lobby of Viacom's ACCE...

Review of Andrew Hodges' book, Alan Turing: the Enigma
by Tom Jennings <tomj at wps dot com>, April 1999 Please refer to the Alan Turing homepage, and to my Story Teller. One of th...

Rocks and Code installation
My Rocks and Code installation explores western science's "belief" in scientific objectivity, examining the interconnected histories o...

Rocks and Code, MFA thesis
University of California Master of Fine Arts degree concentration in Art, Computation, Engineering 2009 my 2009 UCI MFA thesis...

Story Teller
Story Teller is a self-contained but ever-expanding system for, well, telling stories, which are stored as rows of tiny holes in long...

The Earth's Satellite
This is a 45 rpm vinyl record made of the Soviet Unions Sputnik satellite circling the earth, a sound recording made from earth. It doesn't...

pixel eye
Pixel Eye was built for my Rocks and Code installation. It's sole purpose is to provide visitor-reactive waves of ambient simulated Geiger c...

An assortment of Radiacs
Tom Jennings, 1997 revised, 6 Feb 2000 'Radiac', or sometimes 'radiacmeter', is the generic word for radiation detection and meas...

Donald Davis' space art
(no excerpt)...

An annotated history of some character codes
by Tom Jennings email: tomj (at) wps . com most recently revised 29 October, 2004 revision history Entire contents copyright Tom Je...

BURROUGHS CORP. NIXIE FAMILY INDICATOR TUBES.
by Tom Jennings, tomj @ wps . com; last updated 31 Jan 1999 The capabilities of informational displays have historically lagged other...

Bits, Bauds, & Modulation rates
Serial communications, here meaning RS-232 and current loop 1999, revised slightly February 2005 mark and space -------------- S...

Book review: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
the RAND Corporation, 1955 Free Press Publishers, Glencoe Illinois This is a strange book, possibly the oddest book I own, and I have...

Burroughs Corp. Nixie and Panaplex application notes
While there's sufficient information in the net and elsewhere to light up Nixies and make them work (see my Nixie datasheets) but as far...

Burroughs Nixie additional datasheets
Here are a few random datasheets that don't quite fit in the rest of the tube database scheme. These are courtesy David Forbes (www.cath...

COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "mach...

Computer music system for my 1970 AMC Hornet
(2009 note: I abandoned this project after three years of work; the software and hardware worked great, but the power supplies kept popping ...

Cubic Corporation V-45 Digital Voltmeter
4 digit resolution, 0.01%, +/- 1 digit accuracy claimed Serial Number 275 26 transistors, 4 telephone steppers, 10 steps/sec. rack m...

Data General NOVA4
Tom Jennings, updated 2 Nov 2006 Tom Jennings, updated 8 March 2005 (Bob R. is now the lucky owner of this machine now. I was never goi...

Drum memory computer data from Huskey & Korn's COMPUTER HANDBOOK
(no excerpt)...

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
Below is a copy of John von Neumann's EDVAC Report, in 150dpi image form. For some reason I was unable to find a copy of this famous p...

General Radio Model 723c Electronic Fork
This lovely device is an electronic frequency standard dating from the 1940's or early 1950's, a large tuning fork with a vacuum tube amplif...

INPUT/OUTPUT
by Tom Jennings Revised 27 July 1999 Input/output, I/O, is the klunky and crude write-off phrase for the only part of symbolic ma...

LGP-21 Documentation
In this section I'll accumulate documentation for the LGP-21 (and LGP-30, in the case of software, with which the '21 is partly...

Librascope/General Precision LGP-21 Computer
Tom Jennings, updated 16 September 2004 15 February 2003 This is the documentation for my Librascope/General Precision LGP-21 comp...

Number and character representation within computers
How is a number (quantity) represented, stored in memory, or sent via some communications protocol? There is no "real" or "right" way. Whe...

On holy wars and a plea for peace
This 1980 tale by Danny Cohen documents a now-forgotten (but ever-present) story about how data is transmitted serially over data links. Th...

Paper tape
Paper tape is a data storage medium from a past century. It's roots are in mid-19th-century telegraphy. The cliche "dit dit dah da...

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
[ A letter to the editor of Datamation, volume 29 number 7, July 1983. I've long ago lost my dog-eared photocopy, but I believe this was...

Royal McBee/Librascope General Precision LGP-30 serial drum electron tube computer
--> These are just a few photos I took of the Computer Museum's LGP-30. You can find a few documents about it on the net with a...

U.S.TTY/ITA2 to ASCII translation programs
The original contents of this page have been superceded by the history of character codes page. It now only contains the ITA :: ...

Using Photomultipliers in Two-Wire Probe Configurations
The following diagram depicts how a PMT operates in the two-wire probe configuration. The probe wire must supply dynode resistor strin...

Various fine instruments of the past
Teletype Model 28 Teletypewriter. A mainstay of communications for a generation (the one before mine; I grew up on the '33), the mode...

ping stick
the ping stick demonstrates some ideas implicit in embodied cognition, the philosophical idea that, in essence, what we call 'mind...

the Charactron
1. THE HARDWARE The Charactron (sometimes branded a Typotron), a special-purpose electron tube, was a peculiar device with a brief...

CPM-80 diskette contents
Diskette contents listed below; I need to make them accessable......

Mel the Programmer
Though this was written in the 1980's, the LGP-30 was a vacuum tube machine from the late 1950's. Steve Simmons writes: "Found, after a...

Otrona Attache 8:16 diskette contents
23 May 2001 These are copies of the diskettes that remained with my original Otrona Attache. THe computer was sold on eBay, and the b...

The Sharp PC-5000
The Sharp PC5000 is a portable MS-DOS compatible machine. This means the hardware is not IBM-PC compatible, and it uses...

The standard for RS232 sets these signals on the various pins.
I swiped this source from http://unix1.hials.no/~aoy/home_uk.html, it was so damn useful I was afraid it might disappear. Finding this d...

Managing technical complexity in art making
Art involving technology, especially constantly changing media technologies, or multi- or cross-disciplinary work, is a peculiar thing. Prac...

Sensing, Perception, Physics
"...And not everyone has gone through that thought process." Indeed. "The systematic, careful collection of measurements or counts of r...

WABI TEK SABI
wabi tek sabi is way of seeing and living with human craft and technology. like the japanese concept of wabi sabi it has much to do with aes...

Welcome to 4chan
Tom Jennings 9 December 2008 Converted to proper html 8 March 2010 4chan (http://www.4chan.org) is an ...

ping stick
the ping stick demonstrates some ideas implicit in embodied cognition, the philosophical idea that, in essence, what we call 'mind...

Alan Turing made flat
I thought it fitting to re-render Alan Turing's official portrait algorithmically, with what is essentially a state machine, a su...

Atomic Number Generator
A the very dawn of electronic computing machinery, 1948, the Rand Corporation built an electronic machine with which to generate the content...

Carbon Dioxide Camp's Time Travel Booth
Though I list it here on WPS, this was in fact a completely collaborative project; artists in four cities across the U.S. made substantial ...

Cold war collages
Framed collections of debris from early nuclear industry and science. #1 is internally lit with an AR-1 argon (UV) lamp and various small ne...

Cold-War film reviews
Capsule reviews of some Cold War-era films, well-known and otherwise; some available from WPS on VHS. Entire contents copyright To...

Coyote Protocol
Coyote Protocol is group of electronic accoustic boxes that talk to each other via dog-like singing and howling. The find each other by l...

Desktop Atomic Pile
The world needs a good, portable desk-top atomic pile, suitable for demonstration purposes. Used properly, harm to life and surroundings w...

Discorporate spell box
This is a mildly threatening device for focusing energy on our corporate enemies. Assembled from the detritus of a century of terrible in...

EDE: portrait of Edward Teller
"He's a danger to all that is important. I really do think it would have been a better world without Teller" -- physicist I. ...

Encapsulated Landscapes
These are part of an as-yet indeterminate series, each describing peculiar, little-seen and hidden-away uses of the earth. Built into ne...

Model 11 Clock
Model 11 Nixie Clocks are the most straightforward instruments in the WPS lineup, beautiful and exotic, obsolete yet completely pract...

Model 13 Clock
The Model 13 is a one of a kind clock, partially a design study in the use of an analog D'Arsonval meter movement for information displa...

Model 17 Audible Detector
This is the second WPS product. Initially considered a failed project, it seems to have warmed with time's passing. It has a funerary fe...

Model 23 Trinitite Box
This is was first WPS product. The heart of the device is a tiny diorama, water colors on lead, with a reactor-shielding lead glass win...

Model 3 Tape reader Completed September 1999
The Model 3 Tape Reader reads perforated tape and sends the information on to other devices that speak and print. A tape is mounted on ...

Model 31 Vocalizer
The Model 31 Vocalizer is a component of the Story Teller federation; it utters speech when provided with a stream of encoded phoneme...

Model 47 Trinity Diorama
A measurable analog of the Trinity Site and surrounding area, as it appeared shortly after 6 July 1945. As is well known, land may te...

Model 71 Measuring Device
The instruction card attached to this instrument says it best: "The Model 71 is a portable standard for calibrating once-living and ...

Regenerator
The Regenerator is a subtle and difficult machine for communicating with entities, real and unfortunately sometimes imagined. It requires P...

Story Teller
Actually, this is a boring device. It's an integral part of the Story Teller system, and is quite useless without it. Left to itself...

Story Teller
Story Teller is a self-contained but ever-expanding system for, well, telling stories, which are stored as rows of tiny holes in long...

The Universal Machine
meh. i did this paper design during the year i was working in san francisco, while josh was in law school. i didn't have any way to work on...

"texts" archive, from wps.com's gopher server
the contents here date from the early 1990's. today they seem childishly primitive, but if you weren't there, you cannot know how profoundly...

164 Shipley, Gulf War nostalgia
Ahh, the Gulf War. Remember when this was fashionable? I have to admit, it was I that printed up those 8x11 three-color paper flags. I ma...

164 Shipley
Oh look! Outside! The mean construction men banged their big tractor into a hydrant! Well our street wasn't exactly high on the city's li...

666 Illinois
This was one of my favorite and best cars. It was originally yellow, and the sperms (about 50 of them) were brilliant orange and yellow. I...

Bloody punk Napa
Sometimes you make basic judgment errors, you know? Well. In 1990 in the local fascist skinheads held a "picnic" in Napa county. There had...

Greta Snider's PUNK ROCK DATING GAME
This is a program written in Director for the Macintosh, which means it's quite large, some 8.8 megabytes to download. It's definite...

Greta has her say
This billboard was in the corner of a parking lot that ran between Shipley and Folsom, and faced the oncoming Folsom traffic. They regularl...

HOMOCORE 1988-1991
Tom Jennings, 5 August 2008 Tom Jennings, 26 January 2000 Below are all issues of HOMOCORE zine, from #1 through #7, except for...

Hit'n'Run shows
Shred of Dignity put on a lot of free shows. We did about four "Hit and Run" shows, where we'd pick some safe-looking place, rent a genera...

Shred of Dignity and Homocore audio recordings
All of these recordings were made with my little hand-held Aiwa pocket stereo casette recorder, with a very nice stereo mike. Overall,...

Shred of Dignity
Well this wasn't a job or anything, it was a complicated time of change for me. About half-way through the FidoNet thing I'd had it wi...

The Little Garden and TLGnet, Inc
Once upon a time, three little businesses wanted a connection to the ARPAnet/internet. The year was 1990 or 1991. John Gilmore, John...

The Little Garden, TLGnet, Inc.
{You can view the original TLGnet, Inc website, here.} From 1992 until it was sold in 1996 I ran an internet service provider (IS...

Valerie's motorcycle
Val and Great on Val's motorcycle, outside our lovely door. This photo was the cover for HOMOCORE #4....

the black flag of anarchism
by Paul Goodman OK a little starry-eyed but close enough as an over-simplified underpinning of the anarchism that I know that I s...

Archived and obsolete data
I had a lovely Zemco CompuCruise computer installed in my 1970 Hornet; very 1970's! It finally drove me crazy and I sold it on...

Electron tube database, 1958--1961
Updated 5 December, 2003 This database contains technical specifications on some 2000+ electron tubes, mainly obscure and hard-to-find ...

Miniature lamp data
(no excerpt)...

Photos from the Ivall book.
(no excerpt)...

Semiconductor datasheets and catalogs
I am just beginning to scan and index my solid state component catalogs and datasheets, as I have done for most of my electron tube da...

Various datasheets and catalogs
The following are catalogs that will not be scanned. They're too specialized or difficult. The only one of general interest is TI Integr...

Atomic Number Generator
A the very dawn of electronic computing machinery, 1948, the Rand Corporation built an electronic machine with which to generate the content...

Gas Tube Number Generator
(25 July 2012 page under construction; images are temporary, machine is not complete) Randomness isn't a property of anything. It isn...

Shred of Dignity and Homocore audio recordings
All of these recordings were made with my little hand-held Aiwa pocket stereo casette recorder, with a very nice stereo mike. Overall,...

pixel eye
Pixel Eye was built for my Rocks and Code installation. It's sole purpose is to provide visitor-reactive waves of ambient simulated Geiger c...

psynesthesiac
psynesthesiac is a device that translates color to sound, for the purpose of generating MIDI note loop sequences, for input to Ableton Live!...

singing wire
meh. this was an experiment -- actually, the repeat of an experiment i did about 20 years ago -- a taut wire as the resonant element in an e...

Rocks and Code installation
My Rocks and Code installation explores western science's "belief" in scientific objectivity, examining the interconnected histories o...

Rocks and Code, MFA thesis
University of California Master of Fine Arts degree concentration in Art, Computation, Engineering 2009 my 2009 UCI MFA thesis...

The Road
This is a new project, so it doesn't have any/much structure yet. ...

AUTOMATIC DOGMATIC LOGIC
(I sold this domain in 1996, this is what it had in it. It still cracks me up.) I'm very sorry this is so incomplete, but our missionary wo...

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21 October, 2002 Once upon a time. This is my boyfriend Josh. We've been together for just over ten years (as of October 2002). He's...

(no headline)
Trouble is a microscopic Chinese Crested Dog, mostly hairless, fine baby-girl blonde hair, fair skin with freckles. He was the runt of t...

(no headline)
This is a gratuitous picture of me at 2, sticking my little hand into the hub of my father's Ford Model A's spare tire. This is in 19 fu...

2001 Venice Bienalle
Some photos from my trip to the 2001 Venice Bienalle. My Model 71 was part of the Temporary Autonomous Pavillion, hosted by the Slovenia...

666
This leaflet is a free gift from the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, of Rougemont, Quebec. Copies of this leaflet have been mailed to millions...

ASCII turing
alan turing rendered in ASCII. -,JJ666J6/- ,/RO&MHMHR...

Cook report
COOK Report: What got you into the Internet services business? Jennings: I never really did decide to do it. It just sort of happ...

Customer Service Agreement
This was our customer terms-of-use agreement. We kicked ass. ...

Eastlake's Observation
An absolutely brilliant and succinct description of large social processes is below. For a more modern and functional take, and some...

Ed Grothus, 1923-2009
Ed Grothus, the legendary proprietor of the Black Hole, a long-standing Los Alamos NM artist, friend, anti-nuke activist and irritant to d...

Fool drives into our house
(no excerpt)...

Jesus loves little boys
This is a color xerox of a page from a Catholic picture book....

Josh & Tom's dogs
(This page is new (April 2002) and existing scattered dog pix and such will get moved here. As always, it could take years (really).)...

Pictures of 2350-2360 Allesandro
(no excerpt)...

Pictures of 2350-2360 Allesandro
April 2011: out of place but no place to put it: some fool drives into the front of our house. Josh & I bought this property in Fe...

Plot map.
(no excerpt)...

Shits
(no excerpt)...

THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE
Some years ago I looked through a lot of secondary material on piracy hoping to find a study of these enclaves--but it appeared as if no...

THE TOILET CAMERA WAS A HOAX -- FUCK YOU ALL!!! HA HA HA HA!!
In 1994 I put up this fake toilet camera web page, to poke fun at the idiotic cameras-on-coffee-pots and other net.nonsense that was all ...

The Black Hole of Los Alamos
Ed Grothus' Black Hole, aka Los Alamos Sales Co. nominally sells what he calls "nuclear waste" -- surplus from the infamous Los Alamos N...

The Wilderness Machine
I made, with major contributor Brett Doar, the Wilderness Machine for Chris Milk's The Wilderness Downtown movie, part of a project fo...

TomJ's unmentionables.
Some of this stuff is very old, and doesn't meet modern standards for HTML....

VA40
foobar -,JJ666J6/- ,/RO&MHMHRM6M...

Video work
"Essex Army Airfield doco" Operation ARGUS was a fairly insane, dangerous and messy series of high-altitude nuclear experiments with...

Wilderness Machine card-jam fix
This is instructions on installing some fixes for card dropping and card jamming on the Wilderness Machine. PROBLEM 1: The "ricky jay" (...

Y2K
I considered keeping lists this year of people and businesses mongering "y2k" nonsense for greed, profit, and stupidity, such as the Real ...

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Useful URLs: Generate lat/long...

(no headline)
These are the remainder of a very low production run of Radiological Defense badges; five-color embroidered sew-on badges, the insignia...

Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP), and Manhattan Project badge
Manhattan Project badge, ca. 1945. The Army designed a patch for their staff at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos New Mexi...

Burning Man, Carbon Dioxide theme camp
This page is mostly vestigial, having been replaced by the Carbon Dioxide Camp site. This is still where I upload images though since that s...

Classic Computer Scams: World Power Systems, Inc.
--> In 1979 an outfit calling itself "World Power Systems, Inc." appeared on the scene with an amazing assortment of microcomputer...

Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker's Club
Welcome to the incremental and erratic home page for the club electronics class, taught by Tom Jennings. This page is new as of 7 Mar...

Model A1 Programmer Adapter and progM01 host software.
Tom Jennings 18 November 2003 OVERVIEW The Model A1 Programmer is a companion to the PIC_based Model 01a Control Engi...

Project PIC source code
These are sources to various WPS projects (and umm products). Most are PIC sources, for an old PBASIC compiler. Most of them are Story...

References and materials
Tom Jennings You might take a look at my "What is World Power Systems" rant, here. It carries the flavor of the approach I take to te...

The WPS Model 01a Control Engine and Model A1 Programmer Adapter and progM01 host software.
Tom Jennings 9 June 2003 OVERVIEW NOTE: This thing is obsolete. It made a lot of sense in 1998, but it's worse than redundant in 2006. G...

World Power Systems embroidered badge
The RADIOLOGICAL DEFENSE badges were so sucessful (two sold in two years) that we are making available WPS corporate badges. These are ...

c-level.cc's Art and Technology Hacker's Club"
Los Angeles Art and Technology Basic Electronics class, 6 July 2003 This is a small bit of support data for the last class, usi...