Posts by bluearcus

The Dragon 32 is 30

Re: Missed opportunity.

All of the problems with text mode limitations, and poor availability of colours were down to the choice of the Motorola reference design chipset. The VDG chip was perfectly capable, but limited in terms of text mode display and graphics mode colour schemes.

No amount of ROM tweaks could really fix that, although it was possible to achieve a 52 x 21 text display with lowercase by hooking new hi-res graphics mode based printing.

The add on board (from Premier Microsystems, I seem to remember) supplied an entirely new graphics generator chip. If Dragon Data had done that initially they might have had a better machine, but with far less game software from the CoCo available from the word go.

A tricky one.

Short of the BBC though, the Dragon was certainly the most 'serious' UK home computer of the era. Powerful processor, powerful basic, serious software options (OS-9, with C, Basic 09, PASCAL).

Fusion reactor eats Euro science budgets

IEC Polywell Fusor

Tokamak plasma containment fusion is a joke.

The reactors are not clean, they (if they ever work) would be insanely big and expensive, and they make so much Neutron radiation that the reactors eat themselves alive from the inside and are essentially just as much of a danger (liquid lithium jacket!) and long-term nuclear waste problem as fusion. In terms of the physics plasma containment is like trying to make fire by rubbing sticks together, except you have billions of sticks, that are all trying to get out of your grasp, and only a tiny fraction of the damn things are hot enough that if they did rub together they might spark.

There are other types of fusion that could really work though.

Fusor technology has been around for decades in its original form, and one modern variant of the basic Farnswoth-Hirsch approach called Polywell could produce almost limitless totally clean, safe and cheap power with the first commercial generation underway very economically in just a decade. The research and proof of concept work is 90% done and only a small fraction of the money going into tokamaks would be needed to get it running.

But it won't be funded because it has the potential to completely destroy the oil hegemony, and the plasma-containment funding gravy-train that currently exists in nuclear fusion physics.