Deep Dive: Simulating DATAPAC, Canada's Forgotten Internet
Rebuilding the DATAPAC PAD experience in code: the command loop, X.25 NUAs, and five period-authentic hosts behind a 300-baud prompt.
ARTICLES // TECHNICAL NOTES
53 ENTRIES
// WRITING
Articles
Writeups, deep dives, and devlogs — antennas and packet radio at one end, emulators and language design at the other.
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Deep Dive: Lazy Loading 42 Backends with Dynamic Imports
Shrinking the emulator's main bundle from 1.1MB to 104KB by lazy-loading backends, and hiding the fetch inside the dial tone.
Deep Dive: Worker Heartbeats and Job Recovery
JetStream redelivered the message and the work was still lost. Moving job ownership out of the queue and into the database.
Inside Five CPU Emulators
Five classic CPU cores in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly: 8008, 8080, 8088, Z80, and 6502, and the edge cases that keep emulation honest.
Deep Dive: The Microservices Migration
A BBS emulator that outgrew localStorage: gRPC services, NATS messaging, a gateway, and the question of whether any of it was necessary.
Server-Backed Backends and Peripherals Go Physical
Migrating backends to server APIs with NATS pub/sub, adding microservices, and building the peripheral slot system alongside the Canada Goose game.
Building a Code Evolution Analyzer in a Weekend
A quick script turned into two days of yak-shaving through collection speed, chart performance, and an audio bug that took hours to find and one line to fix.
Identity, SEO, and a Lot of Polish
Identity got real: guest sessions, passkeys, and a server‑backed auth surface, plus gopher content routing, Z‑Machine version wiring, and a formatting sweep.
Deep Dive: Passkey Authentication for a Retro BBS
Passkeys in a 300‑baud world: the smallest WebAuthn flow, the server state it requires, and how I kept it in tune with emulator.ca's identity model.
CC-40 Completion and IVR Launch
Shipping the TI CC-40 backend with authentic CALL commands and audio, plus a full IVR phone tree system.
Deep Dive: Kansas City Standard Cassette Storage
Building a Kansas City Standard cassette peripheral: FSK at 2400/1200 Hz, tape transport simulation, and why saving 8 KB takes five minutes.
Storage Peripherals and Audio Realism
Floppy, hard drive, and cassette peripherals with Kansas City Standard encoding, plus a peripheral audio bus that makes the machine feel physical.
Deployment Prep and Backend Growth
Kubernetes/K3s deployment configs, CI/CD scaffolding, schema-driven API generation, and the Star Trek BASIC backend.
Three Languages, One Weekend (Sort Of)
Building BASIC, Forth, and Scheme interpreters in Rust, running them in browser workers, and what the contrast between them revealed.
The Big web/ Move and Parser Migrations
Moving the web app under web/, migrating three parsers to Pest and Pratt, and getting the Z-Machine opcode engine executing.
Deep Dive: CTS Flow Control in the Serial/Modem System
Why you can't just shovel bytes through a virtual modem: RTS/CTS backpressure, buffer gates, and the timing budget that makes dial-up feel like dial-up.
Deep Dive: The Z-Machine Interpreter
Building a Z-Machine transpiler in Rust: opcode decoding, Z-strings, branch offsets, and the constraints that make Infocom's bytecode tick.
Z-Machine Foundations and Storage Sync
Z-Machine decoder work, text handling, and SAVE/RESTORE, plus content-addressable storage with S3 sync.