Hal Hardenbegh has passed away (in June, actually). Link.

Who?

Why, the author of the 80s newsletter DTACK Grounded.

What?

DTACK Grounded was the rant forum for the smart, driven and idiosyncratic Hal Hardenbergh, who was on a mission to create the fastest 68000 machines (and BASIC interpreter) on the planet. (DTACK is the signal from the memory system to the 68000 indicating “Yup, you can complete that memory cycle now,” and simply stapling it to ground means you’ve built a system with as few memory waits as you can. I recall the DTACK Grounded boards were insanely expensive because they used a metric boatload of static RAM, but they ran as fast as raped apes).

Hal’s newsletter was interesting not only because of his outre’ standards for performance, but also for his observations on the computing industry. IIRC he hated Apple. He somewhat liked the Atari ST, but was still critical of it. He ranted against the x86 platform and was never short of advice for the industry.

My roommate and I always looked forward to the next issue of DTACK Grounded, and we were sad when Hal stopped publishing it. We knew Hal was a lunatic, but he was a fun, expressive geek’s lunatic, and despite his obsession with making a fast BASIC interpreter, pretty dead-on with his pithy observations.

I don’t know if the newsletters are online anywhere, but if you can track ’em down, they’re worth a read.