DoPECC
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About and Contact

This site is a private effort to share an interest in early electronic technology and in the design and construction methods of that era.

The machines and the related technical data are both becoming harder to find. The people who used these machines in the 1960s have almost all passed on and items they may have preserved have passed to new care or been lost. Calculators used to turn up at auctions from time to time but in recent years they have become very scarce. The internet provides a means to store and then share what material and information is found.

The site is also intended to be a conduit, a place where information may be deposited and shared by those who have items that may be of interest to collectors everywhere.

Information that is particularly sought includes:

Contact DoPECC

New information, comments, stories and anything else of interest may be sent to contact at dopecc dot net

About this Site

The site began as hand-coded HTML which was a useful learning experience. As the site grew this architecture became unmaintainable and updates suffered. It was clear that a new architecture was required but common website/blogging platforms were unattractive for reasons including lock-in to a product and lack of control once locked-in. Self-hosting a CMS was likewise unattractive due to the need to maintain significant infrastructure and the more complex hacking attack surface.

Static Site Generators provided the solution for a site like this where there are no interactive elements. The Static Site architecture gives full ownership and control of content, avoids lockin, requires minimal simple infrastructure and has a minimal hacking attack surface.

Hugo: DoPECC’s chosen static site generator

Hugo has been an excellent choice. The small, fast Hugo executable is installed on your personal machine and provides a responsive development environment with live rebuilds as you write. There are no plugins to maintain, no server code to maintain and the attack surface is minimal. All your time can be spent on the site content.

There was a moderate learning curve but the excellent Hugo community is generous with support. Hugo provides comprehensive functionality in an easy and interactive content creation environment. For sites such as this, Hugo is strongly recommended.

DoPECC Hugo-Boottrap Version

The first Hugo version of DoPECC used the Bootstrap framework, for convenience. As the site grew further it was evident that the HTML was bloated and certain design decisions were revealed as burdensome misjudgements. I’d also become aware of the work of Jason Knight and his advocacy for semantic design, accessibility, and using HTML/CSS to do most of the heavy lifting so that a site can retain its functionality with scripts blocked.

This led to several years of dilemma, being dissatisfied with the site architecture but also being unable to commit to the effort of rebuilding a substantial amount of content.

DoPECC Hugo-Claude Version

The dilemma was finally resovled when mature Claude arrived. While I am a deep “AI” skeptic, it’s also clear to me that LLMs have a natural application as coding partners. The rebuild dilemma was resolved by using Claude to do all the heavy lifting of:

The complete process from cloning the source tree into a Claude-safe sandbox to a complete working rebuild as seen here now took three full days.