The Lego Computer project, another holdover from last year, also has improvements planned for it. Last year's binary adder is to become something more significant this year, with the possibility of a full arithmetic unit somewhere on the horizon.
SigMicro has attracted numerous freshmen to the ranks of its membership, and with new people have come new ideas. One of these is a "really cool" Bulletin Board System (BBS) program. This project on the PC is meant to introduce beginners to programming, and more advanced members to the nuances of handling serial I/O, disk, and memory resources in a potentially multi-user PC-based environment.
The MBONE, or Internet Multicast Backbone, is a way to broadcast compressed real-time video and sound to computers connected to the 'Net, in contrast to the normal one-sender, one-recipient method. Sometime in the near to distant future, it will play host to a broadcast of a concert by the Rolling Stones. SigMicro is planning on hosting a public showing of it, live as it happens, once a firm date is announced. We'll also be hosting a workshop on C programming within the next month, and developing a tutorial for searching out information on the World Wide Web.
SigMicro meets every Thursday at 8:00 in 1102 DCL. Come join us! Bring ideas, bring suggestions, bring Pez, and bring yourselves.