Links roundup: 4

• Flavio Ribeiro et al. have released components of the video processing workflow at the New York Times to the open source community.
• Adam Conner-Simons describes Gitless, developed at MIT. The tool is intended as a gentler introduction to the Git mindset—no stashing required.
• Phil Sturgeon makes a succinct comparison between REST- and RPC-based APIs. One isn't better than the other; they're just different.

  • RPC-based APIs are great for actions (that is, procedures or commands).
  • REST-based APIs are great for modeling your domain (that is, resources or entities), making CRUD (create, read, update, delete) available for all of your data.

Nifty fifty

Chuck House sends happy birthday wishes to the HP 2116 minicomputer, a 16-bit machine that preceded Digital Equipment's first 16-bit offering. The company offered it as an "instrumentation controller," lest it be seen as a competitor to hardware sold by the much bigger IBM.

Big Hex

Researchers at the University of Bristol have built an operational 16-bit computer the size of a climbing wall, in the service of teaching students processor architecture.