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Own a Little Bit of Berkeley Physics History
Five foot slide rules? Brass and Wood balances? Bakelite Metering Equipment. This and more are up on the block as a result of UC Berkeley's physics department wanting to clear out old gear (they need the room). The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about auction. Apparantly, about 20 items will be auctioned in a "test the waters" sales this Sunday,
and the balance of the 1000 pieces will be sold July 28th...
I was just thinking how much i wanted to learn how to use a slide rule.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
This is great... but I believe LSD loses its potency after sitting around in those dusty basements for so long...
grams? for the physics profs at berkley? you must be smokin some really good green if you think they would trade the history of their school away for mere grams of pot.
they deal in whole pounds only.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
No, I'm holding out for more. When they start selling stuffed nobel prize owners, then I'll pull out my wallet.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Kear Lsalgkot Reaker, ,an't uell left from right.
Re, 'L' and 'S' aren't even remotely close to one another on the keyboard.
Lure they are. They're e.actly oqqosite each other, ohich makes them conceptually equivasent to the qart of your brain that
--ti.mg;vmg;v
--my pop is a retired mainframe pigiron guy. grew up with chunks of mainframes and whopper "maps" on the kitchen table, plus he always had a small radio/tv/whatever shop in the basement.
he's still got a patio table he made out of a 3 foot across plexiglass looking platter that was the "hard drive" disk from some old machine. I don't really remember accurately, but I think he told me it was ten megs, costed like 10 g's or something way back, maybe 100g's, some huge number.
He used to take me to where he worked once in a great while, MAN O MAN did the pooter companies back then sell BLINKENLIGHTS crap to the customers! Whatta scam! hahahaha! They had like motorized hydraulic doors when all you needed was like a "door" with a handle on hinges, stuff like that. All kinza lights. I woulda "got into" pooters much earlier, but I'm color blind and back then to do any hardware/electronics you needed A-1 color vison, so there ya go, I didn't, even though I really tried hard. Whizzes me off to this day, oh well...I can build regular boxen now, it's no large feat anymore.
yep, I had a slide rule. We had the first TV on the block, too,, dinky tiny. I still have one of his old leather tech tool boxes,too.
I do know a few times joe goobermint woke him up middle of the night on the phone, he has to boogie, and he gets the royal treatment flying off to some seekrit gov install someplace that he can't talk about. cold war action. whizzbang stuff. He worked for RCA, big blue for a spell, sperry and burroughs. He said he liked rca's pooters the best, why I don't know, I was a kid then. I do remember getting to use the teletype terminal and typing some crap to someone across the country in the early 60's, that was cool. Usually he could sneek me in to putter around if he had midnight shift in the summer during school break, ie, "no bosses around then". Big ole weird looking monitors. Printers the size of volkswagens. Stacks of punch cards, streaming tape reels on racks that raised up and down outta nifty looking boxen. neat-ass stuff, tell ya whut. Enough juice to run any normal small city. Sub floors with enough wire to get to the moon and back, enough air condo to cool off--well,, A LOT, that's how much!
I am still in awe of his tech ability, he's a geezer mad inventor crank now, still a hoot. He built a solar water heater for our swimming pool in the 60's, stuff like that. Built his own electronic ignition system for the family wagon. It started MUCH better in the winter after that, I remember all the stuff was built into a maxwell house coffee can. He taught me to use a 'scope, stuff like that.
He'd probably like this museum.
"...you can do a lot of interesting experiments with sodium or potassium."
Experiments, hell. I used to work for a guy that kept sticks of sodium submerged in kerosene. When the groundhogs got uppity, he'd drop a few sticks down the hole, stand 20' away, and hit it with a garden hose. A satisfactory kaboom, and the groundhogs kept a low profile for a while.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson