Here in Arizona, they recently instituted a similar test called AIMS. There was a big hue and cry and they finally "dumbed it down" because some students might not pass it. So now the schools aren't just "teaching to the test", they're teaching to a "dumbed down" test...
I believe you're thinking of The City and the Stars, which was also published as City on the Edge of Forever, as I recall. In that story, a youngster living in the last domed city on Earth tries to escape to the wider universe outside.
Childhood's End is about the transition of the human race into the next stage of evolution (a common theme with Clarke). The transition is mediated by an alien race which assists and monitors such situations, but can never make the transition themselves.
Both are excellant stories, as is also Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
All the way through the show, I kept thinking of the "Mystery of Al Capone's Vault" special that basically destroyed Geraldo Rivera's career as a serious newscaster. Two hours of similar hype as they dug into the basement wall to find... two old booze bottles.
On my first computer, a Digital Group Z-80 (gosh, that sure dates me!), I used a Baudot -- yes, Baudot -- teletype for hard-copy output. To keep it running, every so often I would open up the cover and liberally spray the guts with WD-40. True.
The University of Utah had an early mouse and graphical display system in '68 or '69 with the same kind of technology (although I remember the mouse being a bit smaller than the one in the video). Still not very ergonomic, though.
Like modern ball mice, it had two digitizers, but instead of a ball, there were two metal wheels that stuck out of the bottom at right angles. Moving left/right would roll one wheel while the other one, being at right angles, would just drag sideways across the desktop. Likewise, moving up/down would roll the other wheel while the first one dragged. Other directions would roll/slide both wheels proportionately. I can't remember how many buttons were on it.
It certainly impressed us at the time. Of course, I now also use an optical mouse which would have been unbelievable back in '68.
I tried to see it with a 10" f/5.5 reflector at a good dark site near Tucson, and only got vague hints that there was anything there. But I suspect that my visual dark sensitivity isn't as good as many. Your milage may vary.
In my area (eastern Phoenix Metro area), they have already replaced many, if not most, of the traffic signal bulbs with high-intensity LED arrays. They appear to be just as bright as the incandescent bulbs, are much more energy-efficient, and have a longer MTBF, resulting in a big savings in maintanance costs.
The company I work for makes GPS guidance systems for agriculture ("crop duster" aircraft and ground spray rigs). We use high-intensity LEDs for our steering "lightbar" displays, and actually have to dim them down, even in sunlight, as they can be painful to look at directly at full brightness.
Or people (like my wife) who grew up using typewriters, and so insist on hitting the Enter key at the end of every line when typing a document.
Oh, and the Enter key is good for spacing down to the start of the next page, too.
One customer I heard of years ago was having a problem with diskettes becoming unreadable every night. Turns out the swing shift was leaving them for the night shift stuck to the side of a file cabinet with a refrigerator magnet.
Even some of us professionals who should know better screw up at times. I heard one tale about an operator on a big IBM mainframe at a company I worked for, who had a problem with a disk pack (one of those stacks of 14" platters with a handle on top that you mounted in washing-machine sized drives). Turns out that the pack was damaged, and the disks were colliding with the heads, thereby trashing the drive (with quite a bit of noise). Well, when the first drive failed to read the disk pack, he proceeded to try the pack in five other drives one after the other -- giving the support techs a lot of overtime pay the next few days.
...transmit dit-dit-dit dit-dit (That's "hi" in case you are Bruce Perens or one of the other code-impaired people *G*)...
Actually, all you code-impaired people, that's "si". "h" is four "dits". (and I haven't even brushed up on my code in over twenty years!)
I read once that the Moon's orbit is concave to the Sun at every point, so it can be considered to be orbiting the Sun just as much as orbiting the Earth.
In the novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, they ground-launched an Orion spacecraft. The risk was justified, as they were trying to get up into space where they could fight the aliens that had taken over Earth -- but it did a number on Seattle in the process.
I think the Navy used Univac "Fastran" (sp?) drums, which pretty much matched your description. There was a Fastran unit on the 1108 mainframe at the U. of Utah when I was a student there around 1969. The unit consisted of a horizontal counterrotating pair of (basically) machined sewer pipes filled with sand and coated with oxide about eight feet long, one above the other in the cabinet. They took a half hour to spin up to speed when power was applied -- but once they got there, the RPMs were stable.
There was a rumor floating around that one time a bearing seized up in one such unit on a ship, resulting in the drum being ejected through the side (hopefully, above the waterline).
I put a CD-R in sunlight (admittedly, it was summer in Phoenix; your milage may vary) for three hours and it became unreadable. Be warned. OTOH, reel-to-reel audio tapes that I recorded in college thirty years ago are slightly degraded, but still listenable. But I understand that even professional studio tapes used by radio stations and recording studios in the 70's and 80's are becoming unreadable because the oxide binder (read: glue) used in the tapes at the time is deteriorating and the tapes are literally falling apart.
More important is format obsolescence. We may be able to read a 2K-year-old parchment, but how many of us can read a 20-year-old 8" floppy, even if it's in perfect condition? How many CD drives will be around in 20 years? Probably very few, as some new whiz-bang medium will replace CDs a few years from now and some even more whiz-bang medium will make that obsolete in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Arizona, they recently instituted a similar test called AIMS. There was a big hue and cry and they finally "dumbed it down" because some students might not pass it. So now the schools aren't just "teaching to the test", they're teaching to a "dumbed down" test...
Obviously to retrieve an ASCII file...
Maybe he did -- that would explain a lot.
I believe you're thinking of The City and the Stars, which was also published as City on the Edge of Forever, as I recall. In that story, a youngster living in the last domed city on Earth tries to escape to the wider universe outside.
Childhood's End is about the transition of the human race into the next stage of evolution (a common theme with Clarke). The transition is mediated by an alien race which assists and monitors such situations, but can never make the transition themselves.
Both are excellant stories, as is also Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
Knowing how software is written, "incantations" is pretty close to the truth...
All the way through the show, I kept thinking of the "Mystery of Al Capone's Vault" special that basically destroyed Geraldo Rivera's career as a serious newscaster. Two hours of similar hype as they dug into the basement wall to find ... two old booze bottles.
On my first computer, a Digital Group Z-80 (gosh, that sure dates me!), I used a Baudot -- yes, Baudot -- teletype for hard-copy output. To keep it running, every so often I would open up the cover and liberally spray the guts with WD-40. True.
The University of Utah had an early mouse and graphical display system in '68 or '69 with the same kind of technology (although I remember the mouse being a bit smaller than the one in the video). Still not very ergonomic, though.
Like modern ball mice, it had two digitizers, but instead of a ball, there were two metal wheels that stuck out of the bottom at right angles. Moving left/right would roll one wheel while the other one, being at right angles, would just drag sideways across the desktop. Likewise, moving up/down would roll the other wheel while the first one dragged. Other directions would roll/slide both wheels proportionately. I can't remember how many buttons were on it.
It certainly impressed us at the time. Of course, I now also use an optical mouse which would have been unbelievable back in '68.
I tried to see it with a 10" f/5.5 reflector at a good dark site near Tucson, and only got vague hints that there was anything there. But I suspect that my visual dark sensitivity isn't as good as many. Your milage may vary.
MSUSA!
Of course, all you will see is an ordinary-looking dim star. But it's the thought that counts.
In my area (eastern Phoenix Metro area), they have already replaced many, if not most, of the traffic signal bulbs with high-intensity LED arrays. They appear to be just as bright as the incandescent bulbs, are much more energy-efficient, and have a longer MTBF, resulting in a big savings in maintanance costs. The company I work for makes GPS guidance systems for agriculture ("crop duster" aircraft and ground spray rigs). We use high-intensity LEDs for our steering "lightbar" displays, and actually have to dim them down, even in sunlight, as they can be painful to look at directly at full brightness.
Oh, and the Enter key is good for spacing down to the start of the next page, too.
One customer I heard of years ago was having a problem with diskettes becoming unreadable every night. Turns out the swing shift was leaving them for the night shift stuck to the side of a file cabinet with a refrigerator magnet.
Even some of us professionals who should know better screw up at times. I heard one tale about an operator on a big IBM mainframe at a company I worked for, who had a problem with a disk pack (one of those stacks of 14" platters with a handle on top that you mounted in washing-machine sized drives). Turns out that the pack was damaged, and the disks were colliding with the heads, thereby trashing the drive (with quite a bit of noise). Well, when the first drive failed to read the disk pack, he proceeded to try the pack in five other drives one after the other -- giving the support techs a lot of overtime pay the next few days.
...transmit dit-dit-dit dit-dit (That's "hi" in case you are Bruce Perens or one of the other code-impaired people *G*)... Actually, all you code-impaired people, that's "si". "h" is four "dits". (and I haven't even brushed up on my code in over twenty years!)
No, you have to rent it by the hour.
Or if you need even more precision, 355/113.
I read once that the Moon's orbit is concave to the Sun at every point, so it can be considered to be orbiting the Sun just as much as orbiting the Earth.
In the novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, they ground-launched an Orion spacecraft. The risk was justified, as they were trying to get up into space where they could fight the aliens that had taken over Earth -- but it did a number on Seattle in the process.
I think the Navy used Univac "Fastran" (sp?) drums, which pretty much matched your description. There was a Fastran unit on the 1108 mainframe at the U. of Utah when I was a student there around 1969. The unit consisted of a horizontal counterrotating pair of (basically) machined sewer pipes filled with sand and coated with oxide about eight feet long, one above the other in the cabinet. They took a half hour to spin up to speed when power was applied -- but once they got there, the RPMs were stable. There was a rumor floating around that one time a bearing seized up in one such unit on a ship, resulting in the drum being ejected through the side (hopefully, above the waterline).
REAL programmers don't use languages at all -- they toggle the binary in with the front panel switches.
No, Sector 000 would be even better...
More important is format obsolescence. We may be able to read a 2K-year-old parchment, but how many of us can read a 20-year-old 8" floppy, even if it's in perfect condition? How many CD drives will be around in 20 years? Probably very few, as some new whiz-bang medium will replace CDs a few years from now and some even more whiz-bang medium will make that obsolete in short order.