That reminds me of the story of the Tiki 100 educational computer here in Norway - they were demoing it before the press, and to demo its ruggedness (and boy, was that clunk of metal rugged) they poured a half-liter of coke down into the keyboard. "It worked that day, and never again".:)
And the official service message after something had gotten into a Tandberg keyboard (those keyboards are heaven to type on, btw, beats the Model M) was "Set washing machine to low temperature, use no detergent."
The camera did it - No, really.:) It's a very crappy camera. I didn't see that it was out of focus on the tiny LCD, and thus didn't retake them. It's SUPPOSED to do all that stuff automatically, but, well, you said it.
The article makes a few mistakes. First of all, Unix was far from the first OS to be written in a high-level language. Multics was the first big OS (PL/1!! Shudder!), and there were many research OS'en at the time.
Also, the PDP-7 did NOT have a hard drive. Believe me, I have one. The PDP-7 did, however, have an optional model 24 Serial Drum (something like a low-capacity fixed-head hard drive, around 100KB IIRC), whose capacity I cannot recall, a 555 Dual DECTape unit, a directly addressable very-low-density even by its time magnetic tape system, and, of course, the 10 cps paper tape punch/ 300cps High-Speed Optical paper tape reader. But there was never a moving head hard drive. The PDP-8 had one, but I can't for the life of me remember the name.
It's pretty high-bandwidth. I also have a mirror at the University of Oslo - here. I'm moving the site to that server, but there's still a lot to smooth out. That server can take anything:)
Allright, allright, I'm bragging, but... I have a PDP-7! Don't believe me? My pics. Please don't link to the main site, though, it's very much under construction.
A friend of mine was making curry while talking to me on the cellphone. He dropped it into the stew pot. A few days later, he offered it to me, and I gladly accepted, my cellphone having been lost in an unfortunate PSU disaster. (Yes, I charge my Siemens from the +5v line) Anyway, the thing naturally didn't power on, and it smelled HORRIBLY of curry. So, just for shits'n'giggles, I immersed the thing in water. Then, I put it in a bowl with a strong, very very strong detergent. Then I rinsed it again. Let it dry a few hours, didn't work. Put it in the oven! 30 minutes at 75C, and voila, a Nokia.
They are cheap, flimsy, dim, hard to calibrate, and go out quickly.
Agreed... I got one second-hand at unversity, and it's horrible. It was a very high-end model, and it was/is impressive to look at. But the entire image is out of focus. It's bad enough that I have to run it at 800x600 to read the text. Very bad with a 21" viewing area. It's from 1997. A monitor should last that amount of time, no matter what. It has been demoted to my bedroom DivX monitor.
I'm a classic computer enthusiast who would love to talk about your museum - would you please drop me a line?
My email is tore s b e at if i dot u i o dot no -
Remove the spaces.
I'd love to help you guys out with your webpage.
I'm sure a 486dx25 would be far faster if properly coded. Maybe he used GWBASIC.
Ehum, WRONG - he is one of the best programmers in the world, and he implemented it in machine code (The problem itself, not an emulation of the machine) on a late Pentium, early PII-machine. And when that kind of programmer writes it in machine code, he OPTIMIZES it. He helped create the Y2K bug.:)
Give me a break - I have a Pentium 60 from 1992. It was hotter than an Athlon and burned insane amounts of power, but it was fast (and rediculously expensive) for its day. 1996 had seen at least a Pentium-Pro MMX, which essentially is a Pentium-II.
"This [less expensive] camera can only hold 15 seconds of video because of the 'cache overflow'" - about a Sony Cybershot P7 whose video length is limited only by Memory Stick size"
Erm, that's completely true. Cheap cameras can't encode video realtime, and also it can't write it to the flash chip fast enough, and therefore runs out of cache in 15 secs. Sony Cybershot, however (pretty damned good cameras, btw), can encode it realtime, and write to the fairly fast Memory Stick devices.
I believe that back in the 50s, the president of IBM enthusastically proclaimed that there was potentially a worldwide market for four, possibly even five computers. And this was good news.
You have to think about what computers were being used for back then. This was not stupidity on his part, but an accurate analysis of how many computers would be needed for the work pattern that computers were being used with back then. The machines would probably be batch-processed, and everyone would log in via remote terminals and put their batch of cards on the remote reader.
Slashdot Mirror
That is amazing. The Pentium 60s have the heat output of a bloody Athlon.
Properly converted, there is enough energy in a 9v block battery to kill you
That reminds me of the story of the Tiki 100 educational computer here in Norway - they were demoing it before the press, and to demo its ruggedness (and boy, was that clunk of metal rugged) they poured a half-liter of coke down into the keyboard. "It worked that day, and never again". :)
And the official service message after something had gotten into a Tandberg keyboard (those keyboards are heaven to type on, btw, beats the Model M) was "Set washing machine to low temperature, use no detergent."
That's right. The controller was the RX8E or something. Thanks :)
The camera did it - No, really. :)
It's a very crappy camera. I didn't see that it was out of focus on the tiny LCD, and thus didn't retake them. It's SUPPOSED to do all that stuff automatically, but, well, you said it.
The article makes a few mistakes. First of all, Unix was far from the first OS to be written in a high-level language. Multics was the first big OS (PL/1!! Shudder!), and there were many research OS'en at the time.
Also, the PDP-7 did NOT have a hard drive. Believe me, I have one. The PDP-7 did, however, have an optional model 24 Serial Drum (something like a low-capacity fixed-head hard drive, around 100KB IIRC), whose capacity I cannot recall, a 555 Dual DECTape unit, a directly addressable very-low-density even by its time magnetic tape system, and, of course, the 10 cps paper tape punch/ 300cps High-Speed Optical paper tape reader. But there was never a moving head hard drive. The PDP-8 had one, but I can't for the life of me remember the name.
The PDP-7 was an 18-bit, 15-bit adressed system.
It's pretty high-bandwidth. I also have a mirror at the University of Oslo - here. :)
I'm moving the site to that server, but there's still a lot to smooth out. That server can take anything
Allright, allright, I'm bragging, but... I have a PDP-7!
Don't believe me? My pics.
Please don't link to the main site, though, it's very much under construction.
A friend of mine was making curry while talking to me on the cellphone. He dropped it into the stew pot. A few days later, he offered it to me, and I gladly accepted, my cellphone having been lost in an unfortunate PSU disaster. (Yes, I charge my Siemens from the +5v line) Anyway, the thing naturally didn't power on, and it smelled HORRIBLY of curry. So, just for shits'n'giggles, I immersed the thing in water. Then, I put it in a bowl with a strong, very very strong detergent. Then I rinsed it again. Let it dry a few hours, didn't work. Put it in the oven! 30 minutes at 75C, and voila, a Nokia.
They are cheap, flimsy, dim, hard to calibrate, and go out quickly.
Agreed... I got one second-hand at unversity, and it's horrible. It was a very high-end model, and it was/is impressive to look at. But the entire image is out of focus. It's bad enough that I have to run it at 800x600 to read the text. Very bad with a 21" viewing area. It's from 1997. A monitor should last that amount of time, no matter what. It has been demoted to my bedroom DivX monitor.
No worries, there are still plenty of countries for America to liberate ;)
I'm a classic computer enthusiast who would love to talk about your museum - would you please drop me a line? My email is tore s b e at if i dot u i o dot no - Remove the spaces. I'd love to help you guys out with your webpage.
I'm sure a 486dx25 would be far faster if properly coded. Maybe he used GWBASIC.
:)
Ehum, WRONG - he is one of the best programmers in the world, and he implemented it in machine code (The problem itself, not an emulation of the machine) on a late Pentium, early PII-machine. And when that kind of programmer writes it in machine code, he OPTIMIZES it. He helped create the Y2K bug.
Pentiums were just on the market then!
Give me a break - I have a Pentium 60 from 1992. It was hotter than an Athlon and burned insane amounts of power, but it was fast (and rediculously expensive) for its day. 1996 had seen at least a Pentium-Pro MMX, which essentially is a Pentium-II.
That, and packet-switched networks - Donald Davies invented it, almost at the same time as Paul Baran did in the US.
;)
Yes, I am a history geek.
Do you know what date the Byte article was? The local library keeps a complete record of Byte mags, and it would be sort of cool to read. TIA.
"This [less expensive] camera can only hold 15 seconds of video because of the 'cache overflow'" - about a Sony Cybershot P7 whose video length is limited only by Memory Stick size"
Erm, that's completely true. Cheap cameras can't encode video realtime, and also it can't write it to the flash chip fast enough, and therefore runs out of cache in 15 secs. Sony Cybershot, however (pretty damned good cameras, btw), can encode it realtime, and write to the fairly fast Memory Stick devices.
True. On my teletype it's 11 bits, basically because the motor needs the timing of those extra bits to crank the distribution wheels. :)
No, it's quirks like that which made me switch to Linux in the first place. The problem would not be there in the beginning.
I believe that back in the 50s, the president of IBM enthusastically proclaimed that there was potentially a worldwide market for four, possibly even five computers. And this was good news.
You have to think about what computers were being used for back then. This was not stupidity on his part, but an accurate analysis of how many computers would be needed for the work pattern that computers were being used with back then. The machines would probably be batch-processed, and everyone would log in via remote terminals and put their batch of cards on the remote reader.
I actually got the file approx. two hours ago, I guess I was lucky.
There's some new stuff in there that should fix cpufreq for my laptop, so I couldn't be happier. It's building right now. On my 450 Celeron/64MB.
I'll report back... tomorrow.*sigh*
You mean the ones in the basement, waiting for the reboot alarm to go off?
The guest account was enabled on SGI machines. You could just telnet localhost and and you'd be r00t.
Although I never quite understood why you needed qbasic.exe to use it.
edit.exe just loaded qbasic.exe and disabled the interpreter. Also, help.exe did the same, but had some extra functionality (hyperlinks!)
THE ORIGINAL 1988 RTM WORM that lead to the original term being coined, spread via telnetting to the listening sendmail demon.