Besides, we're not going to have a significant fraction of the human population off the planet in your lifetime, or for centuries. (I don't count it as significant unless it's self-sustaining colonies, not dependent on having Earth around to supply them. Less than that is an important first step, but those kids aren't getting off your our lawns, so we've got to put up with them.) So relax, have yourself a beer.
They look like one of many good places to order things online; I got started with Sparkfun and Seeed Studios, and Mouser and Digikey and FunGizmos seem to be popular.
I was using Fry's and Radio Shack more as examples of places you end up dropping by to pick up a couple of transistors or some more connector wire or whatever on your way home from work. (RS has a coupon good for $10 off your next $40 purchase, which I almost never spend there; it's the $5-10 trips that add up:-)
Our data centers also had customer-friendly space. I think it was mostly inside the "show ID to a guard" area, but it was as important a part of the design as the racks and cages.
A friend of mine who worked in QA used to use Scharffenberger chocolate bars as a bribe when the developers fixed things that made her life easier. They were the small ones, the recipients knew they only cost $2, but it's really the appreciation that counts.
When I did my 555 contest project, I mainly used the Arduino as a handy 5-volt power supply, but I also ran a voltmeter script on it that sent its output to my PC screen. Instead of using a traditional voltmeter, I'd get a nice trace of the voltage levels it was seeing on the capacitors, so I could look at the last 100 samples instead of just guessing "it was bouncing between about 1-2v" (or "0.76 and 2.07", on the digital voltmeter, but the batteries on that were dead:-)
An oscilloscope would have been another traditional approach, but I don't have one of those, and the Arduino was a good in-between step.
Arduino comes with pretty much everything you need to get started in a really sophisticated programming environment. It's not quite down to the metal (you can go read rants about "Why DigitalWrite() is Too Slow!" for explanations), but it's close enough, and you can ignore the higher-level libraries and get at the raw bits if you want to. If you're more interested in using them for artwork than engineering, you don't need to do the deep dive, but it's a great place to learn.
At least one of the TI compiler suites comes in a limited-memory-crippled free-beer version, but that's ok in practice if you're using it with Launchpad - it limits you to something like 4K, but the MSP430 chips that come with the Launchpad are the versions with only 2K flash and 128-bye RAM, so it'll let you do anything those chips can do, and let you learn about TI's chip environment.
If you decide to start using the bigger chips from TI, the limitation may get annoying, but by that point you can decide whether to use GCC or (if you're using it commercially) to pay for the non-free development environment because you like those TI chips better than the AVR ATmegas that can use the Arduino environment.
Yeah, it's under $5, but you'll have to buy a soldering iron and some headers to use Launchpad, so it's pretty much equivalent. With Arduino, you can do everything on breadboards. And in practice, you're going to end up buying a bunch of breadboards, LEDs, resistors, alligator clips, baling wire, accelerometers, a Wii Nunchuck, speakers, and other stuff to go with it, so the cost is pretty much equivalent. And if you want to play with the AVR environment much, you'll either end up spending $30 to buy an ICSP programmer or just use the Arduino to do it instead, so you might as well just buy it.
On the other hand, Launchpad's cheap enough that once you've gotten started with the Arduino, you might as well also buy a Launchpad. It's what I would have been playing with next except they were backordered and by the time it arrived I had started playing with 555s.
Arduino is a better place to start - the package really does give you everything you need to get up and running, between development environment, documentation, hardware, and friendly handholding-for-artists. (You'll still find yourself running out to Fry's or Radio Shack to buy more LEDs and resistors - I'd recommend buying a couple packages of "20 assorted LEDs", "50 assorted resistors", etc. to save yourself some trouble.)
You really don't need to know much more for Launchpad than for Arduino, but the Launchpad docs generally assume you already know what you're doing, and the Arduino docs generally assume you don't know what you're doing and want to learn, so there's a lot easier learning curve. Also, Launchpad's a bit closer to the metal than Arduino, where you can start at a slightly higher language level to write your code, if you want to, and Launchpad requires you to solder the headers onto the board yourself, so it assumes you're good at soldering. (And if you want to use the timing crystal, it's surface-mount, which is really annoying if you're not already experienced with soldering.) With Arduino, soldering's optional - you can breadboard everything, or use shields.
Once you've done your first Arduino project, you can do later stuff by just getting the AVR chips and putting them on a breadboard yourself if you'd prefer.
Great timing on that comment - I just spent last month playing with 555s for the 555 Design Contest that accidentally occurred. If you want to blink LEDs, you don't need a 555 - you can use two transistors instead. (And in fact my contest project starts with a 2-transistor oscillator driving two LEDs, and feeds the voltages from it to a 555-based PWM circuit that flashes more LEDs. I've also got an Arduino in it, which is way overkill when I'm just using it for the 5v power supply (:-), but in fact it was convenient to also use it as a voltmeter to test what the transistors and 555 were doing.)
The Launchpad isn't dumber than the Arduino, just cheaper - the MSP430 is a 16-bit chip, but has less RAM and Flash than the 8-bit AVR Atmega328 that Arduino uses. The big difference is in the development environments - the Arduino comes with a higher-level environment, so you don't have to start down at the Raw Bits unless you want to (unlike the MSP430, where you're pretty much forced to), and comes with enough hand-holding that an artist can start doing real work right away. Also, the Launchpad makes you solder the headers and (surface-mount!) timer crystal onto the board yourself, instead of just plugging in shields or wires, but it is better integrated with USB because it doesn't have the leftover serial-FTDI design that Arduino started with.
The anti-trust suit against Microsoft was a major cause of the post-2000 crash. The Silicon Valley startup business model included cashing out, either by IPO, or by Selling Out, either to Cisco if you made hardware or Microsoft if you did software and services (e.g. Hotmail's $400M), and once the anti-trust action started, Microsoft wasn't buying anybody, not only because they didn't want to look any bigger or more powerful, but also because Al Gore was threatening to break them into pieces, and it wasn't clear which pieces would have the money to buy anybody. And if you can't cash out by selling out, venture capitalists were less likely to give you $4M to fund your startup, especially when IPOs were slowing down also, and it was a downward spiral.
There were other major factors as well, of course
The Y2K Rush was over, which had been a lot of short-term business
Alan Greenspan raised interest rates by 2% in about six steps in early 2000 to cool down the bubbling economy, which is rough on a capital-intensive business. It made it harder for venture capitalists to raise cash, and gave them other places to put it besides Silicon Valley startups. (And draw your own conclusions about how much cooling down a bubbling economy is partisan politics when "It's the Economy, Stupid!".)
The late-90s Internet Bubble was largely about discovering the value of web-based advertising when the Internet lets you talk to anybody in the world. The answer that it was worth enough to fund free website space by advertising, but not enough to fund delivering dogfood online.
"Increase market share by losing money delivering dogfood online" as a business model? What were we thinking?:-) Sure, half the startup business ideas were below average, but there was a tendency to mix up coolness and shiny-ness with profitability, and just because the other VCs were funding better ideas didn't mean you should jump on the bandwagon just to be there...
Hey, I do miss setting them on fire:-) Back in the 80s, there were a couple of years where I could read Netnews by printing it all out on dead trees (double-sided 4-up using the big Xerox printer in the basement computer lab), and a bit later when I could still print out everything but net.singles, which was a fairly verbose newsgroup. It was much faster than reading it at 1200 baud, but eventually Netnews got too big to read the whole thing, and morphed into Usenet and later into Google Groups.
WIth a browser that behaves itself, no, it's much more efficient to start opening articles and then read them.
Part of it's because articles on many news sites take a while to load all their pieces, so reading them one at a time as opposed to queuing them means that you have to wait for that,
part of it's that by queuing them you don't have to keep track of where you were after reading each one,
part of it's that the selection and reading are different mental processes, so it's more efficient to do all the selection in one shot rather than context-switch back and forth,
part of it's that I may not read all the articles in one session - this queues up a bunch of stuff to read in between doing other things.
I just updated, and ran my usual browser reliability test on it - with my normal 10 or so windows and 100-200 tabs open, go to Fark.com, open the first 50-100 news articles in tabs, wait for it to stabilize, then read them. It burned a bit of CPU briefly, then froze hard - burned 1.5GB of RAM and I couldn't get it to respond to anything at all. Unlike in the past, the CPU was basically idle, but Firefox was frozen much harder than usual.
You'd think with user IDs in the 7 digits that Slashdot would be a small tightly-knit community where nobody would be willing to risk their karma by doing something like that.... But nooooo, we've got spammers even here!
I keep a lot of windows with a lot of tabs open most of the time, depending on what I'm working on or reading about at any time. Currently about half my tabs are in Chrome and about half in Firefox, with 8-10 windows each. Firefox has been crashing a lot the last couple of betas, so I've been moving the more stable stuff over to the Chrome windows, but there are some things that cause Chrome to fail badly.
Go to a news aggregator site, such as Fark or sometimes Google News. Open 50-100 links in new tabs, and then try to read them. Because it's a news aggregator, there'll be pages from lots of different sites, with lots of different Flash and Javascript garbage and lots of different kinds of advertising and occasional video. (That's what gets through _after_ using AdBlock and NoScript and Ghostery, but for a bunch of news sites I do have Javascript allowed because otherwise they're unreadable.) Firefox mostly succeeds, at the cost of some memory leaks and CPU burn, and if it fails, it crashes, and when you restart and restore most of the links work pretty cleanly. And if it's totally hosed but doesn't quite die, you can go to Task Manager to kill it. With Chrome, it's been much faster and cleaner, but at some point it'll get upset about something and all the tabs turn into the "Oh, Snap!" page - and there's no clean way to make it redraw them.
I've been under the impression that memory leak problems were getting better the last few betas, but FF still does the "burn the whole CPU core" trick, and Beta11 has been crashing a couple of times a day on me. So, yeah, "at last"....
I was once in a traffic court in New Jersey dealing with other matters, so I got to watch them do the easy cases first. The officers all start off saying "Here's my radar gun, model X, I calibrated it first thing that morning, here's the results, blah blah." I have no way to tell if they're telling the truth, but they've at least got the story down to say they're doing everything by the book.
Last time I actually got pulled over for speeding was years ago, out in the Colorado mountains. Cop stopped me, said "Sir, we clocked you at 64mph, we're within township boundaries so the speed limit's 55", and he and I both knew I hadn't been going anywhere near that slowly, and that he was giving me a number that I couldn't argue with, plus it sounded like it was just under the boundary between the cheap ticket and the expensive ticket, and I apologized and said I should have been paying more attention, and he let me off with a warning.
There was a short period of time that almost 1% of the Internet's users could use Kashpureff's root in addition to the real one, but nobody serious was going to pay significant money to only be in Alter-space and not real space. Sure, you might pay $10 to register example.xxx, if example.com had already been bought, but it was obviously a losing deal.
As far as I could tell from the outside, the big objective of ICANN was to give the Trademark Gods more control over the domain-name process than they were going to get through the IAHC, and to prevent new top-level domains from happening, and I was already annoyed at the IAHC for being too subservient to the Trademark Gods. The big issues for me were getting more gTLDs created and making sure that the domain name process could preserve privacy, while the IAHC had pretty much agreed that you wouldn't be able to get a domain name without providing your True Name and ICBM\\\\Lawsuit Address.
Unlike some people, I didn't mind that the Ad-Hoc Committee's first seven domain names were pretty lame and boring - it's a process the world only gets to do once, so it's a lot better to practice it on namespaces nobody cares much about like.FIRM and.NOM, so they can do the job right for more valuable names like.INC,.GMBH,.LLC,.SA, etc. But the takeover by ICANN prevented even those from happening, so we end up with a flat cluttered.COM namespace instead of a more complex and meaningful one.
ICANN accomplished a few more things for its friends in power along the way - delaying DNSSEC and to some extent IPv6, and making it much harder to do experimentally-structured namespaces (with the exception of.museum, which was interesting.) Some things I'll ascribe mostly to incompetence rather than malice - because they really didn't want new TLDs, they didn't do any research into non-7-bit namespaces, so by the time the international-language crowd put enough pressure on them to Do Something, they adopted the appallingly-broken Punycode stuff (which I think came from NetSol, but I could easily be wrong about that.) I was especially annoyed that they asserted control over the IPv6 namespace, because fundamentally they care about Intellectual Property, not the Internet Protocol, and they made it hard for people to get official space for research purposes by charging a lot for it, as opposed to carving up 1/256th or 1/4096th of it and saying "it's experimental, go play with it, have fun!"
Google's original pagerank was always based on having links from other sites - Back when most of the web's content was written by actual humans, the more links you had, the more likely it was that multiple actual humans had found your pages to be interesting. And that was especially true if the links were from interesting humans. These days, it's mostly robots all the way down - even if humans are writing the useful content, the pages themselves are mostly written by dynamic html generators that pack lots of links to the other content on a site.
Having said that, I have noticed that a bunch of content I manage became much harder to find on Google a few years ago when we switched the domain from a.org to a.com (due to the usual random domain-registrar difficulties.) I run the mailing list for a group of people who go out to dinner weekly in/near Silicon Valley, and we've got a decade or two of pages of "This week's dinner at Restaurant X, Schedule of restaurants for the next couple of weeks, review of Restaurant X, directions to Restaurant X", and before Yelp came around, if I wanted to update the review of a restaurant we hadn't been to in a while, my site was often near the top of Google results, sometimes the only result if the restaurant didn't have its own web page and the local paper hadn't covered it. Fortunately there's a lot more real content now that Web 2.0 has users writing restaurant reviews, but the domain name change made the old results drop off the map for a while even though the content was still all there.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is important, and this is research!
Besides, we're not going to have a significant fraction of the human population off the planet in your lifetime, or for centuries. (I don't count it as significant unless it's self-sustaining colonies, not dependent on having Earth around to supply them. Less than that is an important first step, but those kids aren't getting off your our lawns, so we've got to put up with them.) So relax, have yourself a beer.
They look like one of many good places to order things online; I got started with Sparkfun and Seeed Studios, and Mouser and Digikey and FunGizmos seem to be popular.
I was using Fry's and Radio Shack more as examples of places you end up dropping by to pick up a couple of transistors or some more connector wire or whatever on your way home from work. (RS has a coupon good for $10 off your next $40 purchase, which I almost never spend there; it's the $5-10 trips that add up :-)
Our data centers also had customer-friendly space. I think it was mostly inside the "show ID to a guard" area, but it was as important a part of the design as the racks and cages.
A friend of mine who worked in QA used to use Scharffenberger chocolate bars as a bribe when the developers fixed things that made her life easier. They were the small ones, the recipients knew they only cost $2, but it's really the appreciation that counts.
When I did my 555 contest project, I mainly used the Arduino as a handy 5-volt power supply, but I also ran a voltmeter script on it that sent its output to my PC screen. Instead of using a traditional voltmeter, I'd get a nice trace of the voltage levels it was seeing on the capacitors, so I could look at the last 100 samples instead of just guessing "it was bouncing between about 1-2v" (or "0.76 and 2.07", on the digital voltmeter, but the batteries on that were dead :-)
An oscilloscope would have been another traditional approach, but I don't have one of those, and the Arduino was a good in-between step.
Arduino comes with pretty much everything you need to get started in a really sophisticated programming environment. It's not quite down to the metal (you can go read rants about "Why DigitalWrite() is Too Slow!" for explanations), but it's close enough, and you can ignore the higher-level libraries and get at the raw bits if you want to. If you're more interested in using them for artwork than engineering, you don't need to do the deep dive, but it's a great place to learn.
At least one of the TI compiler suites comes in a limited-memory-crippled free-beer version, but that's ok in practice if you're using it with Launchpad - it limits you to something like 4K, but the MSP430 chips that come with the Launchpad are the versions with only 2K flash and 128-bye RAM, so it'll let you do anything those chips can do, and let you learn about TI's chip environment.
If you decide to start using the bigger chips from TI, the limitation may get annoying, but by that point you can decide whether to use GCC or (if you're using it commercially) to pay for the non-free development environment because you like those TI chips better than the AVR ATmegas that can use the Arduino environment.
Yeah, it's under $5, but you'll have to buy a soldering iron and some headers to use Launchpad, so it's pretty much equivalent. With Arduino, you can do everything on breadboards. And in practice, you're going to end up buying a bunch of breadboards, LEDs, resistors, alligator clips, baling wire, accelerometers, a Wii Nunchuck, speakers, and other stuff to go with it, so the cost is pretty much equivalent. And if you want to play with the AVR environment much, you'll either end up spending $30 to buy an ICSP programmer or just use the Arduino to do it instead, so you might as well just buy it.
On the other hand, Launchpad's cheap enough that once you've gotten started with the Arduino, you might as well also buy a Launchpad. It's what I would have been playing with next except they were backordered and by the time it arrived I had started playing with 555s.
Arduino is a better place to start - the package really does give you everything you need to get up and running, between development environment, documentation, hardware, and friendly handholding-for-artists. (You'll still find yourself running out to Fry's or Radio Shack to buy more LEDs and resistors - I'd recommend buying a couple packages of "20 assorted LEDs", "50 assorted resistors", etc. to save yourself some trouble.)
You really don't need to know much more for Launchpad than for Arduino, but the Launchpad docs generally assume you already know what you're doing, and the Arduino docs generally assume you don't know what you're doing and want to learn, so there's a lot easier learning curve. Also, Launchpad's a bit closer to the metal than Arduino, where you can start at a slightly higher language level to write your code, if you want to, and Launchpad requires you to solder the headers onto the board yourself, so it assumes you're good at soldering. (And if you want to use the timing crystal, it's surface-mount, which is really annoying if you're not already experienced with soldering.) With Arduino, soldering's optional - you can breadboard everything, or use shields.
Once you've done your first Arduino project, you can do later stuff by just getting the AVR chips and putting them on a breadboard yourself if you'd prefer.
Great timing on that comment - I just spent last month playing with 555s for the 555 Design Contest that accidentally occurred. If you want to blink LEDs, you don't need a 555 - you can use two transistors instead. (And in fact my contest project starts with a 2-transistor oscillator driving two LEDs, and feeds the voltages from it to a 555-based PWM circuit that flashes more LEDs. I've also got an Arduino in it, which is way overkill when I'm just using it for the 5v power supply (:-), but in fact it was convenient to also use it as a voltmeter to test what the transistors and 555 were doing.)
The Launchpad isn't dumber than the Arduino, just cheaper - the MSP430 is a 16-bit chip, but has less RAM and Flash than the 8-bit AVR Atmega328 that Arduino uses. The big difference is in the development environments - the Arduino comes with a higher-level environment, so you don't have to start down at the Raw Bits unless you want to (unlike the MSP430, where you're pretty much forced to), and comes with enough hand-holding that an artist can start doing real work right away. Also, the Launchpad makes you solder the headers and (surface-mount!) timer crystal onto the board yourself, instead of just plugging in shields or wires, but it is better integrated with USB because it doesn't have the leftover serial-FTDI design that Arduino started with.
According to the Apple site, the big performance win for games isn't the faster CPU, it's the 9x faster graphics processing.
The anti-trust suit against Microsoft was a major cause of the post-2000 crash. The Silicon Valley startup business model included cashing out, either by IPO, or by Selling Out, either to Cisco if you made hardware or Microsoft if you did software and services (e.g. Hotmail's $400M), and once the anti-trust action started, Microsoft wasn't buying anybody, not only because they didn't want to look any bigger or more powerful, but also because Al Gore was threatening to break them into pieces, and it wasn't clear which pieces would have the money to buy anybody. And if you can't cash out by selling out, venture capitalists were less likely to give you $4M to fund your startup, especially when IPOs were slowing down also, and it was a downward spiral.
There were other major factors as well, of course
Hey, I do miss setting them on fire :-) Back in the 80s, there were a couple of years where I could read Netnews by printing it all out on dead trees (double-sided 4-up using the big Xerox printer in the basement computer lab), and a bit later when I could still print out everything but net.singles, which was a fairly verbose newsgroup. It was much faster than reading it at 1200 baud, but eventually Netnews got too big to read the whole thing, and morphed into Usenet and later into Google Groups.
WIth a browser that behaves itself, no, it's much more efficient to start opening articles and then read them.
You don't get to call monopoly-sized-things "bad" if they aren't acting anti-competitively, and the term "monopoly" has a negative connotation.
Been tolkien' on the pipeweed too much?
I just updated, and ran my usual browser reliability test on it - with my normal 10 or so windows and 100-200 tabs open, go to Fark.com, open the first 50-100 news articles in tabs, wait for it to stabilize, then read them. It burned a bit of CPU briefly, then froze hard - burned 1.5GB of RAM and I couldn't get it to respond to anything at all. Unlike in the past, the CPU was basically idle, but Firefox was frozen much harder than usual.
You'd think with user IDs in the 7 digits that Slashdot would be a small tightly-knit community where nobody would be willing to risk their karma by doing something like that.... But nooooo, we've got spammers even here!
I keep a lot of windows with a lot of tabs open most of the time, depending on what I'm working on or reading about at any time. Currently about half my tabs are in Chrome and about half in Firefox, with 8-10 windows each. Firefox has been crashing a lot the last couple of betas, so I've been moving the more stable stuff over to the Chrome windows, but there are some things that cause Chrome to fail badly.
Go to a news aggregator site, such as Fark or sometimes Google News. Open 50-100 links in new tabs, and then try to read them. Because it's a news aggregator, there'll be pages from lots of different sites, with lots of different Flash and Javascript garbage and lots of different kinds of advertising and occasional video. (That's what gets through _after_ using AdBlock and NoScript and Ghostery, but for a bunch of news sites I do have Javascript allowed because otherwise they're unreadable.) Firefox mostly succeeds, at the cost of some memory leaks and CPU burn, and if it fails, it crashes, and when you restart and restore most of the links work pretty cleanly. And if it's totally hosed but doesn't quite die, you can go to Task Manager to kill it. With Chrome, it's been much faster and cleaner, but at some point it'll get upset about something and all the tabs turn into the "Oh, Snap!" page - and there's no clean way to make it redraw them.
It took me a while to get used to having the hovered links' URLs displayed in the URL bar, but I've been deciding I kind of like it.
I've been under the impression that memory leak problems were getting better the last few betas, but FF still does the "burn the whole CPU core" trick, and Beta11 has been crashing a couple of times a day on me. So, yeah, "at last"....
I was once in a traffic court in New Jersey dealing with other matters, so I got to watch them do the easy cases first. The officers all start off saying "Here's my radar gun, model X, I calibrated it first thing that morning, here's the results, blah blah." I have no way to tell if they're telling the truth, but they've at least got the story down to say they're doing everything by the book.
Last time I actually got pulled over for speeding was years ago, out in the Colorado mountains. Cop stopped me, said "Sir, we clocked you at 64mph, we're within township boundaries so the speed limit's 55", and he and I both knew I hadn't been going anywhere near that slowly, and that he was giving me a number that I couldn't argue with, plus it sounded like it was just under the boundary between the cheap ticket and the expensive ticket, and I apologized and said I should have been paying more attention, and he let me off with a warning.
There was a short period of time that almost 1% of the Internet's users could use Kashpureff's root in addition to the real one, but nobody serious was going to pay significant money to only be in Alter-space and not real space. Sure, you might pay $10 to register example.xxx, if example.com had already been bought, but it was obviously a losing deal.
As far as I could tell from the outside, the big objective of ICANN was to give the Trademark Gods more control over the domain-name process than they were going to get through the IAHC, and to prevent new top-level domains from happening, and I was already annoyed at the IAHC for being too subservient to the Trademark Gods. The big issues for me were getting more gTLDs created and making sure that the domain name process could preserve privacy, while the IAHC had pretty much agreed that you wouldn't be able to get a domain name without providing your True Name and ICBM\\\\Lawsuit Address.
Unlike some people, I didn't mind that the Ad-Hoc Committee's first seven domain names were pretty lame and boring - it's a process the world only gets to do once, so it's a lot better to practice it on namespaces nobody cares much about like .FIRM and .NOM, so they can do the job right for more valuable names like .INC, .GMBH, .LLC, .SA, etc. But the takeover by ICANN prevented even those from happening, so we end up with a flat cluttered .COM namespace instead of a more complex and meaningful one.
ICANN accomplished a few more things for its friends in power along the way - delaying DNSSEC and to some extent IPv6, and making it much harder to do experimentally-structured namespaces (with the exception of .museum, which was interesting.) Some things I'll ascribe mostly to incompetence rather than malice - because they really didn't want new TLDs, they didn't do any research into non-7-bit namespaces, so by the time the international-language crowd put enough pressure on them to Do Something, they adopted the appallingly-broken Punycode stuff (which I think came from NetSol, but I could easily be wrong about that.) I was especially annoyed that they asserted control over the IPv6 namespace, because fundamentally they care about Intellectual Property, not the Internet Protocol, and they made it hard for people to get official space for research purposes by charging a lot for it, as opposed to carving up 1/256th or 1/4096th of it and saying "it's experimental, go play with it, have fun!"
Google's original pagerank was always based on having links from other sites - Back when most of the web's content was written by actual humans, the more links you had, the more likely it was that multiple actual humans had found your pages to be interesting. And that was especially true if the links were from interesting humans. These days, it's mostly robots all the way down - even if humans are writing the useful content, the pages themselves are mostly written by dynamic html generators that pack lots of links to the other content on a site.
Having said that, I have noticed that a bunch of content I manage became much harder to find on Google a few years ago when we switched the domain from a .org to a .com (due to the usual random domain-registrar difficulties.) I run the mailing list for a group of people who go out to dinner weekly in/near Silicon Valley, and we've got a decade or two of pages of "This week's dinner at Restaurant X, Schedule of restaurants for the next couple of weeks, review of Restaurant X, directions to Restaurant X", and before Yelp came around, if I wanted to update the review of a restaurant we hadn't been to in a while, my site was often near the top of Google results, sometimes the only result if the restaurant didn't have its own web page and the local paper hadn't covered it. Fortunately there's a lot more real content now that Web 2.0 has users writing restaurant reviews, but the domain name change made the old results drop off the map for a while even though the content was still all there.