Since it does that adequately well, why would it need to have any other purpose. Besides being a tourist attraction and giving people an actual reason to want to visit the Black Hills, of course.
These things were built for religious or political purposes, by a population which was ALREADY SO SUCCESSFUL at farming that they had a great deal of time on their hands waiting for crops to mature, or the next season to arrive, and plenty to eat.
Or, possibly, they got tired of continually having to rebuild the wooden structure they used to tell what season to sow the fields (it was known as Woodhenge but no traces of it survive) so they finally made the investment to produce the stone version.
Broadcast power was something he was into, but they couldn't figure out how to bill for it.
With 'broadcast power' we could simply have plain unshielded boxes located at the outside of our houses. Put some food in the box, and it would be cooked by the broadcast RF energy, similar to how a microwave oven works.
Of course, that sort of turns the whole 'microwave oven' concept inside out: we'd have to walk around in shielded clothing, and keep any food we didn't want to spontaneously cook in shielded enclosures.
I would even go so far as to say that it's more nerdy than a large bulk of the 'IT related' stories that get posted. Slashdot has gotten pretty badly infected with IT types in the last decade. Sometimes they even assume that's Slashdot's target audience.
It's scary to think about, but people have been doing that for decades. Watching mostly TV of course, but you may have noticed GP said 'movies or tv' not just movies.
My parents have the TV on by default just about every evening. The decision isn't whether to turn it on or not, it's what channel to tune it to. They're very typical, in my observation.
Well, you can credit Woz for the fact that people assume that a 'computer' has an integrated keyboard and display. That's practically the definition of a crap/cheap consumer-grade computer from that era. The grownups had terminals that they connected to their personal computers, which mostly ran CP/M. You could at the time buy a CP/M card, manufactured Microsoft, to plug into your Apple computer, which turned the Apple II into, basically, a dumb terminal host.
The Woz's integrated keyboard/display design is, fast-forwarding to today, the reason that morons in the Minecraft Forums say things like 'where is the display and keyboard, I am not impressed' when Minecraft hackers come out with CPU designs rendered in redstone logic.
My dad brought a 5100 home from work on the weekends back in 1976 for us to mess with. It was such a cool machine. A mechanical toggle switch on the side that you set before rebooting it set it to run either APL or BASIC.
Well, CP/M is mythical in the sense that few of the CP/M users ever saw any original published documentation or original disks from Digital Research. There was usually one guy in each user group who had bought the actual stuff and had a printed manual. Everybody else had 'working copies.' And since what Digital Research sold you was a generally non-working copy of the binaries that you had to graft your hand-coded BIOS onto to work with your hardware, this makes perfect sense.
In the later period of CP/M usage, there were, of course, published manuals and turnkey versions of CP/M bundled with hardware by the vendors. But this is Slashdot, right?
That's fun, too, but it doesn't one-by-one close the windows of programs they are running. My main point concerns the gripping-of-the-mouse panic attack. Said users seldom know any of the keyboard shortcuts at all.
But does IBM deserve any credit for that? They fought tooth and nail against it. The main reason IBM's box happened to be cloned was their heavy-weight name, not anything they "invented".
I have an original copy of the IBM/PC Technical Reference Manual here.
It contains the complete schematic diagrams of the PC motherboard and all the plug-in cards manufactured by IBM.
It contains the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS.
I have later addendums to the Technical Reference Manual including the Technical Reference for the EGA display adapter. It includes the full schematic diagram, and the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS extension rom on the EGA card.
I loudly call BULLSHIT on the assertion that IBM intended for the IBM-PC to be a closed architecture. At the same time that IBM was selling the Tech Refs for all their hardware Apple was vigorously suing the Apple/II clone vendors.
Granted, publishing the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS actually made it more difficult for Phoenix to clone the BIOS. Because putting it all out there for anybody curious to read 'tainted' anybody who read it and rendered them as individuals who could not participate in the work-alike re-write of the BIOS.
The main thing missing from the PC/jr was the DMA controller. So all I/O on it had to pass through the 8088 processor's accumulator. That, needless to say, made it far, far slower than a regular IBM PC. I have fond memories of running the wireframe 3-D Pacman clone game called 3-Demon on a PC/jr. If you turned in the game such that you faced down a long corridor, the game's graphics and the beeping would significantly s-l-o-w d-o-w-n as the cpu tried to keep up with the action.
3-Demon is one of the coolest games of that era, I am surprised how few abandonware enthusiasts seem to keep it around.
Did you have an original PC-1 or the much more common PC-2?
The PC-1 had a motherboard with four rows of 16K x 1 chips, and the card brackets and power supply were painted black.
The far more common PC-2 had a motherboard with 4 rows of 64K chips and the card brackets and power supply were unpainted 'silver colored' metal. If I had a dime for everybody who claims they had a PC-1 when they really mean a PC-2.... Well, I guess I'd buy a candy bar or something....
I have a stack of machines, including at least one PC-2, and a pile of PC-XTs, in the second bedroom here. It's next to the pile of five Commodore SX-64's that I have.
I have a version of the LSI-11 that was put onto a pair of ISA cards. The one I have is plugged into a standard '486 motherboard that is installed in a rack-mount case. There are cables coming off the LSI-11 card that go to a more standard LSI-11 card cage. It's a compatibility kludge somebody paid a ton of money for.
Sure, the PDP8/e was smallish. But you're referring to the CPU portion of it. So long as you only want to program it in octal using the switch panel, you're correct. Set the box on a bench and plug it in. It has to be put into a rack with a high speed paper tape reader and have teletypes connected to it to be meaningfully useful as a computer in the sense that most people think of. And the rack that the PDP8/e box gets placed in is roughly the size of... a refrigerator.
It's a stupid use of your gold ingots to make computers out of them. Gold computers wear out quicker than the cobblestone ones! Use your gold ingots to make powered rails.
Most of the people who simply altered their state of consciousness don't land in jail.
It's the people who are out distributing the substances that make it easy for average fools to alter their state of consciousness. It's a little like someone handing out chain saws to a bunch of 12 year old kids. Who doesn't think they should be punished for doing something that dangerous?
this includes software modding like the original Counter-Strike and hardware modding like cutting blowholes into a standard aluminum case and adding water colling.
And that's just sad, because speaking as an electronics enthusiast, I would reserve the term 'hardware modding' for people who actually modify the part of the hardware that is the actual computer, i.e. hacking in more memory, an extra co-processor, grafting new I/O onto a system. The people who cut windows into off-the-shelf PC cases and install cooling systems are metal-shop types, not hardware hackers.
Alt-F4 is the best, though. When you walk up and take over the keyboard of the typical Windows user, just hold down Alt and punch F4 a bunch. As windows close on the screen, they go into such a panic attack while gripping the mouse helplessly that they often pee themselves.
I'm sure the EU will come up with a special agency empowered to be the only ones using said dangerous tools. You aren't anti-social, are you? Don't you trust the commissioners to do the right thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Since it does that adequately well, why would it need to have any other purpose. Besides being a tourist attraction and giving people an actual reason to want to visit the Black Hills, of course.
These things were built for religious or political purposes, by a population which was ALREADY SO SUCCESSFUL at farming that they had a great deal of time on their hands waiting for crops to mature, or the next season to arrive, and plenty to eat.
Or, possibly, they got tired of continually having to rebuild the wooden structure they used to tell what season to sow the fields (it was known as Woodhenge but no traces of it survive) so they finally made the investment to produce the stone version.
Broadcast power was something he was into, but they couldn't figure out how to bill for it.
With 'broadcast power' we could simply have plain unshielded boxes located at the outside of our houses. Put some food in the box, and it would be cooked by the broadcast RF energy, similar to how a microwave oven works.
Of course, that sort of turns the whole 'microwave oven' concept inside out: we'd have to walk around in shielded clothing, and keep any food we didn't want to spontaneously cook in shielded enclosures.
It's a fairly nerdy topic.
I would even go so far as to say that it's more nerdy than a large bulk of the 'IT related' stories that get posted. Slashdot has gotten pretty badly infected with IT types in the last decade. Sometimes they even assume that's Slashdot's target audience.
lapis is basically worthless, still.
Bee nites two udders,
I just tried typing nites and it got flagged as a spelling error. Yep. There it is up there with the red underscoring.
Perhaps they should be government owned, though. Since the US Government fixed up a little business to make it a sweet enough deal for them to buy.....
Shouldn't your name be stalinmarv? Certainly would be more honest of you.
It's scary to think about, but people have been doing that for decades. Watching mostly TV of course, but you may have noticed GP said 'movies or tv' not just movies.
My parents have the TV on by default just about every evening. The decision isn't whether to turn it on or not, it's what channel to tune it to. They're very typical, in my observation.
You may be confusing cause and effect, there.
Well, you can credit Woz for the fact that people assume that a 'computer' has an integrated keyboard and display. That's practically the definition of a crap/cheap consumer-grade computer from that era. The grownups had terminals that they connected to their personal computers, which mostly ran CP/M. You could at the time buy a CP/M card, manufactured Microsoft, to plug into your Apple computer, which turned the Apple II into, basically, a dumb terminal host.
The Woz's integrated keyboard/display design is, fast-forwarding to today, the reason that morons in the Minecraft Forums say things like 'where is the display and keyboard, I am not impressed' when Minecraft hackers come out with CPU designs rendered in redstone logic.
My dad brought a 5100 home from work on the weekends back in 1976 for us to mess with. It was such a cool machine. A mechanical toggle switch on the side that you set before rebooting it set it to run either APL or BASIC.
Well, CP/M is mythical in the sense that few of the CP/M users ever saw any original published documentation or original disks from Digital Research. There was usually one guy in each user group who had bought the actual stuff and had a printed manual. Everybody else had 'working copies.' And since what Digital Research sold you was a generally non-working copy of the binaries that you had to graft your hand-coded BIOS onto to work with your hardware, this makes perfect sense.
In the later period of CP/M usage, there were, of course, published manuals and turnkey versions of CP/M bundled with hardware by the vendors. But this is Slashdot, right?
That's fun, too, but it doesn't one-by-one close the windows of programs they are running. My main point concerns the gripping-of-the-mouse panic attack. Said users seldom know any of the keyboard shortcuts at all.
But does IBM deserve any credit for that? They fought tooth and nail against it. The main reason IBM's box happened to be cloned was their heavy-weight name, not anything they "invented".
I have an original copy of the IBM/PC Technical Reference Manual here.
It contains the complete schematic diagrams of the PC motherboard and all the plug-in cards manufactured by IBM.
It contains the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS.
I have later addendums to the Technical Reference Manual including the Technical Reference for the EGA display adapter. It includes the full schematic diagram, and the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS extension rom on the EGA card.
I loudly call BULLSHIT on the assertion that IBM intended for the IBM-PC to be a closed architecture. At the same time that IBM was selling the Tech Refs for all their hardware Apple was vigorously suing the Apple/II clone vendors.
Granted, publishing the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS actually made it more difficult for Phoenix to clone the BIOS. Because putting it all out there for anybody curious to read 'tainted' anybody who read it and rendered them as individuals who could not participate in the work-alike re-write of the BIOS.
The main thing missing from the PC/jr was the DMA controller. So all I/O on it had to pass through the 8088 processor's accumulator. That, needless to say, made it far, far slower than a regular IBM PC. I have fond memories of running the wireframe 3-D Pacman clone game called 3-Demon on a PC/jr. If you turned in the game such that you faced down a long corridor, the game's graphics and the beeping would significantly s-l-o-w d-o-w-n as the cpu tried to keep up with the action.
3-Demon is one of the coolest games of that era, I am surprised how few abandonware enthusiasts seem to keep it around.
Did you have an original PC-1 or the much more common PC-2?
The PC-1 had a motherboard with four rows of 16K x 1 chips, and the card brackets and power supply were painted black.
The far more common PC-2 had a motherboard with 4 rows of 64K chips and the card brackets and power supply were unpainted 'silver colored' metal. If I had a dime for everybody who claims they had a PC-1 when they really mean a PC-2.... Well, I guess I'd buy a candy bar or something....
I have a stack of machines, including at least one PC-2, and a pile of PC-XTs, in the second bedroom here. It's next to the pile of five Commodore SX-64's that I have.
I have a version of the LSI-11 that was put onto a pair of ISA cards. The one I have is plugged into a standard '486 motherboard that is installed in a rack-mount case. There are cables coming off the LSI-11 card that go to a more standard LSI-11 card cage. It's a compatibility kludge somebody paid a ton of money for.
Sure, the PDP8/e was smallish. But you're referring to the CPU portion of it. So long as you only want to program it in octal using the switch panel, you're correct. Set the box on a bench and plug it in. It has to be put into a rack with a high speed paper tape reader and have teletypes connected to it to be meaningfully useful as a computer in the sense that most people think of. And the rack that the PDP8/e box gets placed in is roughly the size of... a refrigerator.
And here I thought all the blame for the Holocaust was Rolodexes, and 3 x 5 Index cards.
Don't get me started on the fact that there were people throughout the Nazi regime wearing leather shoes. Blame the Cows!
It's a stupid use of your gold ingots to make computers out of them. Gold computers wear out quicker than the cobblestone ones! Use your gold ingots to make powered rails.
Most of the people who simply altered their state of consciousness don't land in jail.
It's the people who are out distributing the substances that make it easy for average fools to alter their state of consciousness. It's a little like someone handing out chain saws to a bunch of 12 year old kids. Who doesn't think they should be punished for doing something that dangerous?
this includes software modding like the original Counter-Strike and hardware modding like cutting blowholes into a standard aluminum case and adding water colling.
And that's just sad, because speaking as an electronics enthusiast, I would reserve the term 'hardware modding' for people who actually modify the part of the hardware that is the actual computer, i.e. hacking in more memory, an extra co-processor, grafting new I/O onto a system. The people who cut windows into off-the-shelf PC cases and install cooling systems are metal-shop types, not hardware hackers.
Alt-F4 is the best, though. When you walk up and take over the keyboard of the typical Windows user, just hold down Alt and punch F4 a bunch. As windows close on the screen, they go into such a panic attack while gripping the mouse helplessly that they often pee themselves.
I'm sure the EU will come up with a special agency empowered to be the only ones using said dangerous tools. You aren't anti-social, are you? Don't you trust the commissioners to do the right thing?