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OT but very useful...
In article , Larry wrote:
"Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: Name a program that doesn't work on an Apple. Maemo Mapper Xournal 55,800 Palm programs millions of Linux programs millions of Windows programs. Don't tell me about Wine. It's **** compared to XP running on a really fast Windows box. Owning an Apple has always been like owning a bike with training wheels you can't take off. Visit any software store and count the Apple programs in the back corner of the Windows Store. Wonder why the whole store isn't full of Apple programs with a tiny section in the back of Windows programs. Visit tucows.com, download.com and compare the shareware available. I upgraded a Linux box last week, part of what it does is run Samba which allows users on the network to share data (among other things). The machine upgraded fine, the apples on the network didn't even notice. The two windows machines, however, refused to login after the upgrade. I spent hours looking for the answer; an answer that would enable one of them to login wouldn't work for the other, and vice-versa. Over the years I've spent so much time just keeping Windows machines working that I'm glad we've replaced all of our office (bar two machines) with Macs - actually, bar three, we also have one Linux work-station, it's a small office, only ten clients, but it saves me a lot of time and I can get on and do my real job. The two Windows machines we have are because the label software supplied by our courier will only run on Windows, they're about to be made redundant now we have a better deal with another carrier. The reason most people use Windows has nothing to do with quality of software, or even abundance of it, it is because that is what the machine came with. The majority use IE, OutLook, MediaPlayer, and the software that came with their digital camera. Most people have no clue about anything outside that, providing they can access FaceBook they don't care. They think that PC *means* windows, that the hardware and UI are not conjoined would surprise them. That will never be overcome. I'm quite happy with that, it means I don't spend all my time dealing with dumb user questions, 'cos I don't do Windows. Justin. -- Justin C, by the sea. |
OT but very useful...
"Bruce In Bangkok" wrote in message
... On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:14:19 -0700, "Capt. JG" wrote: snipped I just downloaded a free app that works like a level. I get the NY Times pushed to the phone every hour. I can also use it like a touch screen for my computer instead of the mouse. Sure... lots of "cuteness" but some of it is very cool tool. The push stuff is nice. I wish I could get that here. Cuteness or cool depends on the user I think. I seldom text but in Singapore you see kids hanging on a strap in the subway, talking with their friends and typing text messages with their thumb faster then I can type with both hands. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
"thunder" wrote in message
t... On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:58:04 -0600, Vic Smith wrote: I think there is something called Boot Camp that allows Apple PCs to run Windows apps. It's my understanding that Boot Camp allows Apple PCs to run the Windows OS, and along with it, Windows apps. Apples, at least some of them, are now Intel based, but, apparently, run a different BIOS that Windows doesn't support. Boot Camp just allows you to dual boot. There is also Parallels, which will run Windows inside a virtual machine, so you can run the Mac OS and Windows at the same time. Yep... you have to reboot to use it. But, there are plenty of emulators out there that work side-by-side with MacOS. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
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OT but very useful...
"Capt. JG" wrote in
easolutions: Yep... you have to reboot to use it. But, there are plenty of emulators out there that work side-by-side with MacOS. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com We could save a couple of thousand dollars and boot my Samsung NC10 netbook to WinXP....Apple OS X.....Linux and not need to run all the apple emulator crapware to drag everything down. Here's the video of the OS X netbook. $410 delivered at Costcentral.com! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HckW...eature=related Fantastic little netbook....NO GLOSSY SCREEN is a pleasure to watch!! |
OT but very useful...
"Larry" wrote in message
... "Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: Yep... you have to reboot to use it. But, there are plenty of emulators out there that work side-by-side with MacOS. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com We could save a couple of thousand dollars and boot my Samsung NC10 netbook to WinXP....Apple OS X.....Linux and not need to run all the apple emulator crapware to drag everything down. Here's the video of the OS X netbook. $410 delivered at Costcentral.com! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HckW...eature=related Fantastic little netbook....NO GLOSSY SCREEN is a pleasure to watch!! Nice, but you still have to boot into what you want right? The emulation I have allows you to switch back and forth on the fly and you can share data back and forth. I don't find it to drag it much, but it's a desktop box. I'm not sure why I would need to switch back and forth either with boot or emulation if I had it on my boat. Seems to me, I'd be on one or the other, depending on what runs natively. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
"Capt. JG" wrote in
easolutions: Nice, but you still have to boot into what you want right? The emulation I have allows you to switch back and forth on the fly and you can share data back and forth. I don't find it to drag it much, but it's a desktop box. I'm not sure why I would need to switch back and forth either with boot or emulation if I had it on my boat. Seems to me, I'd be on one or the other, depending on what runs natively. My poor little Atom N270 1.6Ghz 1MB RAM 2 pound netbook isn't OS magic.... Yeah, on 1GB of RAM you only run one OS at a time.... |
OT but very useful...
"Larry" wrote in message
... "Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: Nice, but you still have to boot into what you want right? The emulation I have allows you to switch back and forth on the fly and you can share data back and forth. I don't find it to drag it much, but it's a desktop box. I'm not sure why I would need to switch back and forth either with boot or emulation if I had it on my boat. Seems to me, I'd be on one or the other, depending on what runs natively. My poor little Atom N270 1.6Ghz 1MB RAM 2 pound netbook isn't OS magic.... Yeah, on 1GB of RAM you only run one OS at a time.... I just booted up my Virtual PC emulator on my Windoz box. I use it very, very rarely to test suspect software. It's actually not bad. Oh, so my point... I only have 1 gig of ram. It's a fairly old system... P4, 3.06 gh. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
Capt. JG wrote:
"Larry" wrote in message ... "Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: Nice, but you still have to boot into what you want right? The emulation I have allows you to switch back and forth on the fly and you can share data back and forth. I don't find it to drag it much, but it's a desktop box. I'm not sure why I would need to switch back and forth either with boot or emulation if I had it on my boat. Seems to me, I'd be on one or the other, depending on what runs natively. My poor little Atom N270 1.6Ghz 1MB RAM 2 pound netbook isn't OS magic.... Yeah, on 1GB of RAM you only run one OS at a time.... I just booted up my Virtual PC emulator on my Windoz box. I use it very, very rarely to test suspect software. It's actually not bad. Oh, so my point... I only have 1 gig of ram. It's a fairly old system... P4, 3.06 gh. Only 1 gig? "640k ought to be enough for anyone",, Lordy, when I went to college if we had a machine with a full kilobyte we were doing well.... Cheers Martin |
OT but very useful...
On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:26:24 +0000, Larry wrote:
Bruce In Bangkok wrote in : Funny. Back in the days when MS was known for making the Z-80 card so you could plug one in and run CP/M software they were good guys. We ran the whole company on Apple ]['s and Z-80 cards at one time. In the days before the PC/DOS, I used to sell Ohio Scientific computers. Our business model had 6502, Z80 and 6800 processors you could select to run all the software currently available on whatever OS you liked. CP/M ran great. But so expensive.... It was also the first commercial microcomputer with a real hard drive, a 74MB, 14" platter monster from the minicomputers of the day. 74MB was an unheardof landscape of real fast storage. Our OS was called OS-65U and ran an extended BASIC on the 6502 processor, the best of the three. Then IBM decided none of the rest of us needed to be in business and that was pretty much the end of it..... I remember, the first year or so after IBM started making the PC people asking me what kind of computer to but and I used to recommend Apple "there is so much more software for them, you know?" Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) |
OT but very useful...
On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:22:56 -0700, "Capt. JG"
wrote: "thunder" wrote in message et... On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:58:04 -0600, Vic Smith wrote: I think there is something called Boot Camp that allows Apple PCs to run Windows apps. It's my understanding that Boot Camp allows Apple PCs to run the Windows OS, and along with it, Windows apps. Apples, at least some of them, are now Intel based, but, apparently, run a different BIOS that Windows doesn't support. Boot Camp just allows you to dual boot. There is also Parallels, which will run Windows inside a virtual machine, so you can run the Mac OS and Windows at the same time. Yep... you have to reboot to use it. But, there are plenty of emulators out there that work side-by-side with MacOS. The problem is that none of the emulators allow you to run ALL of the other guy's software. Wine, for example allows Linux machines to run some Windows software as does the Apple emulator. Any foreign software that directly accesses hardware, use a dongle, or any other fancy anti theft devices, won't run under the emulator. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) |
OT but very useful...
On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:21:41 -0700, "Capt. JG"
wrote: "Bruce In Bangkok" wrote in message .. . On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:14:19 -0700, "Capt. JG" wrote: snipped I just downloaded a free app that works like a level. I get the NY Times pushed to the phone every hour. I can also use it like a touch screen for my computer instead of the mouse. Sure... lots of "cuteness" but some of it is very cool tool. The push stuff is nice. I wish I could get that here. Cuteness or cool depends on the user I think. I seldom text but in Singapore you see kids hanging on a strap in the subway, talking with their friends and typing text messages with their thumb faster then I can type with both hands. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. You are seriously ****ing me off! If I buy another new handphone my wife is going to kill me..... Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) |
OT but very useful...
Bruce In Bangkok wrote in
: The problem is that none of the emulators allow you to run ALL of the other guy's software. Wine, for example allows Linux machines to run some Windows software as does the Apple emulator. Any foreign software that directly accesses hardware, use a dongle, or any other fancy anti theft devices, won't run under the emulator. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) The other emulator problem is INPUT and OUTPUT.....something always doesn't work just right.....ports, audio, video, etc..... |
OT but very useful...
"Bruce In Bangkok" wrote in message
... On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:21:41 -0700, "Capt. JG" wrote: "Bruce In Bangkok" wrote in message . .. On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:14:19 -0700, "Capt. JG" wrote: snipped I just downloaded a free app that works like a level. I get the NY Times pushed to the phone every hour. I can also use it like a touch screen for my computer instead of the mouse. Sure... lots of "cuteness" but some of it is very cool tool. The push stuff is nice. I wish I could get that here. Cuteness or cool depends on the user I think. I seldom text but in Singapore you see kids hanging on a strap in the subway, talking with their friends and typing text messages with their thumb faster then I can type with both hands. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. You are seriously ****ing me off! If I buy another new handphone my wife is going to kill me..... Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) I apologize. I'd be happy to send you screenshots of our local area tides. lol -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:17:59 -0700, "Capt. JG"
wrote: "Bruce In Bangkok" wrote in message .. . On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:21:41 -0700, "Capt. JG" wrote: "Bruce In Bangkok" wrote in message ... On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:14:19 -0700, "Capt. JG" wrote: snipped I just downloaded a free app that works like a level. I get the NY Times pushed to the phone every hour. I can also use it like a touch screen for my computer instead of the mouse. Sure... lots of "cuteness" but some of it is very cool tool. The push stuff is nice. I wish I could get that here. Cuteness or cool depends on the user I think. I seldom text but in Singapore you see kids hanging on a strap in the subway, talking with their friends and typing text messages with their thumb faster then I can type with both hands. Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. You are seriously ****ing me off! If I buy another new handphone my wife is going to kill me..... Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) I apologize. I'd be happy to send you screenshots of our local area tides. lol Might help. Or I can just look to see what time the floating docks get way up on the piles :-) Cheers, Bruce (bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom) |
OT but very useful...
On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:12:31 -0400, Marty wrote:
Only 1 gig? "640k ought to be enough for anyone",, Lordy, when I went to college if we had a machine with a full kilobyte we were doing well.... Iowa State built a computer from scratch, in 1948, and in 65 it was the first box students used. It had 1k in the form of charged spots on vacuum tube cathodes. Eight bits, one byte, per tube. Casady |
OT but very useful...
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OT but very useful...
In article lutions,
"Capt. JG" wrote: I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. There is also Tides. Comparing with the official tide tables for Hamburg, Germany (at www.bsh.de) though, both of them were off by quite a bit - Tides was better but still too far off. Marc -- remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail http://www.heusser.com |
OT but very useful...
In article lutions,
"Capt. JG" wrote: I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. One more thing: Navionics Maps - eg for all around Denmark, including Kattegat, Skagerrak - quite nice indeed even though they are not free. Marc -- remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail http://www.heusser.com |
OT but very useful...
In article , Marc Heusser wrote:
In article lutions, "Capt. JG" wrote: I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. There is also Tides. Comparing with the official tide tables for Hamburg, Germany (at www.bsh.de) though, both of them were off by quite a bit - Tides was better but still too far off. Out of interest, how far is too far? Justin. -- Justin C, by the sea. |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
Larry wrote:
(Richard Casady) wrote in news:49c969b9.9397015 @news.east.earthlink.net: Eight bits, one byte, per tube. I'd love to know the physics behind how they did that. Dual triodes, such as 12AX7, 12AT7, 12AU7, or even earlier 6SN7 were used as latching flip flops, but they only stored one bit...0 or 1. To get 8 reliable levels would be magic. They did use a neon counter tube that had multiple cathodes. Perhaps that is the "tube" that did a byte. [long nostalgic bit follows...] Well, this was a slightly mixed memory, I'd say. the idea of 8 bit collections called bytes came later, around the IBM 360 time frame. Previous IBM incarnations like the 1401 used eight bits plus parity: 6 data, and two marker bits for laying out data fields - if you wanted to add two 1000 decimal place numbers, no problem. Just lay down the field length markers and issue ADD But computer memories were kinda weird and wonderful. There was quite a development effort into CRT memory storage: allocate an X and Y value for each bit and point the electron beam at it to set and to read it out. Hundreds or thousands of bits. Trouble was the beam position drifted, which didn't help data integrity. The serial computers used a nickel line for short term storage: you pulsed an electromagnet at one end to set a pulse going for a '1' or no pulse for '0' so a stream of pulses would run down the nickel wire at the speed of sound to the sense coil at the other end, where the data would turn round to the start coil and start over. That was called magnetostriction. Others used mercury delay lines. Or coil delays. Some early boxes used nixie tubes, which were squat little vacuum tubes with ten digits in a clock around the top. It was necessary to kick the glow from electrode to electrode to count from 0 to 9. But the giant leap from tape drives - first 200 bits per inch, then 650 bpi then 2200 bpi and fixed drum drives to disk drives made the creation of operating systems much easier. Before that time, there really were operators who would load up a data tape or two and an application program and hit run. Around 1956, the core memory was a wonderful step forward. Little ol' ladies really did stitch up 4 kb memories from tiny ferrite rings. Some of them were dunked in a tank of oil to keep the heat down. Speeds went up fast, from 12 microsecond per cycle, to 4 us to 2 us, then 1.2us then semiconductor chips came along. A big commercial machine might have 64kb, even 128kb. This was a step back in one way: you could lose power on a core computer and when it came up again, the code and data were still there in core. Not so with solid state memory.... But I'll stop here.... Brian W |
OT but very useful...
"Marc Heusser" d wrote in
message ... In article lutions, "Capt. JG" wrote: I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. There is also Tides. Comparing with the official tide tables for Hamburg, Germany (at www.bsh.de) though, both of them were off by quite a bit - Tides was better but still too far off. Marc -- remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail http://www.heusser.com I'll check it out! -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
Brian Whatcott wrote in news:rmBxl.21117
: This was a step back in one way: you could lose power on a core computer and when it came up again, the code and data were still there in core. Not so with solid state memory.... But I'll stop here.... Brian W A local Catholic church gave me a complete IBM Systems 32, including OS and small business software for a small manufacturing firm. It had two fixed drives, huge noisy ones; an 8" floppy drive that had a boot loader on floppy and a large data cassette drive to backup the big drives. I can't remember how much data the big 14" drives stored, but I remember something about 108MB or 128MB each. The main computer was about chest high, about 4' wide and maybe 10' long. It ran on 3-phase 208VAC/416VAC, your choice. There were 4 IBM terminals to feed it and massage its output and a massive half-ton chain printer that could eat a whole box of z-fold tractor paper in about 4 minutes printing not X characters/second but X LINES per second at a furious pace. It sounded like a buzz saw trimming the bark off trees in a sawmill when printing, even inside its "quiet cabinet" included in the package. A few of us were rummaging around in my storage building looking for something and the group stumbled upon my Systems 32. One of the guys was in the trucking business and had a big warehouse wired for 3-phase power. He volunteered to power it if we trucked it over there in one of his vans, just to see if we could run it. There were 4 huge boxes of cables. We got it wired up next to one of the large forklift chargers in the warehouse and, after actually reading the manuals a bit, we dared to toss caution to the wind and flip the big switch to ON. The floppy bootloader found what it was looking for and all 4 screens lit up with the original company's text-based logo. It was still loaded with their current inventory from the day it was unplugged and replaced. We ordered vast quantities of industrial supplies and entered over $480,000 to accounts payable in the next few hours. We had a great time. We stole boxes of paper from the warehouse office and dumped the inventory and vendor lists to the printer making an awful racket!...(c;] As the "new" wore off our toy, we shut her down and rolled her back into the truck. I stripped off some really impressive power supply components from the main console and saved a couple of single-phase fans I thought might be useful to my projects. The rest of it we backed the truck up to a very large dumpster and put a big ramp from the truck tailgate to the dumpster's lip. I bet that driver had trouble picking that dumpster up over his cab to dump its half million dollar contents into the crusher in the back that week.....(c;] I dumped the manuals later on with the software backup disks while cleaning out some file cabinets to put church organ manuals into a few years later. Pity....money poured right down a hole it was.... |
OT but very useful...
"Marc Heusser" d wrote in
message ... In article lutions, "Capt. JG" wrote: I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. There is also Tides. Comparing with the official tide tables for Hamburg, Germany (at www.bsh.de) though, both of them were off by quite a bit - Tides was better but still too far off. Marc -- remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail http://www.heusser.com I don't know about either's absolute accuracy, but all in all, I like TideApp better. Tides doesn't have a graphical view, at least I couldn't find one. Sometimes, I don't want to look at the numbers, just the trend. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
"Larry" wrote in message
... Brian Whatcott wrote in news:rmBxl.21117 : This was a step back in one way: you could lose power on a core computer and when it came up again, the code and data were still there in core. Not so with solid state memory.... But I'll stop here.... Brian W A local Catholic church gave me a complete IBM Systems 32, including OS and small business software for a small manufacturing firm. It had two fixed drives, huge noisy ones; an 8" floppy drive that had a boot loader on floppy and a large data cassette drive to backup the big drives. I can't remember how much data the big 14" drives stored, but I remember something about 108MB or 128MB each. The main computer was about chest high, about 4' wide and maybe 10' long. It ran on 3-phase 208VAC/416VAC, your choice. There were 4 IBM terminals to feed it and massage its output and a massive half-ton chain printer that could eat a whole box of z-fold tractor paper in about 4 minutes printing not X characters/second but X LINES per second at a furious pace. It sounded like a buzz saw trimming the bark off trees in a sawmill when printing, even inside its "quiet cabinet" included in the package. A few of us were rummaging around in my storage building looking for something and the group stumbled upon my Systems 32. One of the guys was in the trucking business and had a big warehouse wired for 3-phase power. He volunteered to power it if we trucked it over there in one of his vans, just to see if we could run it. There were 4 huge boxes of cables. We got it wired up next to one of the large forklift chargers in the warehouse and, after actually reading the manuals a bit, we dared to toss caution to the wind and flip the big switch to ON. The floppy bootloader found what it was looking for and all 4 screens lit up with the original company's text-based logo. It was still loaded with their current inventory from the day it was unplugged and replaced. We ordered vast quantities of industrial supplies and entered over $480,000 to accounts payable in the next few hours. We had a great time. We stole boxes of paper from the warehouse office and dumped the inventory and vendor lists to the printer making an awful racket!...(c;] As the "new" wore off our toy, we shut her down and rolled her back into the truck. I stripped off some really impressive power supply components from the main console and saved a couple of single-phase fans I thought might be useful to my projects. The rest of it we backed the truck up to a very large dumpster and put a big ramp from the truck tailgate to the dumpster's lip. I bet that driver had trouble picking that dumpster up over his cab to dump its half million dollar contents into the crusher in the back that week.....(c;] I dumped the manuals later on with the software backup disks while cleaning out some file cabinets to put church organ manuals into a few years later. Pity....money poured right down a hole it was.... I almost bought a Dec 20 years ago... thought of putting it in my garage and using it as a timeshare. :) -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
In article ,
Justin C wrote: I also just downloaded TideApp which is the TideTool equiv. for the phone. Nice. There is also Tides. Comparing with the official tide tables for Hamburg, Germany (at www.bsh.de) though, both of them were off by quite a bit - Tides was better but still too far off. Out of interest, how far is too far? Ok, here comes the comparison. (LW low water, HW high water, 24h time, height above map reference zero for Hamburg, St. Pauli, Germany, 53°32'44"N 9°58'12"E, GMT+1 for Monday, 23 March 2009 (This is the large port of Hamburg) The reference: prediction by th BSH (www.bsh.de, free) HW 0151 3.9m LW 0927 0.4m HW 1439 3.7m LW 2147 0.5m WXTide32 (latest version 4.7, 25 Feb 2007, wxtide32.com, for 53°33.00'N 9°58.02'E, free) HW 0133 3.1m LW 0905 0.5m HW 1428 3.0m LW 2113 0.6m Tides (iPhone, version 2.0, free, but ad ridden) I was not able to enter Hamburg, Germany, a major port, with the new version, even when I entered the exact coordinates and searched for nearby prediction spots. TideApp (iPhone, version 2.5, ads to come - I'd rather pay something for it) HW 0143 3.9m LW 0901 0.75m HW 1425 3.7 LW 2128 0.75m Times seem to be within half an hour, heights within half a metre good enough for planning Mr Tides X (Mac OS X. version 2.5.6.2, http://homepage.mac.com/augusth/MrTides/, based on XTide 2.8, free) HW 0143 3.9m LW 0901 0.75m HW 1425 3.7 LW 2128 0.75m Any comparisons for other ports to assess reliability would be nice, especially for TideApp. HTH Marc -- remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail http://www.heusser.com |
OT but very useful...
On Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:45:45 +0000, Larry wrote:
(Richard Casady) wrote in news:49c969b9.9397015 : Eight bits, one byte, per tube. I'd love to know the physics behind how they did that. Dual triodes, such as 12AX7, 12AT7, 12AU7, or even earlier 6SN7 were used as latching flip flops, but they only stored one bit...0 or 1. To get 8 reliable levels would be magic. They did use a neon counter tube that had multiple cathodes. Perhaps that is the "tube" that did a byte. They told us that each tube stored 8 bits as charged spots on the cathode. Maybe the cathode was in segments. The computer was called the " Cyclone " and had its own unique language, EERIE. You programmed it with a pencil. Your page went to some guy who punched the cards. Some other guy fed the box. The first thing I had it do was an approximation of the area under a curve by breaking it down into a hundred rectangles. Computers are fast? You could learn calculus in less time. Casady |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
Brian Whatcott wrote:
Larry wrote: (Richard Casady) wrote in news:49c969b9.9397015 @news.east.earthlink.net: Eight bits, one byte, per tube. I'd love to know the physics behind how they did that. Dual triodes, such as 12AX7, 12AT7, 12AU7, or even earlier 6SN7 were used as latching flip flops, but they only stored one bit...0 or 1. To get 8 reliable levels would be magic. They did use a neon counter tube that had multiple cathodes. Perhaps that is the "tube" that did a byte. [long nostalgic bit follows...] Well, this was a slightly mixed memory, I'd say. the idea of 8 bit collections called bytes came later, around the IBM 360 time frame. The early CDC machines I worked on used 6-bit "bytes" and used 36 or 60 bit words for instructions. IIRC they even did BCD math on 4 bit nibbles. Previous IBM incarnations like the 1401 used eight bits plus parity: 6 data, and two marker bits for laying out data fields - if you wanted to add two 1000 decimal place numbers, no problem. Just lay down the field length markers and issue ADD But computer memories were kinda weird and wonderful. There was quite a development effort into CRT memory storage: allocate an X and Y value for each bit and point the electron beam at it to set and to read it out. Hundreds or thousands of bits. Trouble was the beam position drifted, which didn't help data integrity. I worked on a CRT that use magnetic torsion rod memory. Magnets on one end would send torsion pulses down the rod which were picked up on the other end. This was synchronized with a spinning disk that had the character masks for the screen! The serial computers used a nickel line for short term storage: you pulsed an electromagnet at one end to set a pulse going for a '1' or no pulse for '0' so a stream of pulses would run down the nickel wire at the speed of sound to the sense coil at the other end, where the data would turn round to the start coil and start over. That was called magnetostriction. Others used mercury delay lines. Or coil delays. Yes, I remember the mercury delay systems. Fortunately they only gained favor in the analog world. One of my favorite "antique" books (next to my old Bowditch and Coast Pilots) is "High Speed Computing Devices" published in 1950. They describe in detail a new device called the transistor: "It seems likely that this device will simply computer circuits considerably." .... This was a step back in one way: you could lose power on a core computer and when it came up again, the code and data were still there in core. Not so with solid state memory.... My lab had one older "mini computer," a DG Nova with limited core memory (8K?) and a teletype with paper tape reader, that we we used as a programmable calculator. It was loaded with Basic and was ready to go on powerup. A machine like that, but with 64 kB and floppies became my first "personal computer" in 1979. |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
"jeff" wrote in message ... My lab had one older "mini computer," a DG Nova with limited core memory (8K?) and a teletype with paper tape reader, that we we used as a programmable calculator. It was loaded with Basic and was ready to go on powerup. A machine like that, but with 64 kB and floppies became my first "personal computer" in 1979. That sounds like a Commodore 64. I started with one of those and still have the complete outfit includung monitor,floppy drive etc., and loads of operating manuals telling you how to 'poke' and 'peek' to get the result you wanted. Classic museum piece now, I think. I'll keep it until it becomes really valuable. Did some good work on it though. My wife wrote a book, quite a long one and illustrated with many photos , and on my C64 I set the whole thing up as 'camera ready copy' and saved the whole cost of our computer outfit when we went to a publisher with it. You had to load the word processing programme every time you booted up but once loaded it was a pretty decent programme. There was 'superbase' too-quite a useful database programme which also had to be loaded each time you needed it. Was that all really almost 30 years ago?? |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
"Edgar" wrote in message
... "jeff" wrote in message ... My lab had one older "mini computer," a DG Nova with limited core memory (8K?) and a teletype with paper tape reader, that we we used as a programmable calculator. It was loaded with Basic and was ready to go on powerup. A machine like that, but with 64 kB and floppies became my first "personal computer" in 1979. That sounds like a Commodore 64. I started with one of those and still have the complete outfit includung monitor,floppy drive etc., and loads of operating manuals telling you how to 'poke' and 'peek' to get the result you wanted. Classic museum piece now, I think. I'll keep it until it becomes really valuable. Did some good work on it though. My wife wrote a book, quite a long one and illustrated with many photos , and on my C64 I set the whole thing up as 'camera ready copy' and saved the whole cost of our computer outfit when we went to a publisher with it. You had to load the word processing programme every time you booted up but once loaded it was a pretty decent programme. There was 'superbase' too-quite a useful database programme which also had to be loaded each time you needed it. Was that all really almost 30 years ago?? I gave my father one of those for his birthday. Unfortunately, being who he was he tried to take it apart and broke it. That happened for all the subsequent computers I gave him until I got him one of the Apples that needed a dedicated tool. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
OT but very useful...
Richard Casady wrote in
: Computers are fast? You could learn calculus in less time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxeLyMvu8fg Sometimes old doesn't mean slow..... W4CSC QRU QRV QSX 7 14 21 MHZ |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
jeff wrote in :
They describe in detail a new device called the transistor: "It seems likely that this device will simply computer circuits considerably." When I was a boy, in the 50s, my uncle worked for GE heavy military in Syracuse, NY. They threw out tons of stuff, a lot of which the pack rats, like my uncle, were allowed to cart off instead of the trash collectors. He brought this boy some new fangled tiny blue plastic "fuses", as he liked to jokingly call them, with 3 wires and a red dot near one of the wires hanging out of them. On the side, it said RAYTHEON CK-722, one of the first production germanium transistors. Fascinated by the new device, my school grades suffered awful as I spent my time pouring over every book he had on transistors and transistor circuits, determined to make something useful out of them. What I made was a 3-transistor TRF AM radio with a regenerative detector in a tiny plastic box my mother threw away. High impedance crystal earphones in ham magazines were a dollar and I had those for crystal radio projects. The new receiver had a loopstick antenna and with 2 RF stages it was very sensitive, though not very selective. I wore it to school just as the World Series started so I could hear the ball game during the boring classes in our elementary school. I got caught, of course, but when the principal found out I had built the radio out of these new transistors, he was so fascinated listening to the ball game on it I wasn't punished. As it was the only transistor radio in our town, I ended up in the newspaper showing it off. You know you're "old" when your new stuff is now a museum!....dammit. http://www.ck722museum.com/ |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
Edgar wrote:
.... Was that all really almost 30 years ago?? The "March of History" has always fascinated me. In 1967 I got a tour of the Apollo control center in Houston, with the 5 IBM 360/75's. This was probably the most powerful setup in the world at the time; now its less power than my kid's cell phone. About 10 years later I was in a huge disk farm in Greenbelt MD where hundreds of "washing machines" held all of the telemetry from all of the US satellites for 6 months. It added up the the almost unthinkable amount of half a terrabyte! Now that costs $69! For years I've be saying that in spite of all this, the most significant advances were from about 1840 to 1870, when the telegraph and the steam engine transformed the world from the way it had been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to a world not much different from the way it was yesterday. However, now I'm not so su are we on the verge of another major shift for humanity? |
OT but very useful...
In article , Marc Heusser wrote:
In article , Justin C wrote: Out of interest, how far is too far? Ok, here comes the comparison. (LW low water, HW high water, 24h time, height above map reference zero for Hamburg, St. Pauli, Germany, 53°32'44"N 9°58'12"E, GMT+1 for Monday, 23 March 2009 (This is the large port of Hamburg) The reference: prediction by th BSH (www.bsh.de, free) HW 0151 3.9m LW 0927 0.4m HW 1439 3.7m LW 2147 0.5m WXTide32 (latest version 4.7, 25 Feb 2007, wxtide32.com, for 53°33.00'N 9°58.02'E, free) HW 0133 3.1m LW 0905 0.5m HW 1428 3.0m LW 2113 0.6m That's out by a fair bit, on the high at least. To be working out calculations on almost 4 and find out it's really around a meter less, that could be a problem. But I'd always *try* to arrive before the bottom of a low... try being the operative word. Mind you, 3 meters wouldn't be much of a problem for most cruisers, as long as there isn't much of a swell. Tides (iPhone, version 2.0, free, but ad ridden) I was not able to enter Hamburg, Germany, a major port, with the new version, even when I entered the exact coordinates and searched for nearby prediction spots. TideApp (iPhone, version 2.5, ads to come - I'd rather pay something for it) HW 0143 3.9m LW 0901 0.75m HW 1425 3.7 LW 2128 0.75m Times seem to be within half an hour, heights within half a metre good enough for planning Mr Tides X (Mac OS X. version 2.5.6.2, http://homepage.mac.com/augusth/MrTides/, based on XTide 2.8, free) HW 0143 3.9m LW 0901 0.75m HW 1425 3.7 LW 2128 0.75m I have XTides on my palm. I find it compares quite well with the local published tides, but I've not done a direct comparison over time. I think I shall. It is said, I believe, on the XTides page, that the figures are calculated, and that, if you want better accuracy you should use published tide tables. While the published tables are calculations too, they're calculated for each port individually, while XTides is calculating based on less actual data - due to storage restrictions (at least on a palm). Justin. -- Justin C, by the sea. |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:33:37 +0000, Larry wrote:
What I made was a 3-transistor TRF AM radio with a regenerative detector in a tiny plastic box my mother threw away. High impedance crystal earphones in ham magazines were a dollar and I had those for crystal radio projects. The new receiver had a loopstick antenna and with 2 RF stages it was very sensitive, though not very selective. I wore it to school just as the World Series started so I could hear the ball game during the boring classes in our elementary school. I got caught, of course, but when the principal found out I had built the radio out of these new transistors, he was so fascinated listening to the ball game on it I wasn't punished. As it was the only transistor radio in our town, I ended up in the newspaper showing it off. You know you're "old" when your new stuff is now a museum!....dammit. http://www.ck722museum.com/ Good stuff. Some time around 1956 I got my hands on a 2N107 which cost 98 cents and had specs similar to the CK722. I took a crystal set that I had built previously, bread boarded onto a short pice of 2 x 4 lumber, and added a 1 transistor audio amplifier. It made a huge difference in the audio level of the ear phones. A friend of mine asked to borrow it once and I found out later that he had entered it in the local science fair and won first prize with it. |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
jeff wrote in :
However, now I'm not so su are we on the verge of another major shift for humanity? Yes, We're witness to an economic coup d'etat where the banking elite have taken over the governments without firing a shot. Just this morning, they're giving themselves another $1,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) from the public treasury....without firing a shot. The new president's new cabinet is all about wall street bankers....See for yourself. |
OT Computer Memory (was OT but very useful...)
Wayne.B wrote in
: On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:33:37 +0000, Larry wrote: What I made was a 3-transistor TRF AM radio with a regenerative detector in a tiny plastic box my mother threw away. High impedance crystal earphones in ham magazines were a dollar and I had those for crystal radio projects. The new receiver had a loopstick antenna and with 2 RF stages it was very sensitive, though not very selective. I wore it to school just as the World Series started so I could hear the ball game during the boring classes in our elementary school. I got caught, of course, but when the principal found out I had built the radio out of these new transistors, he was so fascinated listening to the ball game on it I wasn't punished. As it was the only transistor radio in our town, I ended up in the newspaper showing it off. You know you're "old" when your new stuff is now a museum!....dammit. http://www.ck722museum.com/ Good stuff. Some time around 1956 I got my hands on a 2N107 which cost 98 cents and had specs similar to the CK722. I took a crystal set that I had built previously, bread boarded onto a short pice of 2 x 4 lumber, and added a 1 transistor audio amplifier. It made a huge difference in the audio level of the ear phones. A friend of mine asked to borrow it once and I found out later that he had entered it in the local science fair and won first prize with it. "Science Fair" to me always meant hauling the home brew ham radio station down to the school gym and hauling a sloper dipole from the front door of the school to the top of the flagpole on the same clip as Old Glory. One year, I surprised them all by NOT bringing my station. That year I built a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell from plans that came from Mr Wizard, Don Herbert, who worked for GE that made the TV show. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Mr._Wizard My father had the second TV in town, a Raytheon 9" that looked like an old oscilloscope. The whole neighborhood used to crowd around it before they got their own sets. I installed LOTS of TV antennas besides his. When Mr Wizard was on....the TV was MINE. |
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