history
Prof. Welton's Boxing Cats
Nothing really changes.You left the bodies but you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!
via the always great @paleofuture
Interesting that, again, like lots of late 80s to late 90s concept pieces they were able to see the logical extension of several concepts but missed the big one: ever-present networks. Until recently there was this weird idea with news (particularly print based news people) that we'd need "kiosks" and removable media for this glorious future of reading.PDP-11
So Thompson and Ritchie got creative. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC's newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote.
Management took the bait, and an order for a PDP-11 was placed in May 1970. The machine itself arrived soon after, although the disk drives for it took more than six months to appear. During the interim, Thompson, Ritchie, and others continued to develop Unix on the PDP-7. After the PDP-11's disks were installed, the researchers moved their increasingly complex operating system over to the new machine. Next they brought over the roff text formatter written by Ossanna and derived from the runoff program, which had been used in an earlier time-sharing system. ... more »gallery
The Umbrella Man
Fantastic piece by Errol Morris at the Times (sadly, they won't let the video be embedded).For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
Every user always has a current directory, which belongs to him
Parity Is For Farmers
I think this is insanely interesting. The Internet Archive is offering the data from a disk of a Cray-1 read via a robot buily by Chris Fenton:I managed to acquire a disk drive from the 1970's that could accept one of these disks, but none of the control electronics worked anymore. I built a robot that manually steps the read heads forward, and then I fed the output directly from the analog sensor into an ADC and buffered it using an FPGA, recording ~4 revolutions of the disk for each head/step. I have approximately 55,000 files, each ~650 kilobytes, of the form "head_#_step_#.dat" that each contain a ~67 millisecond snapshot (the disk is revolving at 3600 RPM, so 1 revolution = 16.67 mS) of the digitized output of the analog read sensor. I need to do a fair amount of signal processing to try to recover data on it, but I'd like a way to share the data with others that might be interested in taking a stab at it. ... more »
Ultimately, Fenton got the information off of the disk pack using a whole variety of techniques and experiments, as part of a research project this summer. He wrote a paper about the process, entitled “Digital Archeology with Drive-Independent Data Recovery: Now, With More Drive Dependence!” and it’s now mirrored here at the archive. If nothing else, be sure to browse through the paper just to see the customized stepper motor and reader he build to pull the magnetic data off the platters. And I was kind of understating things... ultimately he did hook it up to USB. ... more »
One of the coolest aspects of this machine is that everything is fully pipelined. This machine was designed to be fast, so if you’re careful, you can actually get one (or more) instruction every cycle. This has some interesting implications – there’s no ‘divide’ instruction, for instance, because it can take a variable amount of time to finish. To perform a divide, you need to first compute the ‘reciprocal approximation’ (something we *can* do in exactly 13 cycles, it turns out) of the denominator value, and then perform a separate multiply of that result with the numerator. ... more »
DUnkirk 5-5341
Lasers!
"A basic need to use technology for total national power"
... said James Webb, administrator of NASA to President Kennedy during a meeting about the space program in 1963. This relays everything about the range of intent of the space program -- not simply getting men to the moon, but a total political, technological, military and economic program unlike anything anyone had ever tried. Of course Kennedy was nervous.A basic ability in this nation to use science and very advanced technologies to increase national power -- our economy all the way through. ... more »
Test Pattern
Swedish (Sveriges) Television test card, taken early one morning in ReykjavikTest cards including large circles were used to confirm the linearity of the set's deflection systems. As solid-state components replaced vacuum tubes in receiver deflection circuits, linearity adjustments were less frequently required (few newer sets have user-adjustable "VERT SIZE" and "VERT LIN" controls, for example). In LCD and other deflectionless displays, the linearity is a function of the display panel's manufacturing quality; for the display to work, the tolerances will already be far tighter than human perception. ... more »
Towards the end of the Indian Head TV era (around the late 1970s), there was no nightly test pattern on some stations, typically when automatic logging and remote transmitter controls allowed shutdown of power immediately after the formal sign-off. After an immediate transmitter power off, in lieu of the Indian Head Test Card and its sine wave tone, a TV viewer heard a loud audio hiss like FM radio interstation noise and saw the video noise colloquially called snow (but resembling "bugs" following a TV-system technical improvement). Audio and video noise received on Indian Head era TV sets respectively indicated the absence of analog aural and visual broadcast carriers. Consumer TVs typically did not have a no-signal noise muting and blanking feature until the late analog TV period. ... more »
I like the BBC test card, because it's a wonderful example of how practical industrial design can develop into an enigmatic work of art. But even better is knowing that the image isn't just art, it has an objective purpose worked into it, a secret meaning that reveals itself under scrutiny. The architecture of industrial design is filled with these subtle codes, and together they create a world around us filled with hidden meaning. ... more »
∴ notes from ebyx
The original nomadic inhabitants of Cbyx rode Modar from one oasis to the next, beasts captured and trained as cubs. The riders developed an extremely close relationship with the animals, the bond was carried over by legendists as ancient, noble, spiritual. While horses, as large as they were in the north, were not Modar. What were written as saintly men and women of Cbyx nature, quitely and stoically enduring, became Northern horsemen, cantankerous, drunken, combative, wild. And they in turn became fable for teleplays, books, programs. Their iconography graced everything having to do with the North. Of great fascination, and State disapproval was the brief war between the horsemen and the expanding industry of the previous century. The purposing of horses for labor was anathema to the tradition of the Cbyx riders, enough so that the horsemen, who rarely organized, did so enough to cause twenty years of havok for any State loving midlander who happened into their hills.
Feb 18 4:40 a.m.
Brynja took a streetcar. She was entitled to her own automobile, but disliked the quiet resentment that the privilege caused. The streetcars here were old style, electric, clattering. She found them comforting. She wondered about a world where everyone would be allowed an auotmobile, the chaos and inefficiency. She rode with other citizens, the cold night causing them to have bundled up, warming their hands on cups of tea sold at the back. A radio next to the driver relentlessly broadcast static peppered State news.
Feb 13 3:43 a.m.
524F474552 moved carefully around the crater. It had taken days. Before the uplink was removed he’d have had telemetry. Now all robots simply talked to one another. Many had no audio, so a system of semaphore was worked out. Some used lights, some used moving parts. As he rounded a small hill he saw, in the distance, another unit. The other unit acknowledged him by raising an arm. Then it raised another. And another. Its arms began to move directionally, independently. A message. 524F474552 focused attention. “B … E … W … A … R … E”. Well, he thought, that was intriguing.
Feb 06 4:13 p.m.
∴ findings
Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium
To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal.
Here one may recall Jane Jacobs's important distinction between visual orderliness on one hand and functional working order on the other. The city desk of a newspaper, a rabbit's intestines, or the interior of an aircraft engine may certainly look messy, but each one reflects, sometimes brilliantly, an order related to the function it performs.
Introduction -- Eloquent JavaScript
JavaScript is the language that is, at the moment, mostly being used to do all kinds of clever and horrible things with pages on the World Wide Web.
∴ knotesy
Krautrock - The Rebirth Of Germany Feb 22 9:25 a.m.
"This Is My Home" - Unique Dwelling In East Village Feb 21 10:38 a.m.
Financial Globalization, Inequality, And The Raising Of Public Debt Feb 21 8:44 a.m.
Ptak Science Books: History of Holes series: Holes in Airships (1919 and 1937) Feb 21 4:22 a.m.
Icelandic Anger Brings Debt Forgiveness Feb 20 11:49 a.m.
