You wanna talk about meta?
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I'm about to install QEMU KVM... in WSL... in Windows 11. It'll be Windows 11 > WSL > Debian 12 > Debian 12, so I can reset the inner Debian VM while testing some install scripts. :wtf: Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s. :laugh: Yeah, I could just install VMWare... but we're going for cool points. And what's life without cool points?
Jeremy Falcon
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I'm about to install QEMU KVM... in WSL... in Windows 11. It'll be Windows 11 > WSL > Debian 12 > Debian 12, so I can reset the inner Debian VM while testing some install scripts. :wtf: Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s. :laugh: Yeah, I could just install VMWare... but we're going for cool points. And what's life without cool points?
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
devs in the 1960s.
Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966. *The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
devs in the 1960s.
Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966. *The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
Richard MacCutchan wrote:
Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966.
You da man. :omg: Or should I say?
01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101110 00101110
Real talk, there is something magical about the early days of computing. Back when it was the wild west and being a part of something new.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
devs in the 1960s.
Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966. *The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
Richard MacCutchan wrote:
*The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
Sorry, I blazed over this part. Us youngins and our attention spans. :-D That's really cool actually. Back when you didn't waste memory or disk space either. Nowadays we got Blu-rays that hold a 100GB and we think that's chump change. All so we can store stuff that's probably 90% useless.
Jeremy Falcon
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I'm about to install QEMU KVM... in WSL... in Windows 11. It'll be Windows 11 > WSL > Debian 12 > Debian 12, so I can reset the inner Debian VM while testing some install scripts. :wtf: Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s. :laugh: Yeah, I could just install VMWare... but we're going for cool points. And what's life without cool points?
Jeremy Falcon
I started out in front of an Altair 8800 entering machine instructions with switches and staring at the lights.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com Latest Article: EventAggregator
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I started out in front of an Altair 8800 entering machine instructions with switches and staring at the lights.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com Latest Article: EventAggregator
Respect, my brother in arms... I mean bytes. :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
devs in the 1960s.
Wrote my first program in LEO III* machine code in 1966. *The LEO III was a great machine, 16K of core memory, no rotating storage (other than magnetic tape), filled a huge air-conditioned room, and played music through a speaker on the main CPU control panel.
From wikipedia: CPU @ 500 kHz Memory 2K (2048) 35-bit words (i.e., 83⁄4 kilobytes) (ultrasonic delay-line memory based on tanks of mercury) Good lord! And that was probably state of the art at the time.
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A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity Framework -
From wikipedia: CPU @ 500 kHz Memory 2K (2048) 35-bit words (i.e., 83⁄4 kilobytes) (ultrasonic delay-line memory based on tanks of mercury) Good lord! And that was probably state of the art at the time.
Latest Articles:
A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity FrameworkIt was. If the mercury tanks were open, working in that room must have been more dangerous than being a hatter in the Good Old Days. :omg: (The mad hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame was mad because of the mercury used in those days to make hats. Mercury is known today as a neurological poison.)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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It was. If the mercury tanks were open, working in that room must have been more dangerous than being a hatter in the Good Old Days. :omg: (The mad hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame was mad because of the mercury used in those days to make hats. Mercury is known today as a neurological poison.)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
I think "tanks" is a very misleading term. It should rather be called a "tube" - you can see a photo of one at Mercury delay tube[^]. The tube is is capped in one end by an electric transducer (actuator) producing pressure waves in the mercury, in the other end by a sensor converting the waves back to an electric signal. If the tube wasn't closed, the device wouldn't work, or would work poorly. The tube in the photo is referred to as a 'short mercury delay tube'. I've got other photos of such tubes, and they are indeed longer. The length of the tube sets its storage capacity. There was an obvious tradeoff: Once you put some data value into the actuator end of the tube, it is unavailable until it comes out of the other end. So a long tube gives you more storage capacity, but slower operation. Other photos of such tubes show 'fans' of rows of tubes: If you could afford it, you would rather use many short tubes in parallel than fewer long ones. Long tubes would slow down your computer to the speed of wave propagation through mercury :-) The device was directly based on the low wave propagation speed. The actuator can transmit several hundred or thousand bits (waves) before the first one reaches the sensor in the other end. When it comes out, it it is immediately cycled back to the actuator - but you may steal a copy for copying into a register, or you may replace it with bits from a register rather than the value that comes from a sensor. One article from 1951 says that each tube holds '16 45-digit numbers', which I assume means is decimal digits. This article has a photo of the short tube in the link, as well as two longer tubes but otherwise identically looking. It doesn't indicate which length holds 16 numbers. (This 1951 article also has a photo of a magnetic storage device from the Manchester computer: Along the rim, the cylinder has "20 rows of digits, each row of 2560 digits in the binary system. To realize how compact the unit is, note that the height of the cylinder is no more than 5 cm.")
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I'm about to install QEMU KVM... in WSL... in Windows 11. It'll be Windows 11 > WSL > Debian 12 > Debian 12, so I can reset the inner Debian VM while testing some install scripts. :wtf: Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s. :laugh: Yeah, I could just install VMWare... but we're going for cool points. And what's life without cool points?
Jeremy Falcon
Quote:
Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s.
Imagine trying to carry a 24TB hard drive back then.
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
