Folding Forum

I can't find one on eBay.

Can you imagine working there? I would end up spilling my coffee and shorting 500 cores.

I used to walk past the first digital computer at Iowa State on my way to class. I find it fascinating that in 50 years people will be laughing at 160,000 core "supercomputers". I had also never heard the term voxel until reading this.

Send them an email asking if they can spare a day to get a PPD stat.

Just for fun....

Have any of you guys out there ever worked on an analog computer?

How about a "hybrid" computer?

OK, so how many of you know what they are/were?

Tom -- Romeo, Michigan

I used a digial software that **simulated** and analog computer. I've never actually used one, but I've seen one and I understand what they do.

tcphillips wrote:Just for fun....

Have any of you guys out there ever worked on an analog computer?

How about a "hybrid" computer?

OK, so how many of you know what they are/were?

Tom -- Romeo, Michigan

I used an old "mini" computer while in the navy about 20 years ago that used switches, buttons, paper tape, cassettes, to program it and also had magnetic core memory. Woo Hoo!!!

I did part of my pilot's training in a simulator that consisted of a true analog computer -- using servomotors rather than amplifiers and resistors. Does that count?

We used to take over the entire "hybrid" computing center back in the 70's from 1700 until 0600, to run some relatively simple (or at least they would be considered so today) simulations.

Used the analog portion for solving the diff eq's and the digital portion for IO and statistical analysis.
Oh yeah, then there was the PDP-8 for control systems.

Better question is who can remember the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors? Or Harry Truman as president. My birth certificate is from the American Zone of Occupation and bears the stamped signature of Lucian Clay. don't quite remember the Berlin Airlift.

The other day I updated the firmware on a friend's big-screen TV. I was joking to my non-technical friends about installing new software on a TV because it sounds so idiotic to somebody who is thinking of a hard-wired TV.

Another friend runs a small office and they have a multi-line phone which decided to give a continuous ring-ring-ring... pattern indicating that something was wrong. They had already tried unplugging all the wires but it didn't correct the problem. It has a 9v battery hidden in the back which I removed . . . then replaced . . . and it cured the problem. Again, jokingly to my non-technical friends, I explained that all the phone needed was to be re-booted.

In a few years, what we think about the technical advances of today will seem just as crazy as the Ptolemaic view of the universe has since the time of Copernicus, Keppler, and Galileo.