The Incredible Machine (1968). Can we do all this on the Prop yet?
Heater.
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The Incredible Machine (1968). 
Can we do all this on the Prop yet?
I remember when I first heard a computer singing, on a documentary about computers on BBC radio in the late 60's. And it's in this vid.
Can we do all this on the Prop yet?
I remember when I first heard a computer singing, on a documentary about computers on BBC radio in the late 60's. And it's in this vid.
Comments
It would be fun to sit those guys at a workstation at Industrial Light & Magic and show them how a movie can be made now....
Whatever we can do, I need to add a big "Execute" button to a project - that's too cool! (I've always been a sucker for blinky lights and switches).
I like the "Execute" button idea. Of course we always have to have blinky lights.
Also I want a "HERE IS" button. When us teenagers were using teletypes back in the day they had a "HERE IS" key on the keyboard. Only recently did I find out what it did. At the time it seemed very mysterious. Deep and philosophical, you know here is, everywhere else is not.
Drawing a circuit to be sent to a simulator hasn't been done, but could be. Not sure it makes sense to do though.
Given how few of us have CRT displays now, driving a tablet, touch or mouse makes better sense.
When has that stopped any of us????? :P
Anyone know what signal you get out from the light emitted by a small area of LCD flat screen now a days?
Yet?
There were light pens available for the C64... the one that I saw demonstrated needed a fairly bright display (since it relied on the timing of the electron beam). But it worked quite well.
I don't know if one would work with a LCD. I'm assuming that each pixel's display is fairly static (rather than refreshed), which would make locating the pen difficult without some display tricks.
Walter
In the 80's, it was pretty easy to build one, and some computers had the hardware support for them built right in. I used a BIC pen to do mine. The Atari 8 bit computers had it in hardware. Hook it up, and a little routine could read the registers and get the pen position.
I'm not sure how it would work with an LCD. How they scan varies. Assuming that gets worked out, one might be able to pulse between low brightness levels and make it work without being a distraction. Or, can an LCD output a color people can't see? (If it's abused?)
Older TV's can do that, if one abuses the color signal going in. Just saying... I got an older 60's era TV to output UV.
A Propeller powered paper tape reader would be pretty simple to build. My lab partner and I built an optical reader as our project using leds and phototransistors for the electronics and mechanical parts scavenged from an adding machine. The electronics for a paper tape punch would be simple, but the mechanics would be tougher to do. Still possible though. Wider paper tape like that used for drywall would make fitting the mechanical parts simpler.
I tried to repair an old LCD many years ago and IIRC the screen was split into several blocks, and each block was controlled by it's own chip. Since light pens depend on the timing of the raster scan to determine where the pen is on the CRT I don't think a light pen would work on an LCD display.
One plan for the punch is to drill 8 holes in a the steel blocks the punches will operate in. Then grind cut and grind down the drill that was used, plus seven others, form the cutting ends with the grinder, then case harden it. There is your punches.
Some monster solenoids should be able to take care of the punching action.
Oh heck, can't we just burn holes through the paper with a laser off ebay now a days?
Or forget the holes and just scorch the paper
Want to edit your program? Just cut and splice the tape. Especially efficient for patching binaries, none of that tedious edit, compile, re-punch the whole tape nonsense.
Want to compare two source codes or binaries? Just hold the tapes up to the light, overlaid on each other, line them up, then you can easily see where one has holes and the other does not.
Want to make a mobius program? Easy...well actually not, at least I never pulled it off. Seems on some weird system or other it would read binary, perhaps a boot loader, from tape up to some point and then run it. Well if the tape was a mobius loop it could read twice round the tape then execute the half forward and half bit-reversed code. Getting anything meaningful out of that might be tricky.
I don't think so either. My thought was to scan a small pixel difference repeatedly. The detector might pick that up as some kind of carrier. But, an LCD might not even be fast enough. Plasma displays maybe. They are much quicker.
Touch, mouse, tablet, all better options these days, IMHO. I loved the idea of a light pen, and when I had one, didn't like it so much, beyond the fun curio it is.
Combination of dumb circuits and a signal that isn't to spec. Maybe also those phosphors too. Was youth, access to some signal generators, etc... at the TV repair shop and exploring what colors could come out of the tube. Got my hand slapped for doing it too. "Hey, look at this! Black light from the TV!" Not good.
Yup. I ended up getting super good at paper tape shenagans while working in manufacturing in the 80's. Lots of shops still had old gear, and tape was used as the dominant program transfer and even execute medium in many places. Kind of amazing, but there it was.
At one point, I had a full set of gear. Splicer, byte puncher, the little patch tapes, etc... a reader / writer was there for the larger programs, but I got to where I was just doing little ones by hand. Punch it all out, and then I had it for later use on the machine whenever I wanted, no typing into the controller.
It's fun, just because you can see the bits! They are right there, easy to read, cool looking. Storage density is crappy though. A whole roll of the stuff is something like 170Kbytes... maybe double that. Can't remember. But I do remember thinking, for a time, the floppy and a whole roll of tape were comparable.
The downside of using an o'scope, though, is that its phosphors have longer persistence than those of a TV monitor.
I worked with one of these back in the early '70s -- a PDP-7, slaved to an IBM 1800. Both were fun machines to program!
-Phil
Hello!
Oddly enough they are.
Let's see. During the 70s, and then the 80s and into the beginning of the 1990s, I worked with a DG Nova3 and then a Nova4, and finally an Eclipse. They did phototypesetting. Half the fun was understanding how the system in question created a punched paper tape roll that the target, a Mergenthaler VIP could use. And finally a laser based one, a Linotron 202. Both were descended from the Linotype machine. First we handed the paper tape to the VIP, and then they switched to a serial interface. The 202 had one for reading in the bootstraps, and the mechanism needed to load the fonts onto it. (That was a lot of fun. And as it happens that was something I did largely for fun, as my father ran the shops. Then we moved onto photo via a Mac. It seems all strange.)
Wow. It's only 5 years or so ago that the city of Helsinki retired a Data General Nova from monitoring and controlling all the traffic lights in the city. They finally started to think it should be replaced when that gigantic 100Kg (or whatever) 10MByte hard drive started making grinding noises like a concrete mixer full of rocks.
I used to love visiting the underground bunker that it was installed in. It was like something out of a Dr Evil lair in an early Bond movie.
But I get your meaning. And I do hope the system went to a good home.
I love the Dr Evil as well. The Austin Powers spoofs are brilliant.
Anyway my underground bunker was great. A kind of secret, unmarked, small but solid steel door in the middle of Helsinki led to a spiral staircase that descended three or four floors down into the granite rock that Finland is resting on. Down their was carved out three or four big rooms.
In one cavern there was a huge map on the wall with blinky lights indicating the traffic lights and a huge operator control desk
In another there was a long line of 19 inch racks containing the Data General Nova, hundreds of modems and a bunch of other electronics. Lot's of blinken lights. A few good old teletypes.
Wish I had sneaked a few photos but that kind of activity was strictly not allowed on government property.
It's amazing all this was still operational in 2010 or so. Although the control room was no longer manned. We replaced it all with a DSL network and a Windows server.
Hmm...perhaps I should liken it to the Bat Cave.
Sounds like something out of the cold war era, a place for emergency management in case of attack, you need street level access in hurry, four flights of a spiral staircase, isn't very impressive for a super hero.
Never mind the cold war. This is Finland. Finns have been keeping their neighbour to the east at bay for a long time.
Helsinki is riddled with underground bunkers and tunnels. I always joked that if any bombs started dropping the whole city population would disappear underground except me. I would not know where they had gone. Nobody had told me about such things, but they all know where to go.
I recently moved into a brand new apartment building. I was surprised to find there is a new bomb shelter in the basement of this building. I'm told that the law requires such buildings to have one. Well, it has a very thick and expensive steel door but obviously it's there just to satisfy some regulations. I can't see anyway to close it with out doing a lot of work digging up the floor which is at a higher level than the bottom of the door.
Super heros and arch villains seem to have a lot more money to spend on their bunkers than city councils.
I understand why the Finnsh people would want to be prepared, considering their history and the close proximity to your neighbor, this underground predates WWII?
Not sure if rising sea levels has an effect your country, cold and damp isn't a good environment for setting up your laboratory.
How do they keep the place electronc friendly? Is that a carved stone staircase or iron? Please don't rush to your batcave.
And what happens when a kid gets stuck in between the door and the frame?
Sounds like they installed the doors... to meet the codes... and then added a little cement to make sure it never got used:)
Yes, I looked at that huge steel door and immediately thought I'd rather take my chances above ground than get entombed in there under the collapsed remains of the 6 story building above it.
It looks like RDL2004 has issued a challenge to Microsoft. Do you know anyone that could hack my Windows 10 machine, if he was given my e-mail?
Don't do it yet... just asking:)
Rich