Computer History Museum sounds like an interesting place to go to. I do not know what my plans are for vacation. However, California is a very nice place to go to for vacation.
Kevin Eldridge Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T -----Original Message----- From: "Jason Orendorff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:49:25 To: <[email protected]> Subject: [nlug] Re: You just have to love math... On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Jack Coats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It paged off of tape. This is the funniest thing I've read all week. Talk about thrashing. > You should have seen it run a big balanced sort using the > tape rives! Those algorithms live on in Knuth. He claims they're still relevant, something about memory access locality. I suspect that's pretty much nonsense, but they're fun to think about. I went to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA last month. They have a room full of old machines, everything from a slice of the ENIAC to a Speak & Spell. In between, nostalgia city. Also got to see some insane old devices for primary storage (what we use RAM for today). Like Williams tubes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube The best was a long tube full of mercury. Data was stored in the tube, in the form of, wait for it... sound waves. You put your data in this end, and some time later it'll come out the other end. If you're not ready for it when it gets there, we'll just send it through again. Utterly absurd. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory But the coolest thing there, and the reason you should absolutely go if you get the chance, was the Babbage Difference Engine. Built from Charles Babbage's original plans with only trivial modifications, and machined out of brass and soft steel to the tolerances achievable in his day, it was the only thing there that actually ran. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/ The engine belongs to a former Microsoft CTO and is only on display until May 2009. -j --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
