Blinkenlights?

On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Apr 2018 10:15:29 +0100) it happened Gareth's Downstairs Computer wrote in :

Ah, 8051, I still have a 8052 BASIC system in the attic:

Wrote some very simple assembler for it once: No experience with that Motorola chip.

8051 is still being made I think, was not so bad, register banks... I have sort of standardized on PIC 18F14K22, 64 MHz.

On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Apr 2018 11:08:56 +0100) it happened Gareth's Downstairs Computer wrote in :

OK, but I use the raspy via ssh -Y from a big PC on the LAN most of the time for development. My Samsung monitor is from 2007, was back once for repair in the guarantee and I once replaced electrolytic caps in the power supply. It is on most of the day. Things are very reliable really, and I have backup of course. Have some small analog input monitors from ebay, and a small HDMI panel from ebay for a raspi.

Yea, I was reading there is a company that makes 'anybody a website designer in 6 weeks' or something like that, it really shows on some sites :-) My background is electronics and it still needs study every day, a fast moving field. Programming sort of came in and reduces hardware chip count... Memories of big boards with wirewrap come to mind.

Running Linux makes things easy, as long as you are not doing kernel work there is little chance your display will fail in some way. OK, you can mess up X11, but that is not that hard to code for.

Have you ever programmed FPGAs? You can write your own processor code if you want, create your own processor core:

I have used FPGA mainly for crypto, and video, a sequential thing like a processor is not always the fastest solution. I think now for crypto currencies we see that trend back to specialized cores again, better than using graphics cards. China... in the lead.

Its all a bit of silliness that traces back to a notice that got spread around and was typically stuck to a computer-room window that let those passing by in the corridor see what was going on in there.

is a reasonable description and gives the text of the most common version.

In my uni the computer was an Elliott 503 (early scientific machine from discrete transistors and ferrite core memory) and the notice on the window was a drawing of a head with 3-4 cubes drawn in the brain area and the caption "Quiet! I'm playing with my mental blocks".

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

The one on-top is a PiDP8 which has a Pi Zero inside it.

Enough LEDs for you?

-Gordon

On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Apr 2018 11:28:27 +0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie wrote in :

Thank you, nice movie on that wikipedia site. Interesting how my brain starts to try to decode the lights immediately...

Topics already covered in other posts, but thanks for the video on behavf of today's computer scientists :-)

And once you've built your PiDP8, here's the code to key in:

Enjoy :-)

-Gordon

Mine doesn't, but then I never used anything with a light show, so have never needed to read such things.

The Elliott 503 had an engineering panel about the size of a smallish drawing board that was liberally covered in red lamps, but it was purely for the engineer - nobody I knew understood it and it was only plugged in if the engineers were around. Like an 1900 mainframe, its operators used a control typewriter.

1900 mainframes didn't have blinkenlights at all, though there was a 24 lamp engineering display with a set of perspex masks that labelled the lamps - each mask matched a different socket in the CPU cabinet. Anything else would have been superfluous because the machine only had two hardware registers, which pointed to the datum and limit addresses for the running program. Everything else of significance (the 8 accumulators, PC and CC, i.e. all 10 registers, were the first 10 words in every program and no, there was no SP register because it was a stackless architecture.

Everything else I've programmed has, like the ICL 1900s, also showed a total lack of blinkenlights.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

The 1907 had a whole panel of lamps and I spent many a happy hour loading registers to locate a a problem :-)

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On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Apr 2018 16:17:13 +0100 (BST)) it happened "Rodney Pont" wrote in :

Trains in a vacuum tunnel over long distances do not seem a good idea to me. Too many environmental problems, say tremors, electricity supply interruptions, flooding, vacuum leaks, and huge infrastructure cost, passengers safety (decompression, exit WHERE? in case of emergency in a tunnel), makes no sense whatsoever. All those problems happen on a regular bases somewhere over distances like that. Seems an investment bubble. Musk has shown lack of insight in complexity of things before, like manufacturing cars.. Planes are cheaper from airport to airport. I wonder how much it cost in energy / money to keep a hundred mile long tube near vacuum... NASA is working on a supersonic plane with a very soft boom sound. Same for electric cars, the grid is not up to it, will fail (does on on regular basis in the US), bit of a storm is all that is needed with overground wires, and you are stuck, unable to recharge and leave the disaster area if needed.

And Virgin? Like that space failure? I would not fly even when given money for it in that feeble spacecraft that looks a lot like the first primitive airplane :-) But if he is your hero fine.

Of topic he went ;-)

On a sunny day (Tue, 17 Apr 2018 15:00:49 +0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie wrote in :

Yes, it was more about reading binary and doing binary math from some lights.

I never saw a 1907 - just 1901,1902,1903S and 1904T - and, of course, the

2903.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Thanks, but I've a (fairly) complete set of the PDP8 series of handbooks from the early 1970s.

But the PDP8 is a side issue to learning the A53 in the Pi3!

As was said, 1900 was when the hardware was designed, and 2900 will be when the software is read

2nd year electronics at Essex had the 1900 as the study, supported by Prof Heath's book on Digital Computer Design.

Didn't work for Brunel on the South Devon Atmospheric Railway!

I first saw the idea in a Scientific American article about 30 years ago.

But all it needs is a sufficiently persuasive politician looking to build a monument to himself; that's what taxpayers are for. It'll probably happen eventually.

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'Heures

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128 bytes ought to be enough for everybody.

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Me too, but it was happening nearly 50 years ago when I dropped out of computer science classes in favour of a job in the Real World [tm]. Some CS weenies are proud of the fact they have no idea of what's going on down on the metal.

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