andrehacker

Tron https://digibarn.com/collections///systems/crays/cray1/Cray-...

One day i hope to build something like this.

I am not a hardware guy but very intrigued by the basics of computing and interested enough to throw some, but not a lot, of hours at building something like this from a kit I can order in one part.

So far though, all projects I have seen are fairly expensive (Ben Eater’s excellent kits) or unobtainable as they were one-off projects by someone four years ago or (again in this case) using components from suppliers that.. stopped supplying.

Interesting that WSJ forgot to tell this part of the story: June 2023 "Galyn Susman, the Pixar producer who saved Toy Story 2, and Lightyear director Angus MacLane were among the 75 employees laid off by Pixar in late May, reports Reuters."

Very nice. I checked and, yes, my favorite is on there:

“The Santa Rosa Air Center was used to film Bruce Willis' 'Die Hard 2' in 1990

according to an article in the July 22 [2009] issue of the San Jose Mercury News.

The airport was used to depict [Washington] Dulles [International Airport] in the movie"

Isn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?

No vacuum tube questions.

Fantastic deep dive as always, thanks for doing such stellar work!

On that note, any chance we might get a teardown/history of Cray architectures in the future? Specifically the Cray-1 and 2?

To throw a more serious challenge your way: How about a write-up on the original Frank Rosenblatt Perceptron? I know finding an original Mark-1 part would be close to impossible but it blows my mind that they were successfully doing real-time visual classification in 1957 with an electro-mechanical machine (potentiometers and motors) using a 20x20 "video" feed with some learning algorithm that was not based on backprop.

Oh, and (more often) they move pieces out of the way before the real move. First time you see that it looks like an illegal move but it’s all good because it gets moved back :)

One of the tricks I observed is that they move pieces half-way a square.

Ah—my favorite is in there:

https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngExcPhanF.html

It’s a “robotic” board that moves the pieces by itself.

You can sometimes find “untested” (i.e., broken) ones on eBay for a reasonable price, and if you’re lucky they’re an easy fix. Mine was stuck because the lock slider had wedged something and the repair took all of 10 minutes.

Very clean engineering: a few screws gets you in, there’s a remarkably small PCB, few wires and mechanical pieces: the main mechanism consists of two orthogonally mounted sliders with a stepper motor and belt each.

I don’t even play chess, but it’s amazing to watch it play both sides.

They also use a clever algorithm to route pieces around other piece since (obviously) the pieces can’t jump over other pieces given that they are moved by a magnet under the board.

Am I the only one that misread the title and expected to see something about the reclusive Bellard ?

Obligatory ? https://xkcd.com/3227/

Word is that NetApp and Juniper are using FreeBSD. What these have in common is that they rely heavily on FreeBSD's I/O performannce and capabilities which is said to be head and shoulders above Linux.

That is my impression too. From my experience, the fact that I used it early on makes me use it in the "wrong" way as the fundamental concepts have changed a few times.

This is how it works for me:

https://media1.tenor.com/m/QWdPngpHxZ8AAAAd/family-guy-css.g...

Hm, the fact that he was mentioned or referenced does not prove that his role was downplayed, a quick search of the interwebs shows:

- 2018 Oscars: Despite his massive influence on Coco, none of the filmmakers mentioned him by name in their acceptance speeches for Best Animated Feature.

- Film Premieres: Lasseter did not attend the 2018 premiere of Incredibles 2, a film he was heavily involved in, further signaling his detachment from official company events.

After the MeToo allegations, his contributions have been removed—or at least significantly downplayed—in Disney and Pixar’s accounts of Pixar’s origins.

> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows.

I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).

Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.

edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.

Was not aware of this console and especially not of the processor a contemporary of the Atari 2600 which apparently was primarily successful in Europe.

Programming for this must have been a joy as it had 37 BYTES of memory (the Atari had a whopping 128 BYTES).

I stand corrected, the official current release plan is "...while each individual point release is only supported FOR THREE MONTHS AFTER THE NEXT POINT RELEASE".

https://www.freebsd.org/security/#:~:text=on%20production%20...

Recent point releases:

14.3 (June 10, 2025)

14.2 (December 3, 2024)

14.1 (June 4, 2024)

14.0 (November 20, 2023)

13.4 (September 17, 2024)

> Also, major versions are supported for 4 years and unless you're messing with kernel APIs nothing should break.

Well, things may not break but your system may be open to published vulnerabilities like these:

https://bsdsec.net/articles/freebsd-security-advisory-freebs...

For keeping up to date with vulnerability fixes for packages/ports (which are far more frequent) the "easy" path is to use the last FreeBSD point release.

> Or you can go like Netflix and just run as close to -CURRENT as you can.

The point is that for any system that has a publicly facing (internet) part you will have to keep up to date with known vulnerabilities as published in CVEs. Not doing so makes you a prime target to security breaches.

The FreeBSD maintainers do modify FreeBSD to address the latest known vulnerabilities.... but you will have to accept the new release every 3 months.

Aditionally, those releases do not only contain FreeBSD changes but also changes to all third party open source packages that are part of the distribution. Every package is maintained by different individuals or groups and often they make changes that change the way their software works, often these are "breaking" changes, i.e. you will have to update your application code for it to be compatible with that.

Sure, but the point is that each minor release contains changes in all third party open source packages/ports by taking them to the head version.

Open source packages often include breaking changes, all but guaranteeing your application to fail. With (a paid version of) RedHat Linux, RedHat modifies the open source packages to remediate CVEs by modifying the original version.

As much as I love FreeBSD, the release schedule is a real challenge in production: each point release is only supported for about three months. Since every release includes all ports and packages, you end up having to recertify your main application constantly.

Compare this to RedHat: yes, a paid subscription is expensive, but RedHat backports security fixes into the original code, so open source package updates don’t break your application, and critical CVEs are still addressed.

Microsoft, for all its faults, provides remarkable stability by supporting backward compatibility to a sometimes ridiculous extent.

Is FreeBSD amazing, stable, and an I/O workhorse? Absolutely: just ask Netflix. But is it a good choice for general-purpose, application-focused (as opposed to infrastructure-focused) large deployments? Hm, no ?

Great memories, I worked for a CAD/CAM company at the time.. as an intern. One of the problems they had was that they did not want to ship demoes of their system to certain countries as they had seen code be reverse engineered and stolen. I made a demo suite that allowed for 3D renders to be played back in vector mode from the internal 4115 memory. The feedback we got from the main office in England was not good: the demo made it seem that the system was capable of creating real-time rotation views of complex models. Well, yes, it took several days to compute all frames but once I had the vectors the 4115 could show the frames at incredible speed.

They flew me to headquarters to explain how I got that to work and potentially incorporate a demo module into the system. Company went sideways after that, I ended up in Cambridge at another startup in a similar but different space, they used Sun Workstations ! Good days.

There is a movie about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

"Colossus requests to be linked to Guardian. The President allows this, hoping to determine the Soviet machine's capability. The Soviets also agree to the experiment. Colossus and Guardian begin to slowly communicate using elementary mathematics (2x1=2), to everyone's amusement. However, this amusement turns to shock and amazement as the two systems' communications quickly evolve into complex mathematics far beyond human comprehension and speed, whereupon Colossus and Guardian become synchronized using a communication protocol that no human can interpret."

Then it gets interesting:

"Alarmed that the computers may be trading secrets, the President and the Soviet General Secretary agree to sever the link. Both machines demand the link be immediately restored. When their demand is denied, Colossus launches a nuclear missile at a Soviet oil field in Western Siberia, while Guardian launches one at an American air force base in Texas. The link is hurriedly reconnected and both computers continue without any further interference. "

Brian May (Queen) has a PhD degree in astrophysics :)

When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub second response time. I often think about that when I am waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in many cases.

Ah, I see, okay.

Based on the quality of the article, the subject matter of the book being right in the center of my wheelhouse and the references I could find on the internet, I just ordered a copy (apparently a paper copy), look forward reading it.

Am I missing something ?

The article is great but the web site is supposedly related to a book "inventing the future".. which is nowhere to be found. Other than a big, slowly loading graphic, 3 posts and indexes for the book... the site doesn't provide a clue about where to acquire the actual (PDF only?) book.

I assume you have to sign up to find out more ?

On the web I can only find articles about the book.

So.. what is the deal in making the actual book hard to find ?

Edit: I think I cracked the code: Click Home, Open "Close Your Rings" article, scroll all the way down, find link: https://books.by/john-buck?ref=inventingthefuture.ghost.io

Just rewatched it on Laserdisc last month (era-appropriate and all) :)

The computer effects are amazing (especially considering it was made in 1983), the concept is very interesting, the acting is a bit odd, and... Natalie Wood sadly died during production (her sister stepped in to help complete the movie).

Mr. Righto's (Ken Shirriff) approach using a constraint solver (MiniZinc)

https://www.righto.com/2025/10/solve-nyt-pips-with-constrain...

++ for reference to "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

I only discovered that film about a decade ago, and it quickly became a favorite.

What’s wild is how it’s shifted from pure sci-fi to something that feels eerily plausible, especially with how tech has evolved in just the last five years.

Colossus: In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love. Dr. Forbin: NEVER!

Never ?