univacky

American here. I have to agree with this sentiment (without getting into the math of our deeply flawed election system).

The administration could not do any of this without the support of Congress, which has not wavered. That support is unwavering because those elected officials are not getting negative feedback from their voters and donors, so they have every expectation that staying this course will work out just great for them.

This administration's actions only continue with the approval of their party who put them and keep them in power.

An aircraft on a flight may not maintain the same identifier/callsign for the entirety of that one flight.

Famously, President Richard Nixon departed Washington DC on Air Force One bound for California. In flight over Missouri, his resignation took effect and Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. When that happened, the callsign of the flight changed to SAM 2700.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One#SAM_27000

When Jordan Mechner wrote Karateka for the Apple ][, he used an array of pointers to rows. A team member realized that by inverting the order of the array, all graphics would appear upside down. Broderbund agreed to ship that "upside down" version on the backside of the single-sided floppy, so that if you booted it upside down it played upside down.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii...

https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Karateka_Side_B

Firstly: I'm a fan of Harbour Air's work and their electrification. Have flown that airline.

Retrofitting electrical flight to a 1950s airframe will be, in the long run, not a great use of the technology.

Those planes were designed around having a single heavy powerplant up front driving the propeller, and fuel largely distributed along the center of gravity (in the wings) so as not to adversely alter flight characteristics over the trip. The electrified Beaver stores its batteries in the fuselage; of course there is no change in mass/CG over the flight with electric, but all that fuel tank space in the wings is going to waste. The fact that these are floatplanes make charging/battery replacement tasks at the dock challenging and restrict options.

A clean sheet design, with multiple distributed smaller motors and more options for battery placement, will be a significant improvement.

https://harbourair.com/going-electric/?tab=Specification

I was there as well. I punched the cards and read the core dumps and programmed in machine language using the front panel switches and lights. I programmed the Burroughs machine in Algol, and the IBM in assembly language (BALR, USING); the GCOS operating system which gave the GCOS field in the Unix/Linux /etc/passwd file its purpose and name; and the Univac 494 with the FASTRAND II drums. It was the most fearsome computing equipment I've ever encountered thanks to its spinning tonnage.

You are seen.

Additionally, von Neumann did not "architect" that design; it was named for him because he wrote a paper describing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Devel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Presper_Eckert#%22Eckert_ar...

<Ada has entered the chat>

That's not true for many, many planes, and there are very many private planes that are not jets and the owners are not rich. Thousands and thousands are homebuilts.

Go to https://www.faa.gov, and on the front page there's a place to enter an airplane registration number and get, along with other info, the name and address of the owner.

The vast majority of airspace does not "require very clear tracking of objects", and is less controlled than a highway. It does not require particular permission besides following the "rules of the road", and is free to use with nobody knowing you're there. I must assume you are referring to airspace which is either around busy airports (cities) or very high (airliner territory) - Class A/B/C/D airspaces.

I was thinking The Terminal Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Man_(film)

Filenames? We used to DREAM of having filenames!

Writing COBOL on the UNIVAC 490 series (30 bit word, FIELDATA character set), our files were on tapes. A tape request was submitted to the tape library, they would pull the tape(s) containing your file(s), and deliver them to the operations floor.

The customer would submit hand-written transactions, which would be sent to the keypunchers, who would punch them onto cards.

The tapes and transaction cards would be sent to the ops floor (where there was the actual computer). The operator would load the first tape in each file onto a UNISERVO tape drive, and go to the patch panel to run wires to assign logical devices to physical devices. ( https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10266686... see page 57)

Then they would put the job deck into the card reader and enter the "UR" (read the Unit Record device) command into the console, which had a spool of paper, not a screen. When the program was awaiting input, they would load the transaction cards and give the console command to continue the program.

We did have a fearsome beast of a FASTRAND drum system for random-access storage, but that was just for executable code and temporary files.

Then you might well get called in the middle of the night, because one of the programs in the job aborted. They called it "aborted" then. Or ABEND (ABnormal END), if you were an IBM person. You would come in, read the core dump (reading core dumps was a valuable skill), and determine that there was a data problem in a transaction (e.g. an alpha character in a numeric field). You would find the offending card, pull it, tear it in half and set it aside to be addressed in the morning as a missing transaction, and tell ops to rerun the job. With luck, there were no bad cards after that one.

Tell that to kids today, and they won't believe you.

There's a lot of interesting Greaseweazle-y floppy development being done at Adafruit right now. Some days they're posting multiple videos a day showing progress updates.

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy

(here are some representative posts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQvzZKNvRM0

https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/01/16/5-25-floppy-reading-wit...

John Morris's Applesauce floppy disk controller hardware and software project continues to add functionality.

https://applesaucefdc.com/what-is-applesauce/

I can't be the only one who was waiting for this reference: https://xkcd.com/149/

Don't be too sure it's going to open again. https://livingcomputers.org/Closure.aspx

I have been running nothing but Linux since 1994. My last Windows was 3.1.

I just installed Windows 10 for the sole purpose of running this flight simulator.

I learned awk for the purpose of playing Tradewars, running on DOS. Playing Tradewars on the local BBS in the mid-80s, I developed a system where I would spend the first night in a new game just running around and logging the session. Wrote an awk script to generate a map of the places I'd been. Then on successive days I'd work over the mapped areas, and expand into unmapped areas, awking it down to keep expanding the map. Good times.

It also was intended to have its name pronounced like "JIF", but you know what happens to intentions.

Compilers like MS and Turbo C used a clever technique - a program could be compiled with a software floating point library and shipped, and the existence of the FP coprocessor would be detected at runtime and the program would self-modify appropriately. If there was a coprocessor, the first time any particular FP routine was called, it would overwrite the instruction calling the library with the appropriate FP coprocessor instruction.

Seems almost hard to find that copy instead of this one:

https://cpsc.yale.edu/epigrams-programming

Ice cream was popular in the 18th century, particularly known to be favorites of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Their homes at Mount Vernon and Monticello, respectively, both have ice houses. They would harvest ice from the Potomac or Rapidan River, pack it with insulating material (sawdust) and it would keep for quite some time in the cool well/cellar-like structure.

https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/ice/ https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/location/ice-... http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/history/icehouse.ph...

There has been one in Leesburg, VA for a few years undergoing testing and evaluation. It is the first in North America. It is currently in daily production use.

https://www.leesburgva.gov/government/departments/airport/re...

I think that computer was built in 1971; the video mentions that the software used is Richard Wilson's player, which was written in 1975 (the DECUS entry is dated 2/11/1976).

You can watch and listen to it on an Altair 8800b and get the octal object code for toggling into your own Altar here: => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYhVnmeWrk

PDP-8 music here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfx5H7ikA7Y

DECUS documentation entry for "PDP-8 MUSIC PLAYING PROGRAM" available on punch tape, 1976; written in assembly (PAL8) and fit in 4K words (12 bit word) of core memory. Worth a read. => http://www.pdp8online.com/miscdocs/DECUS/Decus%208-804_MUSIC...

Oh, man, we're just looking at the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. There is a ton of new hardware for Apple 2s - replacement power supplies, sound cards, coprocessor cards, solid state floppy emulators, VGA drivers, and even FPGA cards (Carte Blanche).

There is also new software being written for the Apple 2 - take a look at Nox Archaist, for example: http://www.6502workshop.com/p/nox-archaist.html

If you had a system with only one floppy, you still had an A: and a B: drive. Any access to (virtual) B: would prompt you to insert the other floppy, and I/O would continue until the disk in A: was needed, and you'd be prompted to swap floppies again.

Very early IBM PCs had BASIC in ROM, which got executed if a disk couldn't be booted, or if you executed an int 18h.

Or so they say - I've never used one of those.

Timely post - Tom Perera was a keynote speaker at the Vintage Computer Festival - East the day this was posted (and Bjarne Stroustrup the next day), and spoke on Enigmas but also discussed the M-209 and SIGABA. He had an M-209 with him, and there is also one on permanent display in the WWII Communication Museum section of InfoAge, where the VCFE is held.

http://enigmamuseum.com/

http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east...

http://infoage.org/

Do we know that every possible finite sequence exists in pi?

I was a bit surprised to find no mention of SF author Jerry Pournelle using the Electric Pencil word processor for many years:

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/early-days-of-word...

I do have WordPerfect running on my old DOS PC as well as a CP/M P112 I built:

https://661.org/p112/

http://propellersexplained.com/

"Organic farming, Nichols tells me, is really about the health of the soil and the ecosystems producing our food. Nichols wants to show me the difference between soil from conventional agriculture, which uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and soil from what Rodale calls regenerative organic agriculture, which uses natural pest management, extensive cover crops, and natural fertilizer like manure."

Okay, if we are going to cut out most of our animal consumption, there goes most of our manure, no?

And if we stick to natural fertilizer, that cuts our potential crop yields by a huge amount. We just don't have a natural means to get enough nitrogen into the soil without the Haber-Bosch process.

Combine those two items alone and I guess we will lose at least 2/3 of our fertilizer supply.

So the first step needs to be, if I'm reading right - get rid of a few billion people?