Posted on 02/26/2025 6:21:53 AM PST by ShadowAce
“An interesting theory which is far from usefulness or practical application.”
That describes pretty much all of our best technologies at an early stage. Give it time.
CC
“Then, to fully erase the patterns without changing the structure of the glass, the team applied heat at 1022 degrees Fahrenheit (550 degrees Celsius) for 25 minutes.”
Wonder how much this furnace/laptop is going to weigh?
Yeah, those were the days. The air-conditioning units were more a more impressive sight than the computers. ;-D
Yes!
And what about the crystals in Zardoz?
Life imitates art...
Either for punch tape or cards.
Odd, I haven’t seen any ads for them lately...............😁
I am 100% sure one of my coworkers has some sets of AM2900 bit-slice elements.
He likely has an IBM 5100 too
Yep - it’s a multifactor issue. Media is worthless without the hardware and software to get it out and organized.
Just think of all the wire recordings that were the rage...and that’s a simple one.
IBM had them.................
Holy Moley! That is a bonanza!
I have a signed copy of the AMD AM2900 Bit Slice Controller. (Dr. Donnamae White) She converses readily by email. She wrote the AND docs for that family and taught the PDP-11 team how to use them.
Those are fun ICs.
I tinkered with one of those machines while in the 9th grade. They wanted me to bring it back to life so that students could listen to recordings of news reports from WWII. No dice. Obsolete tubes.
That wire was pretty thin. If you dropped a spool, you were hosed.
Yeah—don’t erase the patterns—just overwrite them multiple times.
Once again, I got a bogus answer from Copilot AI. It didn’t even apologize until I forced it to:
“I apologize for that oversight. Thank you for pointing it out! While I do my best to provide thorough answers, sometimes certain details can slip through the cracks. The IBM 3840’s 12-inch floppy disk is indeed a notable part of the history of data storage.
If you have any more questions or need further information, I’m here to help. Maybe there’s another tech topic you’d like to explore together?”
Some help!
I used 14” floppies. They were used for random-access auto, like public announcements. The system I used them on was a life safety system for the West Rocket Engine Test Range in Huntsville.
Brave AI DISCLAIMER:
Some information may be incorrect. Do your own research...............
Soon AI will be so pervasive we won’t be able to tell it from a human being...............
They didn't. ;-D
After about six months they discarded the entire system, and went back to the manual equipment.
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