Posted on 08/25/2004 2:18:47 PM PDT by LibWhacker
One of the interesting things about this article to me is the delay in the arrival of a good solid-state alternative can actually be credited in part with this very useful new invention, SHP. I'm definitely not a luddite or anything, but this kind of reminds me of James Burke's old show, Connections.
Yeah. The head can bounce anyway if the harmonic mode is out of balance, and it can happen even if the box is stationary.
While Arabic mathematicians may have refined and furthered the study of algebra (the name "algebra" is derived from the Arabic "al-jabr"), they can not be credited with inventing it. The following is a concise history of the development of algebra:
Algebra has been studied for many centuries. Babylonian, and ancient Chinese and Egyptian mathematicians proposed and solved problems in words, that is, using "rhetorical algebra".
However, it was not until the 3rd century that algebraic problems began to be considered in a form similar to those studied today.
In the 3rd century, the Greek mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria wrote his book Arithmetica. Of the 13 parts originally written, only six still survive, but they provide the earliest record of an attempt to use symbols to represent unknown quantities. Diophantus did not consider general methods in Arithmetica, but instead solved a large number of practical problems.
Several Indian mathematicians carried out important work in the field of algebra in the 6th and 7th centuries. These include Aryabhatta, whose book entitled Aryabhatta included work on linear and quadratic equations, and Brahmagupta, who presented a general solution for a quadratic equation.
The next major development in the history of algebra was the book al-Kitab al-muhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala ("Compendium on calculation by completion and balancing"), written by the Arabic mathematician Al-Khwarizmi in the 9th century. The word algebra is derived from al-jabr, or "completion". This book developed methods for solving six different types of quadratic equations, and contained the first systematic consideration of the subject separately from number theory.
In about 1100, the Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam wrote a treatise on algebra based on Euclid's methods. In it he identified 25 types of equations and made the first formal distinction between arithmetic and algebra.
Some time later during the 12th century, Al-Khwarizmi's works were translated and became available to Western scholars. In the 13th century Leonardo Fibonacci wrote some important and influential books on algebra. Other highly influential works were those of the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli (1445-1517), and of the English mathematician Robert Recorde (1510-1558).
Rules for solving cubic equations were discovered about 1515 by Scipione del Ferro (c. 1465-1526), and for the quartic equation by Ludovico Ferrari (1522-1565) about 1545. In 1824 Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829) finally proved that, in general, it is not possible to give general rules of this kind for solving equations of the fifth degree or higher.
Further contributions to the symbols used in algebra were made in the late 16th century and the 17th century by François Viète (1540-1603) and René Descartes, among others.
Complex and negative roots were a later discovery, and took some time to become accepted. In 1799, Karl Friedrich Gauss proved the fundamental theorem of algebra, which had been proposed as early as 1629.
In the 19th and 20th centuries algebra has become much more abstract and has grown to include much more than the theory of equations. Modern developments in algebra include group theory and the study of matrices.
Absolutely! The throwbacks are actually hostile to any advancement. Another reason we must prevail and they must lose.
"when the querent has no computer anywhere in sight"
I'm not querent! Not that there's anything wrong with that......
I think most hard drives today do have several stacked disks in them.
I had head crash on my laptop. Lost some important emails.
The one thing I learned was if you get a head crash, don't screw around with it. Rescue everything off the disk as soon as possible, then chuck the thing.
A crash will wipe out a few sectors, yeah. But it causes tiny bits of the disk media (hopefully, not the heads themselves) to come lose inside the drive.
So now you have your own personal sandpaper floating around inside your drive. It's only a matter of time before it decides to randomly start wiping out other areas.
hurt your beeber
It is not a pleasant sound. We heard the one that stopped the disk cold. From two offices away.
My personal contribution, from around 1995 or 96, is "walkin' the three-legged dog".
Univac used to have drum storage. It was a large round drum, a cylinder, somewhat barrel shaped, mounted horizontally on bearings with read/write heads, spinning at a couple thousand r's.
I heard a story about it deciding it wanted to chew up the bearings one day.
Came off the bearings, blew apart the housing, and ended in an office, after rolling thru three separate walls, or something.
Almost makes you want to be Amish...!
As time gets by, hardware gets smaller, faster, and cheaper.
Software gets bigger, slower, and more expensive.
Seriously, though, there are some major problems on the horizons if trends continue, because once things stop accellerating there's going to be a lot of 'junk' data hanging around like an albatros which improvements in technology will no longer be able to handle conveniently.
That was an awesome machine. It had read heads all over it, and it was fast.
First machine I ever programmed. The old Univac 1108. A whole 750K of main memory.
I think my DVD remote control has more!
My first computer was digital. Oh, yeah. Thousands of transistors, each on its own board. 4000 bit core storage, tiny ferrite beads strung on wires. Memory was a factory programmed read-only drum in a cabinet half the height of a refrigerator. It was so fast you couldn't even see the low bit nixie tubes blink. My job was to find the burnt out transistor and replace it--happened a lot.
.
You precede me by a bit. I've seen the core storage, but I think it was obsoleted when I started, about 72.
But I do remember Star Trek and the old teletype machines, ***RED ALERT***, ***RED ALERT***, and the bells would ring to high heaven. Most of us would stuff napkins in the bells to quiet them.
And the original ADVENTURE.
A hollow voice says "Plugh"...
I heard a rumor some guy who's dad had died found two brand new in the box Radio Shack Trash 80's in the garage, and was able to get like 10K apiece on Ebay for them!
That computer was obsolete at the time, being built to milspec, but it could take small arms fire and a direct hit from a ships firehose and keep chugging away.
Finally got a chance to ride in your daughters car again eh?
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