Old mainframes in Finland

On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 01:10:55PM -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: Yay! This is my alma mater. Over time, I have lost any connections I could have there but I am glad each time I see the new kids (and cadre) mentioned (especially that mentions are positive :-) ). As I had a look at the diary page of Senster Project [ http://senster.agh.edu.pl/dzienniki/ ], there is a note from 2018-08-09, where inscription on the picture says a number of actuators were missing or defunct. So I guess they went with all new hydraulics (or other kind of moving parts - I am yet to see if there is more details on this) and thus pairing them with simulation of old computer might have not make too much sense. Aha, I spotted "stepper motor" on the same drawing. So, at least some actuators were new. As a side note, Polish wikipedia [1] gives some more depth to the biography of Edward Ihnatowicz, the author of original sculpture. Among other things, at the age of twelve he started going for a year to gymnasium for cadets (a military school), in a city of Lwow (nowadays: Lviv, Ukraine) - a school was said to put a lot of attention to the discipline and high level of teaching [2]. His father being an officer in Polish Army, in 1939 became POW in Soviet Union, later murdered there. Mother and son fleed to Romania, later transferred to Algeria. In 1943, transferred to Great Britain. There, his mother joined Polish Armed Forces and Edward was sent to college. After the war, he went on to learn drawing, married, tried himself as a business owner, movie/tv producer, and then became a cybernetic artist and research assistant at University College London. While he was there, he made two of his three mentioned works, The Senster and The Bandit. The Senster had been dismantled in 1973 and was considered to be lost for a number of years. The Bandit was interesting too, because it tried to guess a gender and temperament often. Very cybernetic! [1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Ihnatowicz [2] As a side to a side note, Polish philosopher and writer specialising in cybernetics-related subjects (Stanislaw Lem), also resided in Lwow during first twenty-four years of his life. Could it be, that a place was somewhat inspiring to certain kind of developments? Lwow was also a site for one of three Polish schools of mathemathics (Lwowian, Warsovian and Cracovian being the names of them). Stanislaw Ulam, a member of it, emigrated to USA and worked in Los Alamos (nukes, thermo-nukes, Monte Carlo method, numerical computations, project Orion etc). Together with John von Neumann he was involved in formulating a concept of cellular authomata: QUOTE: Stanislaw Ulam, while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s, studied the growth of crystals, using a simple lattice network as his model.[8] At the same time, John von Neumann, Ulam's colleague at Los Alamos, was working on the problem of self-replicating systems.[9] Von Neumann's initial design was founded upon the notion of one robot building another robot. This design is known as the kinematic model.[10][11] As he developed this design, von Neumann came to realize the great difficulty of building a self-replicating robot, and of the great cost in providing the robot with a "sea of parts" from which to build its replicant. Neumann wrote a paper entitled "The general and logical theory of automata" for the Hixon Symposium in 1948.[9] Ulam was the one who suggested using a discrete system for creating a reductionist model of self-replication.[12][13] Nils Aall Barricelli performed many of the earliest explorations of these models of artificial life. UNQUOTE. source: [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton ] -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **