28 Jun
2007
28 Jun
'07
6:26 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Billy Pettit once stated:
This thread has been a real disappointment. Almost
all of the responses
have been about computers using standard microprocessors - off the shelf
components. Yes a few had non-vanilla flavored OS's, or idiotic I/O
schemes. A few were even painted different colors from PC Beige.
Come on people: there were computers long before there were microcomputers.
And many of them were wonderfully different and creative.
In college [1], one of my bosses [2] worked on an analog computer. It was
this huge hulking box, maybe 10' long, 6' high, and maybe 1 or 2' deep that
you programmed by plugging wires into various modules. My boss used it to
simulate a chaotic system [3] and play around with it in real time. Since I
was never really good with electronics, I never did "program" the thing.
Another computer I had access to (but sadly, never played with to any
degree---sigh) was the Maspar. It was probably similar to the Connection
Machine (single instruction, multiple data) but with only 4K CPUS, not the
64K the Connection Machine came with. And you could only program the thing
in Fortran (which is probably explains why I or my friends didn't do
anything with it).
Ah, but the Connection Machine---now *that* was an interesting
architecture. 65,536 1-bit CPUs that you would program in a varient of
Lisp.
-spc (But I know how to use a slide ruler ... )
[1] Florida Atlantic University, just across the street from IBM [4],
where the IBM PC was first built.
[2] I worked for a professor and his grad-student wife. Both had
degrees in Psychology, but he worked in the Math Department, while
she was still in the Psychology department, then later in a research
department.
[3] The forumas she simulated where:
xn1 = ((A * yn) + B) * xn * (1.0 - xn);
yn1 = ((C * xn) + D) * yn * (1.0 - yn);
A, B, C and D ranged from -4 to +4 (but for each "run" were held
constant) with the x and y range restricted to 0 .. +1 and plotted.
It was much faster to vary A, B, C and D using the analog computer
than it was on the SGI [5].
[4] IBM is no longer in that facility.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Boca+Raton,+Fl…
[5] Personal IRIS 4D-35. I was the one that wrote the software to
display that equation on the SGI. I still miss that system, but
not the hardware problems.