Not at all, unfortunately. The box was rather generic-looking, iirc, but the distinguishing feature had to be that it was running interpretive Basic from a ROM monitor rather than an O/S. I don’t believe the PDPs did that.
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I used a Tektronix graphics computer like that in the '80’s. Booted up to basic, so you could run a single command (e.g., x=10) at the prompt, or write multiple lines with line numbers and then type “Run.” Pretty cool graphics too - vector based. It had two slots in the back for add-on components. The ones I used were a Fourier analysis box and a A/D-D/S converter.
It did use magnetic tape cartridges rather than paper tape for storage though, so that was an advance.
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Some of the Wang minicomputers worked similarly - ROM monitor with Basic, CRT, etc., but they showed up in the mid-70s. I have a pretty fair recall of my encounter with this beastie - January or February of 1970.
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I just want to say that I’m all-in with respect to the classic computing nostalgia in this thread.
I will like all the posts and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
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I just wish I could get some students I know to read up on stuff like this.
They think the cutting edge is all they need to know, not realising they’re a) probably not anywhere near it and b) about to be challenged to retain it the moment they graduate. They also don’t realise that knowing computer history is important for finding new things in the computer present.
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A friend in the SF area says that environmentally conscious folks there are not sure if this is a good thing or bad.
https://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/elephant-seals-california-beach-shutdown-60730238
Hold auditions. The winners go to Carnegie Hall as “The Three Elephant Seals.”
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Old story (2015), but relevant in the battle against anti-vaxxers:
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From the scientific obituary column.
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Interesting (and depressing) article. I once worked with a woman who said her work in grad school was published by her advisor, without her name on the paper. She at least did get her PhD.
I do have one nitpick with the Atlantic article:
Rochelle Reyes, one of the students, says that she was “extremely motivated” to do this work, having grown up on stories of under-recognized pioneers like Rosalind Franklin, who was pivotal in deciphering the structure of DNA, and Henrietta Lacks, whose cells revolutionized medical research.
This should have been explained better, as it seems to imply that Lacks also was an unrecognized peer and ignored woman scientist. The story is different – Lacks’ wasn’t a scientist; she had a horrible cancer, and her cancer cells were used without her permission, knowledge, attribution, or payment, in research (continuing to this day). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fabulous book about her life and (unknowing) contribution to science.
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Shakycam warning early on.
But most flat earthers think the sun is close enough that the shadows should differ in their cosmology too. So I think the eclipses are important evidence too.
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280km in one day – the guy must have calves like a lacrosse player.
The Flat Earthers can refute this, and refute that, but they can’t refute everything at once.
The one number that did distress me in the video, though, was that 1 in 10 Americans now believe the earth is flat. That seems, to me, to be an increase.
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Which, of course, doesn’t square with the proofs that the sun is far enough away to be treated as a point light source (one easy one mentioned/linked in the video).
…and then they claim the moon is its own light source, or somesuch. It’s a heck of a rabbit hole to go down once you try refuting things point by point.
This popped up in my own youtube recommendations for some reason a week or two ago. A good video, but really could have used some editing to tighten it up. I spent half of it thinking “yes, you’ve described what you’re doing in broad strokes a few times so far, get to the actual detail already!”
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Yeah, but we have to explain… uh…
And the Koreshan Unity Geodetic Survey results.
And the Grand Canyon, if it’s not a quarry.
And UFOs, since it’s ridiculous to suppose they travelled light-years from other disks in our globist cosmology, instead of just from beyond the Great Ice Wall in their flat-earth cosmology.
I think a lot of them only believe that because they figure “libtards” think the world is spherical.
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To be fair, that’s 280 km of flats, and not at Tour de France speeds. It’s impressive, but it’s the kind of thing a mortal could work up to doing in a few weeks/months.
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My friend’s cousin wrote that book. The author donated all the proceeds to the Lacks family.
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Oh, cool!
Can you get a message to her about the fact that Amazon’s reviews were screwed up? I tried to contact Amazon about it but I can’t get through all the email reply bots. Maybe as author, Rebecca Skloot can.
And that’s so nice she donated the proceeds!
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I will talk to her cousin. I need to do a call with her soon anyway. The cousin is one of my best friends on Long Island.
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