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Sunday, October 31, 2021

SCANALYZER Has a New Home

As announced on 2021-10-26, effective today, SCANALYZER has completed its move to the SCANALYST site, which is in full production mode.

SCANALYST Logo

All content posted here since 2021-10-04 has been mirrored at SCANALYST, and new content will only be posted there. You can either bookmark the SCANALYST main page, which contains other topics in addition to SCANALYZER, or go directly to the SCANALYZER category page, which will only show you those posts.

SCANALYST is a Discourse discussion forum, in which registered members can comment and create their own posts, but there is no need to join in order to read the SCANALYZER posts just as you've done here. If you do wish to join, SCANALYST has no subscription fees, no advertising, and requires no personal information other than a valid E-mail address to confirm your sign-up. We will never knowingly disclose any personal information about users.

I'll see you at SCANALYST!

Posted at 11:38 Permalink

Saturday, October 30, 2021

From 1970—IBM System/370 Product Announcements

The IBM System/370 was announced in June 1970 as the replacement for its extremely successful System/360 range of mainframes. It was 100% upward compatible with System/360, running the same operating systems and application programs and supporting the same peripherals, and thus provided an easy migration path for System/360 customers. It replaced the “solid logic” circuitry used in the 360 with monolithic integrated circuits, and the 370/145 and all subsequent models replaced core memory with semiconductor main memory.

When the System/370 was announced, many observers were surprised it did not include virtual memory, which was all the rage in computer architecture at the time, and which IBM had previously introduced in the System/360 model 67 in 1965. In 1972, the original System/370 models 155 and 165 were replaced by the 158 and 168 which did support virtual memory, as did all subsequent models in the series. The System/370 would continue to be marketed for twenty years until replaced by the System/390, with numerous evolutionary changes in the architecture over time.

The IBM 3211 printer shown in the final film was stunning. Nobody made printers like IBM—this beast would crank out 2000 lines per minute, day and night, box after box of paper, without a hiccup.

Posted at 13:00 Permalink

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Dinosaurs—The True Story

How's that space program coming along?

Posted at 13:05 Permalink

Florida Man—NASA Administrator Clarence William Nelson on UFOs

This is an excerpt from an hour long interview on 2021-10-19 at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Scroll back to the beginning if you wish (why?) to see the whole thing.

The interviewer/host, Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics, is also a prize: “Of course, Einstein believed in parallel universes. So, that's good enough for me, if Einstein believed in it, and he inspired a lot of Rod Serling's ‘Twilight Zone’s” [56:50].

Posted at 11:26 Permalink

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

How Virtual Worlds Work—Part 5, Ownership of Virtual Objects

Posted at 12:55 Permalink

Albert Einstein and his Flying Car

This sequence was filmed on the Warner Brothers special effects stage at Warner Brothers in Los Angeles during a Einstein's visit to California in 1931. It has been colourised and re-processed to 4K, 60 frames per second video.

Einstein was not only a film star, but also an inventor. Just a few months earlier, he and Leo Szilard were granted U.S. patent 1,781,541 for the Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator.

Posted at 10:43 Permalink

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

“Orbital Reef”—Commercial Space Station

The “team” is led by Blue Origin, founded 21 years ago, and Sierra Space, which acquired the Dream Chaser spacecraft, which was announced in 2004, 17 years ago. Neither has, to this date, attempted or completed an orbital flight. Team members include Boeing, the launch of whose Starliner “Hangar Queen” is slipping further into 2022 due to problems with hypergolic reaction control thrusters, a technology dating from the 1950s. What could possibly go wrong?

Posted at 11:50 Permalink

Monday, October 25, 2021

The Curious World of Radio Pulsars

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Sunday, October 24, 2021

Earth and Moon from the Lunar South Pole

This computer-generated animation shows the Earth and Moon as viewed from the rim of Shackleton crater near the Moon's south pole, with the camera aimed at the mean position of the Earth. The Sun circles the horizon once a month, never more than 1.5 degrees above or below the horizon. The Earth bobs around its mean position with the lunar librations due to the eccentricity and inclination of the Moon's orbit. Shackleton crater is deep, 4.2 km, and in perpetual shadow. It is believed that water and other volatiles may have collected there.

Posted at 11:58 Permalink

Saturday, October 23, 2021

AutoCAD Release 10 on an IBM Professional Graphics Controller

The IBM Professional Graphics Controller (PGC) (which was often incorrectly called a PGA, for Professional Graphics Adapter, by many people, including me) was a remarkable device for its time. Introduced in 1984, around the same time as the PC/AT, it was compatible with both the original IBM PC and XT as well as the AT. It supported 640×480 pixel 60 Hz graphics with a 256 colour palette of 8-bit RGB values and had 320 kB of on-board display memory, so it occupied none of the scarce 640 kB address space of the PC architecture. It had its own Intel 8088 microprocessor (the same as in the PC and XT) which implemented high-level graphics commands such as drawing arcs and circles and solid filling polygons. This allowed AutoCAD to offload all of the pixel-pushing to the graphics board, speeding up image regeneration.

This power came a a price—a forbidding one. List price for the PGC, which consisted of three printed circuit boards stacked together, was US$ 4,290 in 1985, which is equivalent to US$ 11,000 in today's BidenBucks. This was comparable to the price of an entire IBM PC/XT, which was US$ 4,995 in 1985. This thing was so expensive that I doubt Autodesk would have bought one to support it if IBM hadn't loaned us one to develop a driver. After developing an AutoCAD driver for it (which was a breeze thanks to the on-board graphics primitives), I later used the board in the development of AutoShade, as it was one of the few 256 colour boards available at the time.

Here is a long Twitter Thread from Tube Time (scroll back to the start), who recently restored an IBM PC/AT which probably belonged to an AutoCAD customer back in the day and got AutoCAD Release 10 (which shipped in October 1988) running on it.

Posted at 11:57 Permalink

Friday, October 22, 2021

How Virtual Worlds Work—Part 4, Objects and Behaviours

Posted at 11:38 Permalink

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Ducks in a Row

The full paper is “Wave-riding and wave-passing by ducklings in formation swimming”.

Posted at 12:13 Permalink

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Boeing's Starliner Is a Mess—But What Were the Alternatives?

Posted at 14:19 Permalink

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

David Friedman and James Bennett on Property Rights in Space

Posted at 11:30 Permalink

Monday, October 18, 2021

Magnetic Mysteries—The “Simple Magnetic Over-Unity Toy”

Ignoring potential energy is the source of much confusion and “inspiration” to designers of perpetual motion machines of the first kind. Simple experiments with magnets demonstrate how confusing and deceptive it can be when all energy flows are not accounted for. Fortunately, physicists, engineers, and patent examiners have learned to approach claims of “over unity” (something for nothing) with extreme scepticism. Now if we could just get the economists and politicians on board.

Posted at 11:32 Permalink

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Melting Nuclear Waste to the Earth's Mantle

Here is the 2011 paper, “Self-Sinking Capsules to Investigate Earth’s Interior and Dispose of Radioactive Waste”. Full text is available at the ResearchGate site. The first paragraph of the paper is:

Technical experts, science fiction writers, and environmental advocates have all famously considered a self-descending spherical body in a melting environment not as a solution but as a problem. In connection with nuclear reactor core meltdown, this phenomenon is the so-called China Syndrome. Let’s step back and consider the China Syndrome as a solution.

Posted at 12:20 Permalink

Saturday, October 16, 2021

A Zoologist Contemplates Alien Life

Might convergent evolution and the limited number of biomechanical solutions to the needs of life result in alien life being no more weird than what we find on Earth? (Although if you look at some of the critters that inhabit the ocean, that's already pretty weird.) Dr Kershenbaum's book is The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy.

Posted at 11:14 Permalink

Friday, October 15, 2021

The Agoric Approach to Computing

Agoric computing is a concept of structuring computation and business systems around the model of a free market, supplanting traditional systems which often resemble top-down, centrally planned economies. It encompasses smart contracts, which are central to the emerging field of decentralised finance (DeFi), which is not entirely 100% scams and pyramid schemes, despite how it may appear. In this 42 minute long conversation, the CEO and Chief Scientist of Agoric Systems Operating Company trace the history of smart contracts back to the pioneering work at the American Information Exchange (AMIX) in the 1980s (backed by Autodesk from 1988 through 1992), describe how smart contracts are integrated with blockchain technology, and explain why they have chosen JavaScript as the language on which to build their technology.

Posted at 12:18 Permalink

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Visiting a Server Farm in Germany

Posted at 11:38 Permalink

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

What Did Dinosaurs Really Look Like?

Artist C. M. Kosemen has drawn modern animals as they might be reconstructed from their skeletons alone: “Nightmarish sketches reveal what modern animals would look like if we drew them in the same way as dinosaurs based on their skeletons”.

Posted at 14:28 Permalink