The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal

Taniwha•about 1 hour ago

Thing is capability machines (like this and the 432 and lots of research machines) were very much the thing at the time - cutting edge even. The research literature was full of them. I did a paper design at the time.

What ate them up was "what can you fit all on a chip with not many pins", followed by "what can you fit along with a cache on a chip with more pins", things move so much faster if everything's on the same die.

Tagged architectures are old, Burroughs mainframes had them back in the 70s along with rudimentary hardware objects (pageable even)

scottconover•about 1 hour ago

Website design comment: I love the orange/teal theme! Really drawn to the details such as illustrations carrying the orange/teal theme. Inspired me to re-color a project with this split complimentary color.

inigyou•about 3 hours ago

I wonder if you could throw a small microcontroller at the bottom of a canal, powered by water passing through a fan, to hide it. And why you would want to do that.

lexicality•about 1 hour ago

canals have negligible water flow (except during disasters!) so I don't think that'd work very well. They also get dredged occasionally so there's a decent chance anything you leave down there won't last more than a couple of years

fragmede•43 minutes ago

They do have tides though, so make it a big fan that points up.

ErroneousBosh•about 3 hours ago

Water quality monitoring. Communicate back to the surface with ultrasonic pulses.

arnsholt•16 minutes ago

And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to the surface through the drilling mud.

Hnrobert42•about 1 hour ago

I console myself that this is why I never got fabulously wealthy. That brilliance is no guarantee of wealth. You need luck, too.

But the truth is, you also need to do the work. I used my conclusion about luck as an excuse to not even try. Not even in some grand way. Just in the grinding everyday way. In the way of, "You know what I should do?! I should ... meh. That'll never work."

Take it from me, kids. If you want to do something great, do it while you are still young enough to believe it's possible.

throw83939r0r•about 1 hour ago

Too bad british goverments had to kill companies like that. But the new business plan is going much better!

tibbydudeza•about 1 hour ago

I read about them in Byte Magazine - the names were memorable - Objek - Numerik and a third chip - there were no silicon afaik but jsut emulator circuit boards run by a Sun workstation.

The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal

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