Just a little humor
- Thread starter Shiftless2
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Typo took me a few seconds.
Took me longer than that, even while I was multi-tracking discontent over the premise: "A priest, an imam, and a rabbit ...". A RABBIT? A RABBIT !! what a stupid premise
Then I got it.
What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino?
elephino
Shiftless2
Well-known member
We've all got that one friend who seems to be everywhere
The AI is so common these days, I wonder how easy it is to use?
Anyone here actually ever try it?
I used to do lots of video work, going back to the Amiga and Video Toaster in the 1980s.
It was difficult back then.
The software varies widely.
I came close to trying A.I. a month ago when you and I discussed the Trabant.
I thought of creating an A.I. image of a Trabant doing aerobatics. BUT !
There were strings attached. So no.
As you know, hardware evolution has caused a revolution.
I got my first desktop PC in 1981, when the industry standard for RAM was 64K.
The PC I'm using now has a million times more.
This PC has four 1080HD TV tuners. It can simultaneously record 4 different 1080HD television broadcasts, stores them to a dedicated HDD.
There's TV series, movies, nature, science, & politics documentaries / news events. Commodore can't cram that on a cassette.
Compare the size of one of these:
Gigastone 512GB Micro SD Card, Camera Plus, GoPro, Action Camera, Sports Camera, A1 Run App for Smartphone, Nintendo-Switch Compatible, 100MB/s, 4K Video Recording, Micro SDXC UHS-I A1 U3 Class 10
with a VHS cassette.- stupendous -
The hardware guys are way ahead of the software guys.
The first computer I had was a Timex Sinclair with 2k of memory.
Then a CBM 64, with 64k of memory.
Did you use them to run commercial software? Not sure what software it could run.
My IBM PC may have had an 8088 processor (same as NASA's space shuttles iirc) & 128k RAM, & two sloppy-disc drives, 5.25" 360K capacity.
It ran Sargon III to play chess on an ASCII display screen.
I bought it with Easy Writer word processing software, but upgraded to Word Proof.
We've come a long way since then.
Not sure this'll interest you, but a few years ago I read there are more transistors on Earth than there are leaves on trees.
Tricking rocks into doing our thinking for us, good idea.
Shiftless2
Well-known member
This moron…RFK… is in charge of our Medical program. You couldn’t make this stuff up…😩☄️ | Mickie Murphy | Facebook
This moron…RFK… is in charge of our Medical program. You couldn’t make this stuff up…😩☄️
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The Timex Sinclair was just to learn programming on.
The CBM 64 had thousands of games.
More than the Apple II even.
The XT, AT, etc. were terrible at games at first because the CGA graphics were so poor resolution, color palette, and speed.
VGA was finally acceptable, but did not come out until 1987.
I suspect I'm violating the topic drift protocol. - oops -
computer nostalgia
I have no memory of the CBM 64.
My recollection of the Timex Sinclair, it was trim, orthogonal, black.
In contrast the Commodore 64 looked bloated to me. I never tried either one.
The "XT" in IBM's XT stood for "extended technology", iirc the first home computer to have an HDD. That HDD was large in size, small in capacity, 10 Megs iirc. BUT !
Back then 10 Megs was gynormous.
The 4TB WD USB Passport I'm using now is a fraction of the size, and 4,000 x the capacity.
The "AT" stood for "advanced technology", it had a 286 microprocessor.
VGA (video graphics array) was hot stuff back then, in part because of the inferior CGA it replaced.
I was told VGA is analog.
I gather HDMI is digital, not sure.
On the PC I wrote a program in Basic or Basica, a hearing test.
I think it was about 7 lines of code, basically,
10 sound X
20 print X (displays the numerical value on the screen)
30 x = x + 1
40 goto 10
iirc for me the sound tapered off around 13 kHz, BUT
I don't know whether that was due to defective hearing, or a limitation of the transducer, or other audio component.
The Timex Sinclair was too small, so I added a larger keyboard to make touch typing possible.
The CBM 64 was a cheap game machine based mostly off the external floppy disk.
But there were lots of computers with hard drives before the XT, like the Apple III, Atari, and CBM Amiga.
I really hated the XT due to the awful assembly language instruction set, with segmentation, and the poor graphics.
Yes, HDMI is digital, and I think it can also handle audio data as well as video.
I did most of my programming in C/C++, but retired over 15 years ago now.
oh
I had a co-worker that raved about his (I think it was an) Amiga. iirc he said it had two different OS options (I suppose that's called "dual-boot" now).
Not sure. Somewhere along the line I found a report that the computer on the Apollo 11 LEM was manufactured manually, slender metal wires criss-crossed, with small magnetic rings where the wires crossed.
It's notable we went to the moon, in fidelity to our dead president.
It's astounding that we succeeded with 1950's / '60's technology.
note:
I knew a spectacular Pan Am electronics technician back then. He repaired their radar and avionics equipment.
Back then some if not most of it was vacuum tube technology.
I dumped my Amigas around 1994 due to co-founding chairman Irving Gould and president Mehdi Ali, filing Commodore for bankruptcy on April 29, 1994.
The company was and was totally liquidated for no real reason.
The reason space vehicles need to use older technology, like magnetic ring cores instead of microminiature solid state semiconductors, is that there is too much radiation in space.
The larger and higher amperage older technology are less likely to glitch from radiation.
IBM founder Thomas John Watson (1874-1956) predicted only a few (~5?) computers would ever be needed. *
Semiconductors can't handle it, but astronauts can. That's why they use high amperage astronauts. [/kiddin']
I gather as our micro-electronics gain progressively more circuit density, the voltage needed to operate them drops,
resulting in appliances progressively more vulnerable to voltage transients.
* "There never will be talking pictures." D.W. Griffith
You've got me wondering about quantum computing in space. Lots of questions.