Well the voting public were split 48/52 on whether to leave the EU which is as close to 50/50 it shouldn’t have made any difference, except it did. In general, younger and more educated people voted to remain in the EU and older and less educated people voted to leave.
Those that want to stay in the EU feel like they are leaving a union of nations that was a positive force for good in the world and that the British had a major influence within. They feel that influence is now greatly diminished and are worried about the door being opened to far right nationalist groups within the UK and across Europe.
Those that voted to leave the EU disliked that laws could be imposed on Britain from the outside and with an obscure and seemingly undemocratic process. They wanted control over the borders of the country and get away from the free movement of people allowed within the European Union.
I was thinking of asking what everyone is looking at this sale in the games thread…my top choices are Horizons, hyperlight drifter, or scrap mechanic but I’m still looking around and haven’t found anything that demands an immediate I must have it reaction yet.
Although not a PDP-8 (introduced 1965), I did complete my university study of operating systems by working on a PDP-11 (introduced 1970). Because it was an operating system course, we couldn’t just turn the thing on and go. We had to bootstrap the hardware by hand, entering a few instructions by toggle switches on the front of the machine. That allowed us to download our hand-built assembly language operating system and try to get it to output messages to an attached dot matrix printer terminal. Real primitive stuff.
Note that for the mainstream programming stuff (e.g. FORTRAN, C, PASCAL, etc), we started out writing our code on sheets of paper. Then we’d go to the basement of the computing center and type them on punched card machines to produce a deck of cards with our program, ready to go. Then we’d turn that deck of cards over to an operator who would run it through a card reader about the size of a refrigerator on its side. Then we’d get the printouts of our results a couple hours later after it eventually got run on the university’s timesharing UNIVAC 1108 mainframe.
Here’s a guy explaining the operation of the very model of punched card machine that I used. I find it oddly depressing that I worked on what is now a museum piece.
Imagine a room with 20 of those things clattering away.
Things got more advanced when we were allowed to use the dot matrix printer terminals directly. I’d include a video, but they’re invariably blurry and awful. Just imagine something printing at 300 baud.
Eventually, the university received new minicomputers and “glass teletypes” running at 9600bps. At 300bps, a line would take about 2 seconds to print. At 9600bps, lines would just scroll right by on the screen. It was amazing to us.
And, of course, all the keyboards were mechanical, with deep throws and a loud clack.
Compared to that technology, everything we see now is on steroids. Except perhaps the keyboards. I feel rather honored to have been around to experience those times.
I drove by the DSN station today but I don’t think Jupiter is on my side of the planet right now…pretty sure it’s on the night side of the planet so I’m assuming it’s out of Canberra right now.
Speaking of DSN in general if you’re ever driving up to Yosemite/mammoth in goldstone, CA, in Canberra in Australia, or in Madrid everyone should totally check em out. The Canberra one was a pretty cool little musuem with a bunch of interesting videos about various missions and some shiny pieces of stuff like a piece of heat shield and all that jazz.
The story how I came across these wonderful machines of the past (with the amazing front panel design) is based on the nostalgia of a certain Minecraft Modder.
Redpower, a long abadoned mod, introduced programmable in-game computers coming bundled with the extensible FORTH console/language. I was totally into writing low level programs so I was sinking quite some time working with this mod in Minecraft, learning FORTH etc. …
My father saw me one day and was reminded by that thing …
(gui of the cpu block)
Eloraam, the mod creator, was definitely fond of the front panel design.
Even though the emulator was emulating a more advanced 6502 microprocessor.
My father told me how starting and generally working with these computers was. He did work with them back when he was an apprentice at Hilti.
Pretty much how JB described it. Even though I never lived trough … at … that time I still find this technology very fascinating.
Here’s the most complex thing I built with RedPower:
An automatic inventory system with price calculation, automatic cashier … err … a two way vending machine that adjusts its price depending on available stock.
