OT teach me a word

Roberta Zollner wrote:
I'm more with you than with people who really understand this stuff. But
here goes: we used to have only "analog", which means information stored as
a physical representation, like the little bumps on a vinyl disk that made
the record player needle vibrate exactly the same way as the original sound
did, so we heard a copy of that sound.

not quite, a vinyl disk is analog because the bumps can be any height,
if you set the machine that made them to only produce bumps of say, 10
different heights, it would be digital and would sound terrible played
on a regular record player. You'd also need a lot more space to store
the same amount of time hence why digital storage does tend to be things
where whatever is doing the storing is very very small.


--
Cheers

Anne
http://baltimorealbum.blogspot.com/

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

even the old programmers can't do it, I used to work with the guy who
was in charge of the building of the first computer and many of the
people who worked with him, we moved buildings and the staff common room
was build with class walls with a stripe around it that was supposedly
the first program they'd put into EDSAC, none of them even recognised
it. A younger guy spent ages translating it and found that there was an
error in it, but that was the builders not the original programmers. The
original programmers programmed in machine code, which gives commands at
a really really basic level, then one of the technicians would take that
, look up all the binary codes and make the punch card, they probably
didn't know what the program meant and the programmers wouldn't know the
binary for the program they had written.

Cheers
Anne

--
Cheers

Anne
http://baltimorealbum.blogspot.com/

After I went back to school for my computer science degree, one of my
uncles used to say "I just don't understand how a computer works". My
response was always, "I don't really understand it all, either, but I
know it's really just a bunch of on/off switches." I don't think that
satisfied him.

Julia in MN (retired IBM'er so I understand hexadecimal)

Val wrote:
"Polly Esther" wrote in message
...
could you please explain the word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think
it all started when clock faces began showing funny looking numbers.
Lately it seems that everything is digital and I have no clue what they're
meaning. I just need a very simple understanding of the word. Anyone?
Polly

It's simple to understand, it maybe isn't to explain......

Gather 'round boys and girls and listen to the OLLLLLDDDD computer
programmer who actually programmed in binary......we'll get back to that.
This will be explained and then gradually and hopefully understood in much
the same way that little hand held game works, the one where the BBs roll
around until they all fall into the little holes......there maybe some BBs
rolling around loose from time to time but hopefully they will all be snug
in the little holes at the end of this explanation.

In this case digit means number, not finger or toe.

Digital clocks came by their name because the actual numbers (digits)
flipped as time marched on, not complicated, kind of fun, no big and little
hands, hence an entire generation that has little or no concept of clockwise
or counter clockwise......see there Polly, you're already smarter than a
fifth grader!! These clocks were not computers, they were just called
digital because of the numbers and it sounded more impressively scientific
(and expensive) than "flippin' clock".

Now to why the "digital" with computer stuff. For a simple visual aid we
will all hold our a chopstick and put it through the holes of two donuts.
Hold the chopstick straight up, tilt the bottom donut like this \ , the one
above like this / . The one like this \ has a positive electrical charge,
we give it the #1 to use when writing out actual code humans can read (once,
long ago there WERE actual humans who DID read this code like you are
reading this sentence, I was one of them; very skeerrry)....the other like
this / has a negative charge, we give that the #0.....two numbers = bi-nary
code, that is what the computer reads, negative is OFF = #0, positive is ON
= #1. An electronic computer *anything* is just an electro magnet; same
thing that picks up squashed cars in the wrecking yard but has a bit more
finesse in the actual structure. No electrical impulse, the computer doesn't
work....dead batteries, your camera or iPod doesn't work. The old computers
I worked with actually had these donuts on wires finer than human hair and a
few thousand donuts would fit in a thimble and I have NO idea who built
these machines, they were obviously even less sane than
programmers.....bazillions of little donuts and you could hear them clicking
as they flipped back and forth with the negative and positive charges
pulsing in the machine. One donut is a BIT....8 donuts are a BYTE, half a
byte is four donuts and it's called a NIBBLE, aint that cute!..(there's a
ninth donut in there but you don't need to know about parity bits. *see foot
note if you are so inclined). in 8 bit code called octal (8) you can count
the numbers (donuts) with the potato song.......one potato, two potato,
three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE......'more'
is zero, a place holder ....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,0......same as zero is a place
holder in counting in decimal.....that's 1234567890. 10 is one ten and no
ones; 20 is 2 tens, the zero is a place holder (no ones) until you add
three....2 tens and 3 ones...23!! and so on.

A computer only knows negative and positive, it reads and spits out that
binary code and then it's translated with other coding programs to be more
advanced and easier to read and write so us regular human people can
understand what the machine is telling us. This is why power fluctuations
and not fully charged batteries can screw up what your computer or camera is
doing or it doesn't do anything at all...........sort of like very low or
high blood sugar in people, things start to malfunction. Also why you keep
magnets away from the working guts of a computer. They are not as sensitive
now as they once were.....we had a computer crash because the maintenance
man had a magnetized switch on his flashlight in his pocket and he walked
through the mainframe computer room......that doesn't happen anymore.

A digital picture is comprised of pixels, these pixels are actually hunks of
binary coding that "codes the picture you take" and spits it out all
translated in colors using each individual pixel. The programming arranges
all the pixels in the right order and you have a PICTURE the human eye can
"read" or see. If you have the right equipment, which you most likely don't,
NOR do you need, you can keep enlarging a digital camera's picture until all
you have are solid colored squares, and if you enlarge it even more, pretty
soon these squares will be lots of squares inside squares that are all black
and white (even on color pictures).....black-white, on-off,
negative-positive, 0-1...it's a computer DIGITAL code! How 'bout that! But
since your camera reads and compresses (translates) this code you not only
have colored squares, you have an arrangement of colored squares that are
translated and now MEAN something to the human eye. Those old donuts have
been replaced by transistors and transponders and trans atlantics and maybe
trans fats and all kinds of fancy teeny little trans things that do all this
work in nano seconds, faster than the blink of an eye.....even faster than a
3 year old!

Digital music is the same but translates digital code to tones, then to
notes and then to music with mixing and tracks and tweaking all by digital
programming code. The computer (iPod or whatever) reads the digital
(*numbers* in the machine language) code written to the disc and then sends
it on so humans ears hear music from the speakers.

What it boils down to is that the absolute, most basic computer language is
based on two numbers (digits) zero and one that makes all electronic
computer everythings work. An abacus is a computer too, but it's not
electronic. All a computer does is calculate these series of numbers
(digits) to a *digital* translation so it's something human type people can
understand; like come up with a balance on your checkbook (that may be a
poor example), a picture in your camera, words on your monitor and music
from electronic speakers (you do not hear your disc, you hear the digital
translation of the code on the disc thru your speakers, your quilt programs
and so on and so on.

Digital just means that you have an electronic computer *something* that
uses a low level basic machine language code which is comprised of numbers
that were assigned to identify electrical impulses to become more
complicated codes to calculate, which is now practically synonymous with
create.....when referring to a lot of digital stuff.

Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

Oh, for the *footnote on parity bits. 2001: Space Odyssey, about the
computer named HAL that began trying to take over.....Hexadecimal is (16
bit) machine language ( 0123456789ABCDEF) all bytes have a parity bit (the
extra one that nobody counts or assigns a name/number to) but if it isn't in
sync with the rest, the hex code is really screwed up. IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!" We were employed with Sperry
Univac (corporate rivals)......we were called nerds then, a geek was
something different all together. This IBM joke has been denied by Clarke
and Kubrick, that it was NOT a slam at IBM.........however, Sperry Rand
subsidiaries did a great deal of financing for Kubrick's projects so WE knew
better .............and then I became a heavy construction truck driver. The
End

011101100100000101001100
Val






--
This message has been scanned for viruses by Norton Anti-Virus

http://webpages.charter.net/jaccola/

Ginger in CA wrote:
ok, Val, now my head hurts,
snipped
I am self-proclaimed techno-geekless since then, not interested in
electronics or digital things. Give me a pad of paper, an ink pen or
Ticonderoga pencil any time! You can see what you are writing, see
your mood, see all the nuances of your words on paper.
My DH's uncle was a pencil collector. He had a framed picture titled
"The L.E.A.D. 2.5 Word Processor", describing a pencil's features and
with a regular yellow pencil attached. It also had several other models
of different lengths or with 2 sharp ends or 2 erasers. I have it
hanging by my computer now.

Julia in MN

--
This message has been scanned for viruses by Norton Anti-Virus

http://webpages.charter.net/jaccola/

Asked DH and his response to your "little words and short sentences"
request was "At the bottom it is all ones and zeros." followed by a long
contemplative silence and:
"Digital converts everything into whole numbers and works with those
numbers. Think about buying binding by the package,compared to buying
fabric. You can't buy half a package of binding but you can buy half a
yard, or other fractions of a yard of fabric.
Binding by the package is digital, fabric by the fractional yard is analog.
If you want more detailed info, I or a lot of other people, can tell you
far more than any reasonable human being would ever want to know about
it."

Not sure if that exactly answers your question. G It does have to do
with converting the numbers that the information is translated to into
ones and zeros in some manner...... lots of technical stuff....

Pati, in Phx
http://community.webshots.com/user/PatiCooks



Polly Esther wrote:
Last year I learned bling and blog with your help. This week I've
discovered skew. For reasons totally obscure to my old brain, 'skew' is
what you want when you're trying to figure out how to reduce or make
smaller. At least that's how Windows, in its infinite wisdom, uses the
word.
Now. In little words and short sentences, could you please explain the
word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think it all started when clock
faces began showing funny looking numbers. Lately it seems that everything
is digital and I have no clue what they're meaning. I don't need to take
anything apart and examine how it works, I just need a very simple
understanding of the word. Anyone? Polly [ p.s. I'm pleased to note
that SpellCheck denies the existence of bling and blog; at least I'm ahead
of it.]

Val, about the people who built "those machines" with all the thimbles
full of "donuts on sticks"..... both my uncle and my grandmother had
something to do with the early machines, perhaps my aunt too. G We
have never been exactly sure of what, but after the war they were able
to tell others that they had been working on stuff that was partly
explained in the newspapers. G (Both aunt and uncle were
physicists....... Granddad also worked in "secret" stuff down at Fort
Huachuca in southern Arizona for many years until shortly before he died
in the '70s.)

Pati, in Phx
http://community.webshots.com/user/PatiCooks



Val wrote:

It's simple to understand, it maybe isn't to explain......

Gather 'round boys and girls and listen to the OLLLLLDDDD computer
programmer who actually programmed in binary......we'll get back to that.
This will be explained and then gradually and hopefully understood in much
the same way that little hand held game works, the one where the BBs roll
around until they all fall into the little holes......there maybe some BBs
rolling around loose from time to time but hopefully they will all be snug
in the little holes at the end of this explanation.

In this case digit means number, not finger or toe.

Digital clocks came by their name because the actual numbers (digits)
flipped as time marched on, not complicated, kind of fun, no big and little
hands, hence an entire generation that has little or no concept of clockwise
or counter clockwise......see there Polly, you're already smarter than a
fifth grader!! These clocks were not computers, they were just called
digital because of the numbers and it sounded more impressively scientific
(and expensive) than "flippin' clock".

Now to why the "digital" with computer stuff. For a simple visual aid we
will all hold our a chopstick and put it through the holes of two donuts.
Hold the chopstick straight up, tilt the bottom donut like this \ , the one
above like this / . The one like this \ has a positive electrical charge,
we give it the #1 to use when writing out actual code humans can read (once,
long ago there WERE actual humans who DID read this code like you are
reading this sentence, I was one of them; very skeerrry)....the other like
this / has a negative charge, we give that the #0.....two numbers = bi-nary
code, that is what the computer reads, negative is OFF = #0, positive is ON
= #1. An electronic computer *anything* is just an electro magnet; same
thing that picks up squashed cars in the wrecking yard but has a bit more
finesse in the actual structure. No electrical impulse, the computer doesn't
work....dead batteries, your camera or iPod doesn't work. The old computers
I worked with actually had these donuts on wires finer than human hair and a
few thousand donuts would fit in a thimble and I have NO idea who built
these machines, they were obviously even less sane than
programmers.....bazillions of little donuts and you could hear them clicking
as they flipped back and forth with the negative and positive charges
pulsing in the machine. One donut is a BIT....8 donuts are a BYTE, half a
byte is four donuts and it's called a NIBBLE, aint that cute!..(there's a
ninth donut in there but you don't need to know about parity bits. *see foot
note if you are so inclined). in 8 bit code called octal (8) you can count
the numbers (donuts) with the potato song.......one potato, two potato,
three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE......'more'
is zero, a place holder ....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,0......same as zero is a place
holder in counting in decimal.....that's 1234567890. 10 is one ten and no
ones; 20 is 2 tens, the zero is a place holder (no ones) until you add
three....2 tens and 3 ones...23!! and so on.

A computer only knows negative and positive, it reads and spits out that
binary code and then it's translated with other coding programs to be more
advanced and easier to read and write so us regular human people can
understand what the machine is telling us. This is why power fluctuations
and not fully charged batteries can screw up what your computer or camera is
doing or it doesn't do anything at all...........sort of like very low or
high blood sugar in people, things start to malfunction. Also why you keep
magnets away from the working guts of a computer. They are not as sensitive
now as they once were.....we had a computer crash because the maintenance
man had a magnetized switch on his flashlight in his pocket and he walked
through the mainframe computer room......that doesn't happen anymore.

A digital picture is comprised of pixels, these pixels are actually hunks of
binary coding that "codes the picture you take" and spits it out all
translated in colors using each individual pixel. The programming arranges
all the pixels in the right order and you have a PICTURE the human eye can
"read" or see. If you have the right equipment, which you most likely don't,
NOR do you need, you can keep enlarging a digital camera's picture until all
you have are solid colored squares, and if you enlarge it even more, pretty
soon these squares will be lots of squares inside squares that are all black
and white (even on color pictures).....black-white, on-off,
negative-positive, 0-1...it's a computer DIGITAL code! How 'bout that! But
since your camera reads and compresses (translates) this code you not only
have colored squares, you have an arrangement of colored squares that are
translated and now MEAN something to the human eye. Those old donuts have
been replaced by transistors and transponders and trans atlantics and maybe
trans fats and all kinds of fancy teeny little trans things that do all this
work in nano seconds, faster than the blink of an eye.....even faster than a
3 year old!

Digital music is the same but translates digital code to tones, then to
notes and then to music with mixing and tracks and tweaking all by digital
programming code. The computer (iPod or whatever) reads the digital
(*numbers* in the machine language) code written to the disc and then sends
it on so humans ears hear music from the speakers.

What it boils down to is that the absolute, most basic computer language is
based on two numbers (digits) zero and one that makes all electronic
computer everythings work. An abacus is a computer too, but it's not
electronic. All a computer does is calculate these series of numbers
(digits) to a *digital* translation so it's something human type people can
understand; like come up with a balance on your checkbook (that may be a
poor example), a picture in your camera, words on your monitor and music
from electronic speakers (you do not hear your disc, you hear the digital
translation of the code on the disc thru your speakers, your quilt programs
and so on and so on.

Digital just means that you have an electronic computer *something* that
uses a low level basic machine language code which is comprised of numbers
that were assigned to identify electrical impulses to become more
complicated codes to calculate, which is now practically synonymous with
create.....when referring to a lot of digital stuff.

Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

Oh, for the *footnote on parity bits. 2001: Space Odyssey, about the
computer named HAL that began trying to take over.....Hexadecimal is (16
bit) machine language ( 0123456789ABCDEF) all bytes have a parity bit (the
extra one that nobody counts or assigns a name/number to) but if it isn't in
sync with the rest, the hex code is really screwed up. IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!" We were employed with Sperry
Univac (corporate rivals)......we were called nerds then, a geek was
something different all together. This IBM joke has been denied by Clarke
and Kubrick, that it was NOT a slam at IBM.........however, Sperry Rand
subsidiaries did a great deal of financing for Kubrick's projects so WE knew
better .............and then I became a heavy construction truck driver. The
End

011101100100000101001100
Val

"Tia Mary" wrote in message
...
Val, did I get it right?? Does the word snipped = 1010010 in binary? I
gotta tell you -- I sat here and wrote down the alphabet with 8 letters to
a row and then put 1 or 0 above the columns so I could figure
that one silly word out -- LOLOL!

'snipped' in binary is
01010011010011100100100101010000010100000100010101 000100

each letter or character is a byte (8 bits) The mathematical calculations of
combination of 1s and 0s are endless. Unfortunately it doesn't work like the
secret decoder ring I am giving you an A+ and 5 gold stars for your
ingenuity and creativity in trying to figure out the code......and now you
know why all those new coding languages were and created so you could let
the computer do the calculations.....after all, it IS just a calculating
machine LOL

he just got that part and started laughing like a person possessed. He
plans on sharing the story with all the other nerds he works with --
LOLOL!

I'm glad he enjoyed that....I'm surprised there are people still around who
remember Space Odyssey!

Val

Thanks for asking this question Polly, now I'm feeling totally brain
dead!!
Val lost me somewhere around one donut being a bit. 8 a byte hmmm? or
was that 4 no that was a nibble.
wish I had some in the pantry could do with one with a cup of hot
chocolate to sooth my brain.
But then just think of all the trans fats in the donuts. Definitely
not good for anyone.
And as for BBs , well has anyone stood on these little blighters in
bare feet? Well I have, curtoesy of DS and his BB gun. It hurts...
just like my brain so please excuse all spelling errors.

MY VAL but you're brainy!! Very impressive. You couldn't send some
cells digitally to me? Thanks for the explanation anyway. I think I
'sort' of understand now the difference between analog and digital,
just don't ask me to explain it back please. I'll copy and send your
binary message to his email box for him to ponder later.

Elly

"Val" wrote:
"Polly Esther" wrote in message

...

could you please explain the word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think
it all started when clock faces began showing funny looking numbers.
Lately it seems that everything is digital and I have no clue what they're
meaning. I just need a very simple understanding of the word. Anyone?
Polly

It's simple to understand, it maybe isn't to explain......

Gather 'round boys and girls and listen to the OLLLLLDDDD computer
programmer who actually programmed in binary......we'll get back to that.
This will be explained and then gradually and hopefully understood in much
the same way that little hand held game works, the one where the BBs roll
around until they all fall into the little holes......there maybe some BBs
rolling around loose from time to time but hopefully they will all be snug
in the little holes at the end of this explanation.

In this case digit means number, not finger or toe.

Digital clocks came by their name because the actual numbers (digits)
flipped as time marched on, not complicated, kind of fun, no big and little
hands, hence an entire generation that has little or no concept of clockwise
or counter clockwise......see there Polly, you're already smarter than a
fifth grader!! These clocks were not computers, they were just called
digital because of the numbers and it sounded more impressively scientific
(and expensive) than "flippin' clock".

Now to why the "digital" with computer stuff. For a simple visual aid we
will all hold our a chopstick and put it through the holes of two donuts.
Hold the chopstick straight up, tilt the bottom donut like this \ , the one
above like this / . The one like this \ has a positive electrical charge,
we give it the #1 to use when writing out actual code humans can read (once,
long ago there WERE actual humans who DID read this code like you are
reading this sentence, I was one of them; very skeerrry)....the other like
this / has a negative charge, we give that the #0.....two numbers = bi-nary
code, that is what the computer reads, negative is OFF = #0, positive is ON
= #1. An electronic computer *anything* is just an electro magnet; same
thing that picks up squashed cars in the wrecking yard but has a bit more
finesse in the actual structure. No electrical impulse, the computer doesn't
work....dead batteries, your camera or iPod doesn't work. The old computers
I worked with actually had these donuts on wires finer than human hair and a
few thousand donuts would fit in a thimble and I have NO idea who built
these machines, they were obviously even less sane than
programmers.....bazillions of little donuts and you could hear them clicking
as they flipped back and forth with the negative and positive charges
pulsing in the machine. One donut is a BIT....8 donuts are a BYTE, half a
byte is four donuts and it's called a NIBBLE, aint that cute!..(there's a
ninth donut in there but you don't need to know about parity bits. *see foot
note if you are so inclined). in 8 bit code called octal (8) you can count
the numbers (donuts) with the potato song.......one potato, two potato,
three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE......'more'
is zero, a place holder ....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,0......same as zero is a place
holder in counting in decimal.....that's 1234567890. 10 is one ten and no
ones; 20 is 2 tens, the zero is a place holder (no ones) until you add
three....2 tens and 3 ones...23!! and so on.

A computer only knows negative and positive, it reads and spits out that
binary code and then it's translated with other coding programs to be more
advanced and easier to read and write so us regular human people can
understand what the machine is telling us. This is why power fluctuations
and not fully charged batteries can screw up what your computer or camera is
doing or it doesn't do anything at all...........sort of like very low or
high blood sugar in people, things start to malfunction. Also why you keep
magnets away from the working guts of a computer. They are not as sensitive
now as they once were.....we had a computer crash because the maintenance
man had a magnetized switch on his flashlight in his pocket and he walked
through the mainframe computer room......that doesn't happen anymore.

A digital picture is comprised of pixels, these pixels are actually hunks of
binary coding that "codes the picture you take" and spits it out all
translated in colors using each individual pixel. The programming arranges
all the pixels in the right order and you have a PICTURE the human eye can
"read" or see. If you have the right equipment, which you most likely don't,
NOR do you need, you can keep enlarging a digital camera's picture until all
you have are solid colored squares, and if you enlarge it even more, pretty
soon these squares will be lots of squares inside squares that are all black
and white (even on color pictures).....black-white, on-off,
negative-positive, 0-1...it's a computer DIGITAL code! How 'bout that! But
since your camera reads and compresses (translates) this code you not only
have colored squares, you have an arrangement of colored squares that are
translated and now MEAN something to the human eye. Those old donuts have
been replaced by transistors and transponders and trans atlantics and maybe
trans fats and all kinds of fancy teeny little trans things that do all this
work in nano seconds, faster than the blink of an eye.....even faster than a
3 year old!

Digital music is the same but translates digital code to tones, then to
notes and then to music with mixing and tracks and tweaking all by digital
programming code. The computer (iPod or whatever) reads the digital
(*numbers* in the machine language) code written to the disc and then sends
it on so humans ears hear music from the speakers.

What it boils down to is that the absolute, most basic computer language is
based on two numbers (digits) zero and one that makes all electronic
computer everythings work. An abacus is a computer too, but it's not
electronic. All a computer does is calculate these series of numbers
(digits) to a *digital* translation so it's something human type people can
understand; like come up with a balance on your checkbook (that may be a
poor example), a picture in your camera, words on your monitor and music
from electronic speakers (you do not hear your disc, you hear the digital
translation of the code on the disc thru your speakers, your quilt programs
and so on and so on.

Digital just means that you have an electronic computer *something* that
uses a low level basic machine language code which is comprised of numbers
that were assigned to identify electrical impulses to become more
complicated codes to calculate, which is now practically synonymous with
create.....when referring to a lot of digital stuff.

Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

Oh, for the *footnote on parity bits. 2001: Space Odyssey, about the
computer named HAL that began trying to take over.....Hexadecimal is (16
bit) machine language ( 0123456789ABCDEF) all bytes have a parity bit (the
extra one that nobody counts or assigns a name/number to) but if it isn't in
sync with the rest, the hex code is really screwed up. IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!" We were employed with Sperry
Univac (corporate rivals)......we were called nerds then, a geek was
something different all together. This IBM joke has been denied by Clarke
and Kubrick, that it was NOT a slam at IBM.........however, Sperry Rand
subsidiaries did a great deal of financing for Kubrick's projects so WE knew
better .............and then I became a heavy construction truck driver. The
End

011101100100000101001100
Val

Pati C. wrote:
Val, about the people who built "those machines" with all the thimbles
full of "donuts on sticks"..... both my uncle and my grandmother had
something to do with the early machines, perhaps my aunt too. G We
have never been exactly sure of what, but after the war they were able
to tell others that they had been working on stuff that was partly
explained in the newspapers. G (Both aunt and uncle were
physicists....... Granddad also worked in "secret" stuff down at Fort
Huachuca in southern Arizona for many years until shortly before he died
in the '70s.)

my grandad was also involved with one of the early machines, EDSAC 2,
he's too young to have been there right from the start, he got a
vacation job as a student working on it, which meant being right there
with a soldering iron putting the bits together. Names like his are not
recorded. The interesting thing is, that he reckons the wrong people get
credited, he has enormous respect for the guy in charge, but a lot of
people also record him as having the brains, which he definitely does to
a certain extent and having been in seminars with him when I was in my
early 20s and he's in his 90s, he's still very sharp, but my grandad
rates some of the people working under him much more highly. Great
projects don't happen without someone pulling it together so even if
this guy didn't have the biggest brain, he had the people and project
skills, they all deserve recognition!

Here's the wikipedia entry on the guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes

and some of the others
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Needham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W...r_scientist%29

Cheers
Anne

--
Cheers

Anne
http://baltimorealbum.blogspot.com/

"Ginger in CA" wrote in message
ups.com...
Back in the
late 60's when computers took up a whole room, the military tried to
recruit me since I scored so high on some tests that"normally the boys
are the only ones to understand" [their words not mine] and had to do
with computers.

Which is why I bagged the computer career. That was before EEOC. It was the
era of the Good 'ol Boys. I was the only woman programmer out of 62 people.
I was the supervising programmer of my team of 8 and we were the lead team.
I made $600.00 a month less than the lowest paid man on my team. I was paid
almost the same as the women who were key punch operators. When I requested
to be paid the same as other programming team leaders the answer
was.......but you're a woman, these men have families to support.....I was a
single mother and had a family to support as well, plus I had at least two
or more years of higher education than any of "the boys"......well, you
should get married if you can't take care of yourself and child, then you'll
probably get pregnant and you won't be able to work anymore, no raise. Back
then it was T.S. if you were a woman, not much you could do about the equal
work equal pay thing. That's when I quit and for the next 5 years went on to
kick the doors open of the Teamster's Union. "Driver" wasn't gender specific
on the pay scale.

Val