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#21
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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/ |
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![]() 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/ |
#23
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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/ |
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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/ |
#25
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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.] |
#26
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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 ![]() |
#27
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![]() "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 ![]() 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 |
#28
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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 ![]() |
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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/ |
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![]() "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 |
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