DIY is dying

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I've also heard that Anne Hathaway is a physics geek. Just watched "Interstellar" for the third time.
Her new husband is one lucky guy!

I was high (my mind was wide open to scenaristic approximations and enormous errors) but i'd been constrained to an emergency land off when Anne Hathaway ran at full speed in water at the knee level with a 70kgs space suit on a high gravity planet after two years without walking in a zero gravity spaceship... i'm very lucky and happy to have flew so much time !
 
I was high (my mind was wide open to scenaristic approximations and enormous errors) but i'd been constrained to an emergency land off when Anne Hathaway ran at full speed in water at the knee level with a 70kgs space suit on a high gravity planet after two years without walking in a zero gravity spaceship... i'm very lucky and happy to have flew so much time !

If you have the original DVD, check-the special features. I think they filmed that in Iceland, and she got got hypothermia in that scene from bad seals on her drysuit. I too, noticed how unbelievably agile they ALL were - the movie "Pandorum" was more careful about that. But the physics errors in that movie (and in "Gravity") didn't kill my buzz - I just kept having to skip back to see what I'd missed while rolling on the floor laughing.
 
2 of my own reasons to want a time machine

Or maybe you should have just confessed to using a time machine. It worked for Doc Brown in 1985, it could work for you.

I had the chance back in 1980 to buy a DeLorean from my sister's neighbor, whose wife wanted it gone because of the difficulty in keeping fingerprints off of it. A year later, I wanted to buy a BMW Izetta from a guy in Sunnyvale who had 4 or more parked in his yard. He said "No, I won't sell you one, unless you buy two - you'll need one for parts." Now, if ever there was motivation to want a time machine,......there you go.
 
It's a matter of degrees. There is a thread here where someone is building a speaker driver from scratch..........
Oh, I do build mine from scratch.
As in: starting with cold rolled steel sheet, cold rolled round bar, 3/8" to 1/4" oxy torch cut disks of steel, usually from junked ship hulls (I live in Buenos Aires old port), unmagnetized ceramic rings (I built my own magnetizer), hand wound voice coils.
I buy factory made cones, dustcaps and spiders because they are easily available and dirt cheap but if needed could make those too.

Mine on right, Celestion Greenback on left:
parlante-fahey-guitarrabajo-sonido-celestion-o-jensen-D_NQ_NP_530211-MLA20479654383_112015-F.jpg


Homemade rack cabinet, starting with raw aluminum sheet:
00709.jpg

handwound power transformer of course.
 
As amazing as that is, we weren't about buy a Sun or Spark or whatever Unix workstation to do the task. We were already too expensive with our little Apple IIe machines.
And since we didn't have your time machine in 1986, we weren't able jump over to 1999 to buy a Pentium III. Heck, even the Pentium Pro was 9 years off and out of reach of our limited time machine. 😀

Some of us just have to work with what we have. The pain still lingers, tho.

I got an Amiga 1000 in 1987 (probably the most advanced personal computer of the time). It had a (I think) 4Mhz 68000 (edit: just checked it was 7Mhz).

It wasn't long after it's release that the Genlock came out. I imagine you would have used those at some point pano? Amazing piece of kit for the time, real time video effects! They were used quite extensively by some of the Australian TV stations.

I was also going to mention Vishnu's time machine. I think 286's were the state of the art intel chip in 1987, the 386 may have just come out... the 68020 definitely was around in 1987.

Tony.
 
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Thanks, Vishnu;
For the APP NOTE
For one upmanship on computers vintage type, try Analog, Tube based KC-135 flight simulator computers from the 50's... and the classic Linc computer from Lincoln Labs of MIT, first product of DEC...
 
Analog Deices parts for use in the Current-Feedback Audio Amp

The patent has expired.

So much the better.
SSM2131 is obsolete - may be why they didn't pay to renew?

The OPA627 or 637 has lower distortion, but pricey - $22 - $30 each
AD845 next, but really, so low it's a moot point - $25 - $40 each
AD797 very low distortion as well, and only $11 each
OP97 - $4

OPA627/637 is Dielectrically-isolated FET-input
AD845 is FET input, just not Dielectrically-isolated,
and DigiKey has them on "Final Buy" status

AD797 is bipolar-input, which means higher input bias currents -
not a problem with the OP97 handlng things, but does require a
bit more tweaking.
AD797 part was used in a design for an audio oscillator with 1 ppm distortion.
Jim Williams thought that was insane, but you need that to be able to
test the OPA627 in cases where the absolute lowest distortion must
be verified - precision lab and test gear, etc.

Of course, you could just throw a 741 in there, and have it sounding like
trash...that is, when it's not oscillating...:Popworm:

...but seriously, a "modern" replacement substitute for the SSM-2131 could be
figured out; the parameter requirements are well-described in AN-211.
Since ADI bought Linear Technology, a part such as LT1007-LT1037
would seem appropriate. They are bipolar (not FET) input as well, but the input bias current is ~1/10 that of the AD797, and they're only ~ $3.50 each

I built mine with the AD845 - saved my OPA627s for line-level and instrumentation stuff, and my AD797s for - you guessed it - low-distortion
oscillators, and as the control amplifier in voltage regulators for 24-bit A-to-Ds and microphone & phono preamps. Noise so low, you could hear one electron passing wind. (I never did ask John Atwood if that's why he used that one for his website name...)
 
We lived in a shoebox.....what, you had a box? we lived in a hole in the road!....

Thanks, Vishnu;
For the APP NOTE
For one upmanship on computers vintage type, try Analog, Tube based KC-135 flight simulator computers from the 50's... and the classic Linc computer from Lincoln Labs of MIT, first product of DEC...

Analog Computers - now that's appropriate in these forums. They used them at Los Alamos to solve integral and differential equation calculations in the design of the first atomic bombs. And I think the Linc might have been the genesys for the word "Link" in Link Flight Simulators. IIRC, the first simulators used feedback servos based on tube analog computers. Yeah, I worked THERE, too, at Singer-Link, for ~2 years, on the flight simulators for the AH-64 Attack Helicopter and CH-47 'Chinook' Carrier Helicopter. We used to call them "the world's most expensive video game" because before we shipped them out to the Army, we'd have to test the electronics by hooking two of them together -$1M each of your tax dollars at work -and dogfighting them in a simulated battlefield arena run on a third computer.
...And it all comes full circle, because the databases for the scenarios were run out of Perkin-Elmer mainframes, because the original super-fast simulation computers were supposed to be from a startup called ELXSI, but they could never get the prototype to work. :headbash: And that design team :whacko: at ELXSI left to start.....NexGen Microsystems :c_flag:.
But my FIRST computer...well, in high school when everybody was going oooh over the Apple II, I was building a MITS Altair from scratch with an Intel 8008. (To go earlier than that, you'd be talking the 4004 - the 4-bit version.) Floppies? Monitor? It had toggle switches and red lights on the front panel, and if you wanted to store or retrieve a program or data, it had a messed up little kluge of an adapter that plugged into portable MONO cassette deck :wchair:
I suppose if you wanted to back further, but not as far as the abacus, you
could look at picking up a surplus ENIAC, a digital computer built from...tubes.
That's where the term 'debugging' came from, by the way...the warmth and light would attract moths, and they'd spiral in, shorting things out. When techs talked about "getting the bugs out of the system" they meant it quite literally.:Popworm:
True story....c'mon guys, that fish was ...this...:wave2:...big...
 
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...Shoebox?...You had a shoebox?...

My first attempt at programming was in 1980 on a Z80 micro-professor.
It was a Z80 based pcb with a keyboard integral to the pcb and multi 7 segment LED display.
You had to input hex codes into the keyboard then step on the address.
When finished you pressed the run button.

Keypad...you had a keypad? Hexadecimal display? Look up the Mark 8 - July 74 Radio Electronics - (8008-based) and MITS ALTAIR 8800 (8080) Jan 1975 Popular Electronics - on Google: "Mark-8 computer project ... just a detailed set of plans and a set of bare printed circuit boards. The hobbyist faced the daunting task of acquiring all of the integrated circuits and other components" and the Altair, a "box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel".

In case you never saw it, the whole "shoebox...you had a shoebox?....we lived in a hole in the road!" is from a Monte Python skit, where two guys are each trying to one-up the other's "hard childhood" stories.....

Well....it's been fun, guys, but it's Saturday night here, and I have trouble to get into....:drink::drink::drink::cheers:
 
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