The computer thread

You are talking about the school and manufacturing plant in palm Beach gardens Florida. That is where I went to school for the 70/45 a 32 bit machine that had a E core pulsed memory for controlling the instruction code for the registers. It also was the first computer that had integrated circuit chips. They were ECL, emitter coupled logic. With switching times in the Pico seconds. Before Cmos and TTL. Equipped with 250 inch per seconds tape drives. Old School.
 
plant in palm Beach gardens Florida.

It could have been. I was in the 3 year vocational electronics program at a technical high school in 1967 to 1970. The 2nd and 3rd year teachers were always arranging field trips to various electronics places and one of those ventured north to Solitron Devices in Riviera Beach where some BIG military spec transistors were made, and an RCA computer facility somewhere near Solitron.

I remember the Solitron visit much more vividly than RCA, probably because they gave us a 5 gallon bucket full of devices that didn't pass test......I had lots of fun blowing them up in the quest for big amounts of audio power.

We visited the Control Data school in Coral Gables too since it was only a few mile drive. Their computer had small circuit boards with individual gates and flip flops made with discrete transistors.

These field trips also taught a couple of us where to dumpster dive for goodies too. Pearce Simpson imported CB radios, Juliette imported cheap Japanese electronics. We would collect an El Camino full of broken stuff from their dumpster, make one or two "good ones" from several broken ones, whatever they were, then sell the good ones to fund our hobbies, like loud guitar amps, and making the El Camino go faster.

the first computer that had integrated circuit chips. They were ECL

ECL was the "fast" stuff. The dumpster behind Coulter Diagnostics was always full of circuit boards. I used a propane torch to reclaim the chips, which were RTL and DTL logic. I designed and built a primitive digital music synthesizer in the early 70's using these chips after seeing Emerson Lake and Palmer in concert in 1971.

These chips had switching times in the 30 - 100 nanosecond range. My divider chain topped out somewhere in the 500 to 700 KHz range depending on it's mood and the ambient temperature. Like my 68HC11 boards, I could not convince myself to throw them out, so I still have them. I'm going to apply power and see if any of that 1960's vintage logic still works.
 

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Solitron Devices in Riviera Beach made the transistors used to drive the wheels on the Moon Buggy or Jeep. Yes on the Moon. I had a friend that worked there.



I see you used a lot of Vector board to build stuff too. It is too expensive to use that bread boarding technique today. Each flea clip cost about a nickel. But it is the best I ever used.
 
2 different SSD experiences -

1 - Laptop, Lenovo G580 i5 processor. Always inordinately slow to boot and slow at first time loading of programs & internet (ie cold start to browsing web circa 10 mins). Once loaded, worked as normal. No idea why, some computers seem to behave this way. Even a fresh install of windows made no difference.
Fitted an SSD and it boots & loads in seconds. SSD was installed by cloning original drive (not clean install).

2 - Buoyed up by this experience tried same on my desktop pc. This boots in a sensible time, not a problem for a session but faster boot would be beneficial eg when wanting to quickly look-up some info. SSD barely makes a difference. Longest boot delay is boot POST checks and I find there is no "quick boot" option to turn this off on my motherboard. Oh well, good job SSDs are no longer expensive.
 
I bought my SWTPC (of Tiger Amps fame) 6800 system from the Byte Shop in 1975. It was over $1K for a 922 KHz processor and 2 K of static RAM. They had an Apple I but couldn't get it working to demo. I should have bought it anyway, Apple I's today are worth big bucks.

I gave the SWTPC machine to a museum in the late 80's. It had been upgraded to a 2 MHz 6809 CPU and expanded to 256K of (paged) ram, color video and an 8 inch floppy. It took up the whole bench and dimmed the lights when you turned it on.

Apple II clones, a TRS 80, and a 5 slot IBM PC followed in time.

Several friends and I got together and started buying out failed computer shops in the late 80's. I had decided to go to college at age 37 and had a captive market for IBM PC clones.....our slogan came right off MTV....."get your memry for nothin and your chips for free."
 
Hey Folks!



I collected rare, or in one or the other way "special" PC- components for a few years. As a hobby I put then those parts together and built systems, like, lets say "the best (AMD) PC money could buy in 2002" or "fastest Socket Super Seven ever possible". I concentrated on AMD, because it would have been a field of parts much to big to handle as a hobby if I looked for every brand. Beneath building rigs I also had a special interest in CPU-coolers as most of the users which spent 2000 bucks on a CPU were to stingy to put more than 20 bucks in a good cooler.


However, the computer thing is history and I got time try something new ... DIY Audio ;). I'm still a complete newbie, but its fun, and the active speakers I built sound better than anything I ever heard. I'm hooked, I want more!


Best regards
Jochen
 

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How much VAT has to be balanced against income taxs and what services all the taxes are providing. I’d rather pay more VAT (here 5% national + 7% provincial). And i wouldn’t want to give up my medical services or nice roads.

dave

When VAT was introduced in the UK in 1973 the idea was to lower the pay as you earn tax and add a pay as you spent tax. It worked well, we all noticed a reduction in income tax.
When Canada introduced their equivalent, there was no income tax reduction, it was just a tax grab.
Canada is very highly taxed country, I can remember when my brother came out from the UK for a visit and I mentioned how much income tax I paid and he said he could not sleep at night if he had to that sort of tax.
I did not mention just how much it cost to remain comfortable in country of extreme temperatures.
Canada is a country with a very low income tax threshold, I can remember my daughter working at Radio Shack part time for minimum wages while at college and was required to pay income tax.
In Canada there were 1.1 million visits to food banks in March of 2018 alone and Dollar Stores have been the success story of recent years while up market stores have closed.
 
100% joke, read the description this time ...
"Cores: 100
Threads: 200
DDR5 RAM support: Sure, probably
Base clock: 1.4 PHz
Overclock capable, but doing so might create a small black hole inside your CPU (and void your warranty)
PCIe Lanes: 28. Oh you're really gonna use more? Please...
Socket LGA1151 compatible. We're as surprised as you are
RGB lighting capable
You can pay for more colors. People like microtransactions, right?
Also, don't de-lid these. Seriously. You'll break all the RGB
And you'll hurt our feelings
Includes a free copy of Lawbreakers"

Funny
 
My last build was a coffee lake 8700k 6 cores with 8GB DRAM.
I have it running at 5GHz.

I usually build my own pc's. This last one had a cooler in the kit which was a challenge until I realised it was two kits in one, one for Intel and one for AMD.
It eventually came together.

When installing the new parts I took the opportunity to clean out the case and the power supply. The power supply air inlet was close to getting clogged so just got to it in time.
 
SSD reliability.

A few posts ago there were some negative comments about SSD reliability. I'd like to balance that with my own experience so far.
My department has SSDs as system drives in 32 workstations that have been running for 4 years so far. We have not had a failure.
SSDs in 8 servers as mirrored system drives for a similar time. One "failed" according to the RAID controller but in the workshop it seemed good. I put it into my workstation and it has run for 2 years, therefore I think it was a parity error only.
Something I'm not proud of is that there is a "mission critical" piece of kit with a RAID 0 (striped) set of 16 SSDs:eek: It's been running for 4 years and it's been fine.
These are all enterprise drives.

Have I see a fault SSD? Yes a colleague bought in his MacPro that had a retrofitted SSD; it was dead.

I think the moral of the story is that not all SSDs are created equal.
 
I think the moral of the story is that not all SSDs are created equal.

I completely agree.
But you never really know how long it will last until it's not working anymore...

My issues with SSD's where with very early units.
And it has been shown in more in-depth reviews, that SSD's with a long hard life with a huge amount of rewrite cycles then suddenly shut off for a few weeks, sometimes never come back to life.
My use scenario exactly reflected this, sadly, the in-depth review came a year or two after my data loss...

My own moral of the story is: Have backups, distributed across several separate computers, using different PSU's, mainboards and storage technologies.