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SneezeOfTheDecade posted:If you don't already know about it, I have a feeling you two might enjoy this youtube channel. (Sadly, it looks like it hasn't updated in a while.) This is excellent.
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Feb 7, 2020 13:59
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Vavrek posted:Math stuff I have an Anthropology degree (lol), so I love thinking about the continuous line of technology, starting from stone tools, fire, clay pots....leading up to refined metals and basic chemistry...keep going and it's metalworking leading to more and more precise tools, with better alloys and better steel, and slowly machines and early physical computing became possible...from there it accelerates, with electronics and computing, and becomes more granular with chips making better chips, and goes far off into more theoretical technologies. Obviously math is the backbone of all this, so you see a unit like that differential equation machine and I start imagining scientists streamlining processes with it, turning out data, enacting plans and designs, but I just don't know what specifically it was used for.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:03
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LifeSunDeath posted:early physical computing became possible...from there it accelerates because the salvage from the Roswell crash made possible the quantum leap in technology from vacuum tubes and diodes to the silicon wafer transistor 
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Feb 7, 2020 14:33
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Pastry of the Year posted:because the salvage from the Roswell crash made possible the quantum leap in technology from vacuum tubes and diodes to the silicon wafer transistor Lol, imagine if they pulled some alien tech from a visitor in 1930 and it was the equivalent of an iphone 5, and apple just can't ever seem to surpass it.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:38
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LifeSunDeath posted:but I just don't know what specifically it was used for. Ah! OK, I think I misunderstood the original question. Here's my attempt at answering: I think the most useful applications are in trying to describe/model physical processes with multiple variables and those which change over time at an uneven rate, especially if you have multiple systems. In other words, where calculus is absolutely required. The examples I've seen mentioned around are of the "weight on a spring" or "projectile motion" nature. The former could describe any number of mechanical problems, like modeling behaviour of structures (e.g. bridges) or mechanical devices (e.g. car suspension). Of course the latter would be used for military purposes, namely to calculate missile trajectories (like mentioned in the Navy video upthread). Turns out YouTube has an example of an analog computer being programmed to solve the projectile motion problem. i.e. you throw an object of weight W from a height of X at an angle of Y and speed Z and want to know where it lands. I queued up the video to display the solution only (the first 15 minutes aren't all that thrilling) which is extra neat because the oscilloscope he attached as the output device literally plots the projectile trajectory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tOA8Fo6b7A&t=888s The one he's solving is kind of a Physics 101 problem, but you can imagine that adding more and more variables and changes would complicate thing real quick. I don't know if computers like these could've been used to model and prevent the conditions which led to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge going for a swim for example, but... maybe?
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Feb 7, 2020 14:47
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Trabant posted:Ah! OK, I think I misunderstood the original question. Here's my attempt at answering: Thanks, that makes sense. Reminds me, I had this in highschool (literally asked for it for xmas to stunt on this one nerd in my chemistry class who also had one), and had zero use for it. I ended up getting the same nerd to install some asteroids type game on it. Luckily I was able to sell it off in college for like 100 bux.  the keyboard and d-pad were great though, you could enter all your notes in there, and the dpad was useful for the few games.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:55
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LifeSunDeath posted:I have an Anthropology degree (lol), so I love thinking about the continuous line of technology, starting from stone tools, fire, clay pots....leading up to refined metals and basic chemistry...keep going and it's metalworking leading to more and more precise tools, with better alloys and better steel, and slowly machines and early physical computing became possible... I think it's come up in this thread before, but you might be interested in Clickspring's videos about the Antikythera Mechanism. The main series covers his efforts to reproduce the device, starting from brass stock. The companion series focuses on his speculation about the methods and tools the original makers might have used.
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Feb 7, 2020 15:04
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LifeSunDeath posted:Thanks, that makes sense. Reminds me, I had this in highschool (literally asked for it for xmas to stunt on this one nerd in my chemistry class who also had one), and had zero use for it. I ended up getting the same nerd to install some asteroids type game on it. Luckily I was able to sell it off in college for like 100 bux. These things were loving awesome! We had a bunch in our advanced maths classes in highschool. I was so jazzed when I got one that had games installed on it.
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Feb 7, 2020 15:39
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Vavrek posted:(There's boolean algebra, which is like algebra if you got rid of all the numbers except for two of them and also ignored fractions and square roots.) I feel a sudden need to work on K-maps
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Feb 7, 2020 15:40
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Nocheez posted:These things were loving awesome! We had a bunch in our advanced maths classes in highschool. I was so jazzed when I got one that had games installed on it. When I graduated these were banned on all of the AP tests
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Feb 7, 2020 16:33
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Toast Museum posted:I think it's come up in this thread before, but you might be interested in Clickspring's videos about the Antikythera Mechanism. The main series covers his efforts to reproduce the device, starting from brass stock. The companion series focuses on his speculation about the methods and tools the original makers might have used.
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Feb 7, 2020 16:38
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Plinkey posted:When I graduated these were banned on all of the AP tests Same, but they were fantastic at teaching higher level maths due to the ease of use. Just a much better calc than the TI-8x.
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Feb 7, 2020 17:16
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Goddamn I loved my TI Game Gear. Being able to do symbolic/indefinite integrals was a game changer and saved my rear end a hundred times. The exam would still require me to actually show my work, but at least I knew right away if I got the wrong answer. I still have the thing somewhere, but I'm almost certainly out of the 4 AA batteries needed to run it...
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Feb 7, 2020 17:25
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I guess basic graphic calculators have gotten advanced enough that college calculus classes don't allow them anymore. In Calculus II, my professor had a calculator section at the end. For Calculus I, III, and Differential Equations, it was all done by hand. But that usually meant it was easier. The numbers were easier to work with so you could tell if you were doing it right, so it was mostly about knowing the procedures, and not about getting fuckoff crazy numbers. The only time I really got to use my calculator with any of this stuff was in my circuits class. Even then, we didn't really do much calculus. The book would show how you do to calculus to get down to the differential equation and then you just solve a simplified version of that. I was mostly just using linear algebra and my calculators complex number functions. Calculus seems to be most useful when you're doing actual science, engineering seems to usually find a way to make it more simple so you can just get on with it. For me, Calculus didn't really seem to have a good use until I took Physics. And in a way, physics didn't make much sense until after I took calculus. Before I took calculus, physics just had these equations you have to remember and they didn't seem to have any connection. Then I realized that position, velocity, and acceleration are all just derivatives/integrals of each other. Then it all clicked. If you have starting values and an acceleration, you can figure out where something is. If you have the position equation, you can also find its velocity and acceleration at any point in time. If you have an equation that tells you the speed of an object over time, you can integrate it and it gives you the distance traveled. This stuff all seemed super advanced and impossible to understand before I learned it, but only the underlying concepts are hard to understand. Once you know what you're doing, you can do most generic calculus in your head. Mind blown.
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Feb 7, 2020 17:38
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Explosionface posted:I feel a sudden need to work on K-maps One of my favorite little moments hanging out in the electrical/computer engineering student lounge: guy comes over, is clearly bored and full of energy, chatting with a few other people. Suddenly: "Did you know a TI-89 can solve K-maps?" "What." Conversation within earshot stops as he shows where to find it in the menus. It's a built-in program that none of us knew was there. (In my case because I had a TI-83.)
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Feb 7, 2020 18:02
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I was helping my kid with quadratic functions last night and I couldn't even remember how to make a power of 2 exponent on my laptop keyboard as I tried to see Wolfram Alpha would save me from admitting I couldn't remember any of this. She then told me to just use PhotoMath, but I had already tried that and I still couldn't get a valid answer. A hardware graphing calculator would have come in handy.
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Feb 7, 2020 18:28
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You just use the carat thing 3^2
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Feb 7, 2020 18:56
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Plinkey posted:When I graduated these were banned on all of the AP tests
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Feb 7, 2020 19:46
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I haven't tried to confirm it, but I remember my AP statistics teacher telling us that, the first year the TI-83 (or maybe it was the earlier TI-81) was allowed, the exam had really not been calibrated with a calculator like that in mind, and having one basically guaranteed a top score that year.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:34
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Cojawfee posted:For me, Calculus didn't really seem to have a good use until I took Physics. And in a way, physics didn't make much sense until after I took calculus. Before I took calculus, physics just had these equations you have to remember and they didn't seem to have any connection. Then I realized that position, velocity, and acceleration are all just derivatives/integrals of each other. Then it all clicked.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:38
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Fun fact: the good TI calculators used the same Motorola 68k cpu that also powered the Sega Genesis, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and early Apple Macs. I actually had a teacher who used to work on analog computers back in the SU. According to him, those were generally more accurate then computations with 8 bit numbers and cheaper/faster then computation with larger word-sizes. That reminds me, anybody remember the octet? Back in ancient times byte referred to what is called a word these days, and was machine dependent. So telecoms and network people decided to call 8-bits an octet.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:19
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Cojawfee posted:You just use the carat thing 3^2 You got me. I ended up doing CTRL + COMMAND + SPACEBAR and then typing exponent in the search bar and I felt progressively stupider at each step. I haven't had to use a special character on a laptop since a German engineer got angry that no one used the ö in his name. VictualSquid posted:That reminds me, anybody remember the octet? Back in ancient times byte referred to what is called a word these days, and was machine dependent. So telecoms and network people decided to call 8-bits an octet. Octets are alive and will never die if you're in networking.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:30
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VictualSquid posted:Fun fact: the good TI calculators used the same Motorola 68k cpu that also powered the Sega Genesis, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and early Apple Macs. You can still buy brand-new SCADA devices (to control aspects of the electric grid, for example) that use a Moto 68k CPU.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:32
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VictualSquid posted:Fun fact: the good TI calculators used the same Motorola 68k cpu that also powered the Sega Genesis, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and early Apple Macs. The bad TI calculators used the Z80, same base as the Gameboy.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:41
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Y'all making me want to buy this shirt https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/961627-mc68000
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Feb 7, 2020 22:13
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It's still an octet in French, too - which is why WD USB disks destined for Europe are marked in both MB and MO. (Yes, megaoctets. Yes, the French are very French.) As for computer engineering, I've come to consider it most closely related to the discipline of practical engineering that lays out long automatic production lines.
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Feb 8, 2020 00:37
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Computer viking posted:It's still an octet in French, too - which is why WD USB disks destined for Europe are marked in both MB and MO. (Yes, megaoctets. Yes, the French are very French.) It's also numérique, not digital. Keeping things French, I always love to bring up the Minitel, a kind of national internet before internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g&t=9s It functioned like a kind of two-way Teletext and must have been mind-blowing back in its day. You could order train tickets, enroll into university and do your bank stuff from the comfort of your own home. (It also allowed a lot of sex stuff, proving that the French are always gonna French.)
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Feb 8, 2020 13:01
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RabbitWizard posted:So, anyone mentioned the Curta before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta If can't output 5318008 it's no use to anyone.
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Feb 8, 2020 14:35
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The Furby Gurdy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVBfF_wppWs
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Feb 8, 2020 16:31
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Vavrek posted:Computers are, uh. Computers are weird and different surprisingly non-mathy? Like, computers are built out of really complicated, continuously varying* analog electronics hardware which is all set up to produce these incredibly simple but reliable devices. One of the ways they're simple is that you don't think about a range of voltages, you just call one voltage HIGH another one LOW, and you make sure HIGH and LOW are far enough apart that the analog electronics respond very differently to each. Then you stop thinking about anything analog and just talk about HIGH and LOW and maybe call them TRUE and FALSE or 0 and 1, and you hook those devices together into a complex machine that's designed to respond in perfectly predictable ways to certain sequences of bits. "Mathiness" isn't defined by proximity to differential and integral calculus. Saying computers don't do math because you felt it wasn't very "mathy" to build one of the simplest possible pieces of binary logic is about as reasonable as saying, "oh, electrical stuff isn't hard, I put together a battery and LED once and all you need to know is V=IR. It's all just algebra, right?" Anyone with a decent bachelors-level education in computer science would instantly agree that computer science is nothing but an applied branch of some high-level theoretical math concepts. The core concepts of the field were worked out from first principles decades before anybody actually built an electronic digital computer. The electronic parts are just a highly refined, complex implementation detail that's still abstracted away when reasoning about the larger system.
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Feb 8, 2020 18:08
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It has been said that computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes. If anything, I think that overstates the link between computer science and computers. Astronomy is an observational science. It needs telescopes to gather data and hone hypotheses. Meanwhile, computer science makes less use of computers than astronomy makes use of computers.
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Feb 8, 2020 23:41
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Minidiscs are so gorgeous. That's all I wanted to say.
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Feb 9, 2020 03:55
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Unperson_47 posted:Minidiscs are so gorgeous. A good and correct post
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Feb 9, 2020 04:08
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Unperson_47 posted:Minidiscs are so gorgeous.
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Feb 9, 2020 04:09
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yeah its the coolest looking media format by far
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Feb 9, 2020 04:13
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CD singles are going to catch on any day now. EDIT: This was the first one I bought. 
Dick Trauma has a new favorite as of 04:16 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 04:14
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Code Jockey posted:A good and correct post 
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Feb 9, 2020 06:13
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Unperson_47 posted:Minidiscs are so gorgeous. The players lasted forever on a single AA battery. Using ATRAC and SonicStage was less fun.
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Feb 9, 2020 08:38
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Edit: ignore, wrong thread
Not So Fast has a new favorite as of 08:44 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 09:04
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Not So Fast posted:BBC News - Labour accuses Keir Starmer campaign team of data breach Is the membership database stored in a Microsoft Access 97 database accessed via an Active Server Pages front end running on Windows NT 4 Server hosted on a dual socket Pentium II machine? If so you posted this in the correct thread 
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Feb 9, 2020 14:24
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