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  • Of Wangs And Core Dumps

    I started learning programming on a Soviet computer called Iskra 226, a few of which were given to our after school program by the kind Navy bureaucrats. I vividly remember finding a BASIC program already stored on the hard disk that cheerfully asked a few questions about the weather and the megatonnage of a warhead and then quickly calculated the size of the epicenter, severity of fallout and whatnot. The teacher was not amused and asked me to delete the program before anyone else had a chance to see it..

    Although Iskras turned out to be less popular with other kids who preferred Soviet knockoffs of Sinclair Spectrum which had good graphics and buttloads of nice games that could be loaded from audio cassettes, I preferred the loud monochrome screened monster. You see Iscras had peripherals – a dot matrix printer that sounded like a machine gun and a humongous hard drive that sounded even louder.

    Later I learned that Iscra was a clone of a Wang 2200 computer. And even later I learned a bit more about Dr. Wang’s company. So, continuing my Computer History Through Coffee Mugs Series, I present to you a prized mug from my collection:

    As it turns out, Dr. An Wang also happens to be the inventor of magnetic core memory, a technology that always fascinated me. Here is a core memory plane from my collection:

    Core memory stores bits by sending current to donut shaped rings of ferrite. Wikipedia article explains how this works. Early core memory arrays used a small amount of larger ferrite cores. Later ones, like the one on the above picture used buttloads of tiny little cores. From what I heard, these amazing devices were assembled by third world garment workers. By hand. Under microscopes. If you have any doubt that this is true, take a look at these close-up shots that clearly show that this is done by hand:

    Jay Dubya Zee shed some light on how horrible is the job of people who assemble camouflage nets. Think about how much worse is doing something like this:

    How much ram is this you might ask? The back of the card holds a label. It says:
    Lockheed Electronics Company, Inc.
    Data Products Division
    Core Memory 8k x 18
    8200-0001
    2001002326-1A1 HK022
    7530

    These days core memory is still used in aircraft and spacecraft because it keeps the information when power is off and is supposedly less prone to radiation.

    The word wang these days mostly means “penis”, a common name of a Chinese restaurant, is used on t-shirts, as a sentence enhancer or just at random. Also, unexplicably, “wing-wang” is another name for a dollar.

    Memory dump files are called “core dumps” to this day because of core memory. Also it is common to refer to core dumps of dilithium and chockolatium.

  • Cubozoans

    “Box jellyfish, or cubozoans, are bizarre, highly poisonous predators (New Scientist, 8 November 2003, p 34). “These are fantastic creatures with 24 eyes, four parallel brains and 60 arseholes,” says Dan Nilsson, a vision expert from the University of Lund in Sweden.”

    So, cubozoans is another name for bubble-era web startups.

  • “I Dint Know Kats Were So Smart”

    Wow. This is a frickin’ Flowers for Algernon situation. Ripley the Cat has 622 Livejournal readers at this time. I have 45. Well, either the cat had intelligence enhancement or I am retarded. Or both.

    Maybe Tilde the Cat should guest-blog for a while. If she’ll refuse, I can ask Gary the Cat, my second never before mentioned in this blog cat.

  • News in Underpeople Research

    CNN : “In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells.
    …
    Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.”

    Colonel P.M.A Linebarger might have been a little bit off with predicting the timing of Underpeople creation.


    (part of the cover design for “Best of Cordwainer Smith” by Darrell Sweet)

    To quote professor Farnsworth: “You were all for preserving Hitler’s brain, but putting it inside a shark’s body – all of a sudden that’s going too far!!”

  • Michael on Used Books

    New York City is home to what is probably the biggest used book store in the world. Strand is a real New York institution. A giant two level store in a pre-war commercial building on 12th Street and Broadway always drew me in with its outdoor book carts. Every time I entered the store proper I was already burdened with a good stack of 1 dollar hardcovers and 25 cent paperbacks. Even though I was rather poor at the time, I spent a disproportionately large part of my income on books written in a language that was still new to me. But at the Strand I got a pretty good bang for my buck.

    In my many shopping sprees there I noticed an unsettling fact. I almost never went home with the books that I was planning to buy, but still my hands were crisscrossed by red marks left by super heavy plastic bags. In fact, in the area that I was most interested in, golden age sci-fi paperbacks, the Strand was strangely lacking. So when I learned about bibliofind.com, (which is a part of Amazon now) from a little ad in New York Times), I stopped going there altogether. Why waste my time in a cramped non-air-conditioned labyrinth of bookshelves blocked by frequently smelly bibliophiles and snarky Strand employees with crazy tattoos and piercings, when I could simply go online and order exactly what I wanted at similar prices? All hail long tail!

    Just a few days ago I popped up from subway near Union Square and decided to see if the siren’s song of Strand’s outside book bins would still draw me in. Next thing I knew I was inside, checking my bag in and holding a stack of weird books. Inside the changes and forgotten details overwhelmed me. Even though they were slow to get on the whole web bookselling train (to this day when I order at abebooks.com or Amazon that have thousands of vendors, I am yet to get one book from Strand), the store thrived. They opened an Annex on Fulton St, another one which I never visited at 57th st and a tiny little booth almost the size of a porta-john in front of the Pierre Hotel, right next to the train stop. Rupert Murdoch chose a good location for his apartment.

    And the original location began a slow barnsandnoblefication. No, they don’t have a cafe yet (and if they will I hope it’s going to be Joe’s and not Tarbucks). But they added 3rd floor, an elevator (so now you don’t need to walk outside into the side entrance to get to the rare editions department) and demolished the horrible little bathroom on the first floor. It was kind of weird standing where it used to be. The funny notes and cartoons were still taped to the bookshelves and columns, and the basement still had many antique pipes and old electrical cables (I noticed what I think was a cut pre-war high voltage cable the thickness of my arm in the wall). I saw – gasp – fresh cat5 runs.

    When I paid for my books and went to get my bag from bagcheck, I commented on my relief to the fact that the old duct tape encrusted boxes where not replaced. The bagcheck guy laughed and said – hey, dude, this is the Strand. We don’t replace stuff until absolutely necessary. I hope they don’t change too much, although I welcome air conditioning, the elevator and the extra floor. I need to get a new camera and go and take some pictures there before everything changes again.

    One of the books that I bough in the outside bin cracked me up because I am such an avid fan of Joel on Software:

    My wife asked – “Timesharing of what?”. He heh, back in the 70s (when I was born) time sharing was a hot buzzword. And not the real estate kind.

  • Google Maps Fun II: It’s the Templars!

    As I mentioned earlier, I spent a summer working in a summer camp at Floyd Bennett Field. The camp organizer rented huge hangars that were used for makeshift basketball and tennis courts. One of the duties that I had there was cleaning bathrooms in the hangars.

    Only many years later did I learn how important and historically interesting Floyd Bennett field was. I distinctly remember cool Art Deco aviation wings on the front of the hangars. And here’s a nice picture of none other than Howard Huges walking in front of it (very likely the very same hangar in which bathroom I was mopping up poo and pee).

    As it turns out Floyd Bennett Field used to be a small, money-loosing airport that had one big draw. It was heavily favored by aviation pioneers as a starting point for world record attempts. It was a starting point for Hughes’s famous around the world in 3 days flight, Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan’s transcontinental “wrong way” flight which is a story in itself and numerous other flights by the likes of Alexander de Seversky, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. You can find more very cool pictures of the glory years of Floyd Bennett Field here.

    Of course, not being able to compete with JFK and La Guardia, after the war Floyd Bennett Field airstrips and hangars fell into disrepair, and were used for ventures similar to that summer camp.

    Looking at google’s satellite map I found something interesting on the abandoned airfield: two Maltese Cross markings. It’s either Knighs Templar or FDNY. Maltese Cross of FDNY insignia is actually adapted from the one worn by Knights Hospitalers, some of whom served as firefighters in the crusades (Greek fire and stuff). Who knew that one of the corners of FDNY maltese cross symbolizes “Tact” and another “Explicitness”…

  • The King of the Datacenter

    Exhibit A : an extremely cool mural on the wall of a Google data center by one of their supposedly 35K a year system administrators:

    Exhibit B :
    Amdahl LVS (codename Elvis) storage unit with a very striking door design by (correct me if I am wrong) IDEO Frog Design.

    See my other posts about Amdahl : “The Legend Of How Much Crap Michael Can Buy on Ebay” and “FUD You“.

  • Architedventure or Advenitecture

    What is this?

    Right, it is the Flatiron building undergoing some renovations. The people who used protective net as an advertising board for H&M were apparently forced to remove it.

    If you read my blog (as I suspect that you really don’t), you might know that Flatiron building is very special for me. So as soon as I herd that the workers are doing demolition work and throwing pieces of deteriorating facade into a dumpster I went to investigate. Well, actually not right away, but when I got the chance, but that does not matter. The dumpster was there, filled to the brim. Surprisingly enough my haul was exactly the same as of my fellow dumpster divers:

    two pieces of facade (I think I know where they are from – the curvy thing is a part of a column and the square thing is a blocky decoration, similar to the one which helped the hero of “From Time to Time” to climb the building).

    Two bricks, with markings M& LW and Bourne. These might be modern, but looks like they were a part of the Flatiron, and that’s all that matters.

  • Every Keyboard Should Have Chrome Switches on the Top

    Here’s a keyboard that’s truer than the One True Keyboard:

  • Fun With Google Maps Part I : The Magical Lake in the Land of the Blibbet

    What’s that between buildings that look like shuriken from above? Of course it is Lake Bill. It’s not marked on the map kindly made available by Jeff Barr, but there it is in an awesome 360 degree panorama and here are some pictures of ducks and koi that live there. There’s another picture in the blog post by Adam Barr (I’ve read his book) about 10 favorite spots on MS campus. I am told that it is a prime beer drinking spot – no wonder seeing how many Barrs there are at Microsoft budum-pum.

    The origin of the naming of the lake is shrouded in mystery. I also heard that long before Bad Boy Ballmer was charging up developers by jumping on stage he was doing that by swimming across Lake Bill.

    By the way, does anyone have a video of Gates’ famous table jumping skills? Does he do that any more? Oh, and if somebody pointed me to those funny Microsoft Tech Ed videos, that would be very cool.