Another take on the Original Enterprise...

^^ Boy, is THAT an eye opener.

 

^^^
My favorite part is the big ol' ship's steering wheel! I'm kinda disappointed that my actual home computer doesn't have one. Also, I would like a huge bank of dials and levers. If this contraption doesn't scream mad scientist I'm not sure what does!

--Alex

P.S. What the heck is Fortran language? I guess I'll have to look that one up.

 

It's a FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!

 

^^^
HA!

That's great too. So the ship's wheel was ACTUALLY A SHIP'S WHEEL! Hilarious!

So I looked up Fortran language. Fascinating reading. It also debunks the above picture as a fraud since the caption implies the article was from 1954 but the first Fortran manual was printed in 1956. though the idea was being worked on as early as 1953. So ... whatever. I guess.

--Alex

 

Fake or not, it'd make an outstanding case mod.

 

Speaking of case-mods... since I can't do "Enterprise" yet, I thought I'd share where things stand.

First, here's my current "main computer" setup. This is a fully-silent system... no fans, isolated drive noise, all water-cooled... barely detectable. But that means it's hard to work on (even with quick-release water lines, so I don't have to drain the entire system every time, it's still a hassle!). It also has the advantage of keeping me from spending too much money on new toys all the time.

Shot with EX-S12 at 2009-09-13

Now, the system I'm working on is MOSTLY ready now... I've got all the main parts up and together. This is going to go into that case, and most of the peripherals stick around. Meanwhile, I'm going to migrate the motherboard, CPU, memory, and a few other components to a "home theater PC" I'm putting together. In order to work on this easily, I haven't implemented the water-cooling yet, so it's definitely audible. I've got a "special case" to do this sort of work on... a Danger Den "Torture Rack," which is really an open-air, acrylic rack (I can't even really call it a "case") for all your main components. You see it here, on another desk elsewhere in my home.

Shot with EX-S12 at 2009-09-13

It's working nicely so far, but I'm still waiting on the cooling block for my memory (12GB of Dominator memory with a water block soon to be mounted) and so far I haven't been able to make the "swap out" thing with OS installations work... it's too different... so I'm afraid I may have to do a clean install (which will delay things quite a bit, dammit!) You'd think that you could swap out motherboards without requiring a full OS reinstallation, but that's never yet proven to be the case. I still keep hoping, though...

Anyway... that's the status. No new work on the ship, but the drydock is coming together.

 

I think back to th early 1990's when I was six and my family got it's first computer, I believe this was the
printer.



When my father used it we sometimes left the house !

 

What a mighty computer you have.

 

Nice setup, Cary! Keep us posted as you work on it. 12GB of RAM ... my god, that's heroic! How much power do you expect the new system will pull? And I love the LCD monitor which is too big to fit back in your display nook! I have the same problem putting a flatscreen TV into an existing entertainment center.

But ... where's the ship's wheel? Every good computer needs a ship's wheel.

 

Oh, good grief. I had to take a class in Fortran in 1992! I had to take that class as a prerequisite for my engineering courses, and was rather annoyed that it was no longer required (basically obsolete) the very next year.

 

My Freshman Engineering Fundamentals class had to learn Fortran 77 (which they had been using for YEARS). The next year they learned Fortran 90. Then they switched to C/C++. For some insane reason, I think they are using Java now

 

Well... my first experience with programming was "TI BASIC," then "TI EXTENDED BASIC." (Actually, the TI-99/4A was a pretty good computer if you had all the parts, and not just the "base console" - which had no directly cpu-addressable memory in it!)

But then I made the move to REAL power... and kids, remember this... "Real Men Program in Assembly."

The next year, in college, we got to use punch cards. Then we moved up to Fortran 77. Actually, I hated Fortan, but only because you'd never know if you'd made a mistaken until after you'd compiled the whole thing...

I grew up without very much money... the TI-99/4A was a HUGE expenditure for my family. But using it, learning the "inner workings" (down to what happens when you flip a particular bit in a particular register) and learning to work around the limitations... was central to my learning everything "techy" since then.

Kids these days and their high-level-languages...

(Seriously... an engineering program using JAVA?!?!?)

 

Now THIS screams "mad scientist!"

 

And we Assembly Programmers also drive Stick Shifts.

To be fair, it was the entry level class that ALL engineering students took. Many of whom would never program anything ever again - but we also hit on mechanical principles I never touched again. I don't really know why they were still grouping Aerospace, Ocean, Civil, Electrical, Computer, Environmental, Chemical, Industrial Systems, Materials, and Mechanical Engineers into the same intro classes with Computer Scientists. Yes, they are all technical fields, but CpE's and ChE's have very little in common. So too CE's and CS's.

You don't know computing until you have built an ALU out of TTL chips, and programmed it with machine code; then gone on to build an entire computer around it, and written the BIOS for it and built an OS to run on it.

Just because the "kids" I was dealing with a decade ago got lost when I called up a command prompt doesn't mean they are clueless with computers, right???

 

I don't mind using higher-level languages. My later engineering courses (especially the aerodynamics and stability & controls classes) relied heavily on programming through Excel and Matlab. But I wouldn't trust Java any further than I could throw it. (Wait. That saying doesn't work well here, does it? )

 

Hey, just ask them what the "Save" icon is a picture of!

 

The kids at the HS where I work have just recently discovered "net send" lol

 

Couple of years ago at a summer family party, a cousin gave the young kids a handful of water balloons. They stood there for a few minutes trying to work in teams stretching out the lips of the balloons while someone else poured water into them from a cup. My cousin had to come back over to the group and show them how to put the balloon over the end of the garden hose to fill it up.

So she says to them "I can't believe you guys don't know how to fill up a water balloon. How many of you know how to sign on to AOL?"

"I do!" "I do!" "I do!" "I do!" "I do!" "I do!"