Apple-1 signed by The Woz for sale
Youtube Direktwoz, via The Verge
Demnächst zu versteigern im Auktionshaus Breker in Köln: Ein funktionierender, von Steve Wozniak signierter Apple-1. Die haben noch ganz viele andere tolle Sachen zu versteigern, klickt mal ein bisschen auf der Seite rum, tonnenweise vintage Gold.
A German auctioneer will put a working Apple-1 computer on the block later this month, and expects the handmade computer to fetch between $261,000 and $392,000 at Thursday’s exchange rate. The record price for an Apple-1 was $640,000, paid last year in an auction also run by Breker, of Cologne, Germany.
On May 25, Breker will try to sell a different Apple-1, one of only six in working condition, the auctioneer said. The Apple-1, a circuit board hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was made in 1976, and sold at the time for $666.66. About 200 units were produced, but by an estimate last year by British auction house Sotheby’s, only 50 survive.
Rare working Apple-1 computer to hit auction block this month
Rebooting the oldest working Computer
Youtube Direktklickediklackblinkblinkklong
Im National Computer Museum in Bletchley Park (da wo Turing etc.) haben sie vorgestern den ältesten Rechner der Welt nach einer dreijährigen Restaurationsphase gebootet. Und ich liebe diese Mischung aus Klickediklack, BlinkBlink und Ratterdiklonk. Wenn man bedenkt, das dieses 2,5 Tonnen schwere Monster ein paar Jahrzehnte später technisch weniger leistet, als ein KatzenGIF, wird einem ein bisschen anders. Tatsächlich dürfte sogar mein unanimiertes Logo oben mehr Speicher verbrauchen, das Teil hatte in seiner ausgebauten Version 40 Byte [8-stellige Röhrendingsbumse] Speicherplatz, mein Logo braucht als transparentes PNG 922 Byte, als GIF mit 8 Farben würde es 520 Byte verbrauchen.
In 1951 the Harwell Dekatron was one of perhaps a dozen computers in the world, and since then it has led a charmed life surviving intact while its contemporaries were recycled or destroyed. As the world’s oldest original working digital computer, it provides a wonderful contrast to our Rebuild of the wartime Colossus, the world’s first semi-programmable electronic computer.
The Harwell Dekatron computer first ran at Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment in 1951 where it automated the tedious calculations performed by talented young people using mechanical hand calculators. Designed for reliability rather than speed, it could carry on relentlessly for days at a time delivering its error-free results. It wasn’t even binary, but worked in decimal — a feature that is beautifully displayed by its flashing Dekatron valves.
NASAs computed Maps of Earth
Die NASA hat sich ‘nen neuen Supercomputer angeschafft und simuliert mit dem die Erde, heraus kommen zum Beispiel so schicke Karten wie das Ding oben, und das Teil ist kein Foto, sondern ‘ne berechnete Grafik. Whoa!
This is not a photo of the Earth from some far-flung satellite. This is the output of a computer that has been programmed to take those laws of physics and apply them to the Earth. It has data about sunlight hitting the Earth (which includes variations for season); it knows about the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and how the air’s temperature changes with latitude, longitude, and height; it can calculate how much water evaporates and where it rains or snows out; it accounts for fires, dust, the Earth’s rotation, the local geography, and even humanity’s effect on the environment.
And when it’s done, it can show us what the Earth looks like under various conditions. In this case, the blue swirls over the oceans trace sea salt; green is smoke from forest fires, white is sulfate particles (emitted from volcanoes and the burning of fossil fuels), and reddish-orange is dust blown about.
Planet in a Bottle: NASA creates computer model of dust storms, forest fires, and sea salt.
Cray Supercomputer Brochures from the 80s
Apropos Supercomputer: Ich hab’ neulich eine ganze Reihe (leider nicht sehr hoch aufgelöster) PDFs von alten Marketing-Broschüren von Rechner-Buden aus den 60ern bis in die 80er Jahre aufgetrieben, da ist von Apple bis Xerox alles dabei und wäre ich noch opportunistischer, als ich ohnehin schon bin, würde ich jetzt die 1984er Macintosh Sales Broschüre posten. Aber die bringe ich irgendwann, wenn das garantiert kein Schwein interessiert, weil that’s me.
Ich hab’ jedenfalls mal die Broschüren zu den Cray Supercomputern genommen, hab’ die alle als JPGs gerendert und die interessantesten Seiten rausgesucht und bei Flickr hochgeladen: Cray Supercomputer Brochures, meine Favorites davon nach dem Klick.
Raspberry Pi Supercomputer
Letztes Jahr hatte ich über den Mini-Rechner Raspberry Pi gebloggt, einem Single-Platinen-Rechner, mit dem jetzt schon drölf Leute hundert seltsame Sachen machen. Zum Beispiel einen Kindle Terminal Hack oder eben: Ein Supercomputer aus 64 parallelgeschalteten RasPis. Hier ein Tutorial zum Selbermachen (64 RaspberryPis kosten ja tatsächlich grade mal 30 Pfund bzw 37 Euro x 64 = 2368 Euro für nen Supercomputer… ein echtes Schnäppchen!), hier die PM der Uni Southampton.
Das Gehäuse des Raspberry Pi-Supercomputers ist natürlich aus Lego und Hackaday haben ausgerechnet, wieviele RaspberryPis man parallel schalten muss, um auf die Top500-Liste der Supercomputer zu kommen: „If you’re wondering what it would take to get a Raspberry Pi supercomputer into the TOP500 list of supercomputers, a bit of back-of-the-envelope computation given the Raspi’s performance and the fact the 500th fastest computer can crank out about 60 TeraFLOPS/s, we’ll estimate about 1.4 Million Raspis would be needed. At least it’s a start.“
Russian Apple Museum
Alex Nasedkin hat auf Livejournal tausend Bilder aus einem Apple Museum in Moskau gepostet. Alle Rechner laufen noch, das älteste Stück ist der Apple II. Ich hab irgendwo beim Macintosh Quadra mit Apple Hardware angefangen, System 7.6 damals, irgendwann vor 16 Jahren. Jeez. Hier die Google-Übersetzung zur ausgestellten Hardware:
A. The oldest one available at the museum – Apple II in 1977. Processor 1 MHz, 4K of RAM, OS, Apple DOS. That’s modestly in these times. The system loaded with a cassette recorder. As you can imagine, this was even before the Apple I, however, it is a fossil, which is now the day the fire will not find. 2. Slightly improved version. 3. Olden Jobs always said that the computer should be beautiful and perfect both outside and inside. 4. 5. While images can be entered with a graphics tablet. 6. The next milestone was the emergence of Macintosh. 7. Subsequent modifications. 8. 9. Computer Lisa. At that point, Apple is actually divided into two camps – Lisa and Macintosh. This is Lisa in his time was worth about $ 10,000, and therefore never got popular. 10. Epplovskaya famous mouse.
11. Apple IIc – hospitality computer and monitor. Left the phone, acting as a modem. 12. 13. Drives. And at the bottom of the left joystick. 14. “The printer.” 15. 16. 17. Macintosh in the left vertical monitor – especially for the publishing industry. Who else would think of this before? 18. 19. Server “Quadra.” 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. And here is the first laptop. 25. Then they called the PowerBook. 26. Data for the 90 very steep. 27. 28. By the end of the millennium there were Aybuki – the quintessence of “apple” design. 29. 30. That’s the first desktop IMac 1998. Available in several colors. Plague, and more! 31. Fashion for transparent. 32. With the advent of the era of zero-LCDs. 33. The word “Macintosh” was reduced to the current “Mac”. 34. The famous “lamp”, remember? 35. Distant precursors of iPhones and aypadov. 36. “Sea” netbook. 37. There was a time, Apple was trying to produce even tsifromylnitsy. 38. The museum also provides software different times. 39. As well as books on PC-Related topics. 40. And such fun bags.
Marvel and Star Wars Computer-Books
Paxton Holley hat ein Flickr-Set mit Scans aus dem Marvel Superheroes Computer Fun Book Two von 1984 und dem Star Wars Questions and Answers about Computers von 1983 online gestellt. Ein paar der Seiten aus beiden Büchern nach dem Klick. (via The Beat)
Googles artificial Brain teaches itself how to find Cats on the Web
Google X, das experimentelle Labor, in dem sie die Google Brillen und die Robo-Autos entwickeln, hat ein neuronales Netz aus 16.000 Prozessoren aufgebaut und das Ding mit 10 Millionen zufälligen Thumbnails aus Youtube-Videos gefüttert. Dieses Netz hat daraus das Konzept „Katze“ entwickelt, völlig autonom und ohne Anleitung von außen: Googles Hirnsimulation hat gelernt, was eine Katze ist. Ich meine, da hat man ein künstliches Hirn und schmeisst es zu mit Daten und was macht es? Katzen!
To find them, the Google research team, lead by the Stanford University computer scientist Andrew Y. Ng and the Google fellow Jeff Dean, used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections. They then fed it random thumbnails of images, one each extracted from 10 million YouTube videos.
The videos were selected randomly and that in itself is an interesting comment on what interests humans in the Internet age. However, the research is also striking. That is because the software-based neural network created by the researchers appeared to closely mirror theories developed by biologists that suggest individual neurons are trained inside the brain to detect significant objects. […]
“We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat,’ ” said Dr. Dean, who originally helped Google design the software that lets it easily break programs into many tasks that can be computed simultaneously. “It basically invented the concept of a cat. We probably have other ones that are side views of cats.”
Happy 100th, Alan Turing!
Alan Turing, der wahrscheinlich wichtigste Kryptograph, Mathematiker und Informatiker, Erschaffer des Turing Tests zum Nachweis künstlicher Intelligenz und der nach ihm benannten Maschine, Knacker des Enigma-Codes, mit dem die Nazis im zweiten Weltkrieg ihre Botschaften verschlüsselten und nicht zuletzt vom Staat gemobbter und in den Selbstmord getriebener Homosexueller. Turing gilt als Vater der Informatik, der Robotik und der künstlichen Intelligenz. Tragische, historisch extrem wichtige Figur, nicht nur in Hinblick auf die Entwicklung des Computers.
Google.com hat heute ein Doodle in Form eines Turing-Machine-IQ-Tests, dieses Video hier erklärt, wie’s funktioniert:
Mehr:
The Atlantic: What Happens When We Turn the World’s Most Famous Robot Test on Ourselves?: „For years the Turing Test has been used to compare humans with computers. Now sociologists are using it to compare humans with each other.“
Wired: The Rich Legacy of Alan Turing: „Alan Turing achieved more in the space of a few decades than anyone could hope to achieve in a lifetime. His ability to imagine the unimaginable and put these lofty theories down on paper, and then into practice, show a highly disciplined character capable of becoming an expert in pretty much anything he had an interest in. Turing went from drawing up a basic model for all computers to breaking down the constructs of complex chemical reactions with enviable ease.“
Economist: The Science Museum’s Alan Turing exhibition – A beautiful mind: „This year marks the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and one of the many tributes is a new exhibition at Britain’s Science Museum. Unlike other Turing tributes, which have tended to focus on one aspect of his work, the Science Museum aims to give a flavour of Turing the individual, and thus the exhibition mixes illustrations of the importance of his academic achievements with exhibits from the personal life of the man himself.“
Die BBC hat eine siebenteilige Artikelserie: Alan Turing: why the tech world’s hero should be a household name, The codebreaker who saved ‘millions of lives’, Is he really the father of computing?, The experiment that shaped artificial intelligence, Gay codebreaker’s defiance keeps memory alive, Centenary of the birth of WWII code breaker Alan Turing
ZDNet: Alan Turing: The computing pioneer’s life and works, in photos
CPU-Quartett
Ein CPU-Quartett. AMD vs G4 vs Intel, drei Millionen Megahertz sticht. WANT!
Go head to head in an epic battle of CPUs. 30 CPUs from the last forty years have been picked for their contribution to computer history. The CPUs that we chose for Volume 1.0 had the greatest impact on the desktop history.
CPU Wars (via Boing Boing)
Xerox Alto Commercial, 1972
(YT Direktxerox, via Fanboy)
Ein Commercial für den 1972er Alto-Rechner aus dem Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, dem ersten Rechner mit GUI (Graphical User Interface). Steve Jobs lizensierte Jahre später die Rechte an der GUI-Technologie und entwickelte den Apple Lisa. Rest is History.
In this short one-minute commercial, Xerox introduces its vision for the office of the future. Years ahead of its time, the 1972 Xerox Alto featured Ethernet networking, a full page display, a mouse, laser printing, e-mail, and a windows-based user interface. Although it’s high price limited sales, the Alto was a groundbreaking invention and the inspiration for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Computers in Movies
Starring the Computer, eine Website über Rechner in Filmen. Bild oben: „MacGyver – Season 1, Episode 15 “The Enemy Within” (1986): MacGyver analyses a mysterious material removed from the arteries of a heart attack victim using his Commodore 64.“ (via MeFi)
2012: The Alan Turing Year
Am 23. Juni würde Alan Turing 100 Jahre alt, weshalb man 2012 kurzerhand zum Alan Turing-Jahr ausgerufen hat. Alan Turing war einer der frühesten Entwickler von Künstlicher Intelligenz und hat den Turing-Test erfunden, von Wikipedia:
In 1948, Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. In 1952, lacking a computer powerful enough to execute the program, Turing played a game in which he simulated the computer, taking about half an hour per move. The game was recorded. The program lost to Turing’s colleague Alick Glennie, although it is said that it won a game against Champernowne’s wife.
His Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative and lasting contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence, which continues after more than half a century.
Hier die Website zum ATY, das Blog The Turing Centenary hält auf dem laufenden, was so passiert. Hier die ATY-Website der Gesellschaft für Informatik mit einer Übersicht der Veranstaltungen in Deutschland.
Schizophrenic Computer-Networks
Superinteressantes Experiment an den Unis in Austin, Texas und Yale. Dort haben Forscher Netzwerke, die normalerweise Gehirnfunktionen abbilden und Sprachen lernen, mit Informationen und Storys bombardiert, woraufhin diese als Ergebnis Symptome von Schizophrenie zeigten. Von PopSci: „Researchers testing mental illness figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer, causing it to place itself at the center of crazy delusions, such as claiming responsibility for a terrorist bombing. The results bolster a hypothesis that claims faulty information processing can lead to schizophrenic symptoms.“
Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found. The researchers used a virtual computer model, or “neural network,” to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. […]
“The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance — the salience — of experience,” says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. “When there’s too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn’t be learning from.” The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. […]
“It’s an important mechanism to be able to ignore things,” says Grasemann. “What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia.” After being re-trained with the elevated learning rate, DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall. In one answer, for instance, DISCERN claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
Scientists afflict computers with schizophrenia to better understand the human brain (via /.)
Supercomputer Watson vs Humans Round 1 (UPDATE: Round 2 online)
(Youtube Direktwatson, via Geekosystem)
[update] Video zu Tag 2 nach dem Klick.
Gestern ging die erste Runde im Jeopardy!-Kampf von IBMs Supercomputer gegen die Menschheit in die erste Runde. Hatte er in einer Aufwärm-Folge noch haushoch gewonnen, stand es gestern beim Ende der Sendung unentschieden zwischen Watson und Brad Rutter, die beide bei 5000$ standen. Ken Jennings landete relativ abgeschlagen bei 2000$.
Die Folge ist komplett bei Youtube und es ist superfaszinierend zu sehen, wo die zwar fantastische und erstaunlich gut funktionierende Technologie von Watsons Spracherkennung ihre Schwierigkeiten hat, Snip von Geekosystem:
Wordplay, partly. In response to the clue, “Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated the same year,” Watson answered fairly confidently with “chic.” (The correct answer was “class.”)
And then, there were the times when Watson’s lack of humanity caused it to make mistakes that the worst human Jeopardy! bungler wouldn’t: One particularly odd exchange happened when Ken Jennings incorrectly answered a decades question with the ’20s, and Watson immediately followed by responding, “What are the 1920s.” Trebek, with exasperation: “No, Ken said that.”
Dennoch: Genau diese kleinen Fehler erinnern einen daran, dass das hier ein echtes Rechnersystem mit Spracherkennung ist und kein Mann in einem Stahlkasten mit Wikipedia und Internet. Die zweite von drei Runden folgt heute abend (bei uns also morgen früh irgendwann), ich halt’ Euch auf dem Laufenden. Zweiter Clip der Sendung und ein Video über die Aktion von PBS nach dem Klick.
