Oldest Polaroids of an Apple I
Paul Terrell, Besitzer eines der ersten Computerladens überhaupt, hat jüngst auf seiner Facebook-Seite die bislang ältesten Bilder von Apple Hardware überhaupt veröffentlicht. Ein paar Polaroids der allerersten Serie des Apple I-Rechners, die Steve Jobs und The Woz eigenhändig im Laden vorbeibrachten. Rest is History: Behold, Some of the First Apple Computer Photos Ever.
Microchip-Acidbath Hardware Porn
Zeptobar ist ein Hardware-Entwicklungs aus Russland und die zeigen auf ihrer Website, wie man einen Chip mit Schwefelsäure öffnet. Dann haben sie die Innereien in riesig aufgelösten Fotos festgehalten: Hardware Porn.
Take some microchips of interest and add concentrated sulfuric acid. Container should be closed, but not airtight, so that fumes can escape (that is extremely important). Heat it to boiling temperature (300 °C). White substance at the bottom is baking soda – it’s here to neutralize accidental spills and part of fumes. After 30-40 minutes, acid “burns” plastic to carbon.
After it cools down, we can sort what is ready for next step and what needs another acid bath (thick, bulky packages usually need 2-3 rounds). If pieces of carbon stuck to the microchip itself and cannot be removed mechanically, one can remove them in hot concentrated nitric acid (temperature is much lower, ~110-120 °C).
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.
Linux on a Calculator
Youtube Direkthaha, via Ronny
Daniel Tang hat einen Linux Kernel auf ‘nem Taschenrechner zum Laufen gebracht und kann da jetzt textbasiert im Internet surfen. Als nächstes bitte Linux und Netz auf einer ollen Casio Taschenrechner-Uhr.
[tangrs] has successfully run a Linux kernel on the ARM based Nspire CAS CX graphing calculator. He’s developed an in-place bootloader that allows a kernel to be loaded from within the stock Nspire OS. It also allows for peeking and poking at memory for debugging.
[tangrs] also managed to get USB host mode working on the calculator. This allows for a USB keyboard and Wifi dongle to be connected. At this point, the calculator can connect to the internet and browse using a text-based browser: Links. The calculator runs a SSH server for remote access, and graphical browsing is in the works.
Old Hardware-Junk plays Bob Dylan
Vimeo Direktbob, via Designboom
Schickes Commercial für ‘nen Druckerhersteller, in dem sie mit jeder Menge alter Hardware Bob Dylans „The Times they are a-changing“ spielen. Das Konzept ist zwar schon kräftig durchgelutscht, ist aber noch lange nicht wirklich durch, wenn’s so schick gefilmt und elaboriert aufgeführt wird, wie oben. Hier noch ein Makin-Of-Clip:
we decided to create a full-scale orchestra, made entirely out of discarded relics from the old world of printing. Printers, scanners, copiers, fax machines, modems, hard drives — a scrapheap symphony, reprogrammed and rewired to perform Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Because the old world of printing has come to an end. And this is their swansong.
To [isthisgood?] fell the arduous task of making the discarded printer relics sing, through a rigorous process of soldering, reprogramming, hacking, and re-wiring. They even custom designed their own circuit board, so as to control all of the printers from one main computer.
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Old Hardware plays House of the Rising Sun
Ghostbusters on 8 Floppy-Drives
Alter Computerschrott spielt Radioheads „Nude“ – echt jetz!
Radiohead and 394 Floppys playing the Imperial March
Bright Eyes: Programmable DIY-LED-Glasses
Technology Will Safe Us machen sowas ähnliches wie das Make-Magazin, nur in England, und bieten DIY-Kits für Elektronik-n00bs (wie mich) an. Ihr neuestes Spielzeug ist eine programmierbare LED-Brille, die einem Coden beibringen soll. Das Teil kann Feeds darstellen und demnächst renne ich mit meinem Feedreader im Gesicht rum. Schick!
Bright Eyes is DIY technology kit that encourages people to learn programming because it is so cool. It is a pair of glasses which have 174 LEDs (light emitting diodes) on them for you to program. These LEDs can play back graphics and videos off a micro SD card (video player), or be controlled using any microcontroller platform. Best of all, we’re making them Arduino compatible! So, if you want to add a microphone or an ambient light sensor to make them more responsive – you’ll be able to.
All of the code will be open source and freely available. We are working on easy to navigate and understandable tutorials for programming the glasses in various ways. You can create standalone graphics, animations, or generative visuals. By adding sensors, you can literally have the glasses respond to music, or if you’re really keen, you can connect them to your twitter account and share your tweets!
The Bright Eyes Kit – DIY LED glasses to inspire programming (via Creative Applications)
Hacked Farm-Toy plays Simon Says:
Old MacDonald Hacked A Farm: „My kids have a plastic farm toy. It moos, it oinks, it neighs, it baas, and frankly, it grates. But since I tricked it out with a microcontroller brain, at least it can play Simon.“
African Kids hack their OLPC-Machines
Nicholas Negropontes One Laptop per Child-Projekt läuft jetzt seit 5 oder 6 Jahren und experimentiert seit neuestem mit dem „Format“: Die haben Kisten mit Tablets in äthiopische Dörfer gestellt, ohne Anleitung, nur ‘ne Kiste voller Hardware. Fünf Monate später haben die Kids die Maschinen gehackt und in einem Jahr programmieren sie einen Kick Ass Egoshooter. Faith in Humanity: Restored. Grandiose Story wie aus einem techno-utopistischen SciFi-Roman, nur in Real Life mit einem phänomenalen Ergebnis. Bravo!
OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about. Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?
But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction (via Killscreen)
[update] Dan Klorix hat auf Facebook ein PDF mit Specs der gehackten Tablets gepostet.
New Yorks Diesel-Web
Ich liebe diese Story auf The Verge über das Not-Internet über Fog Creek Software, die während New York im Dunkeln liegt und zu einem Großteil vom Netz abgeschnitten ist, ihre Infrastruktur aufrecht erhalten… mit dieselbetriebenen Notfallaggregator. Gibt dem ganzen Internet-Ding irgendwie eine madmax-artige Erdung, die Story, finde ich:
The storm hit. The power went out. Fog Creek’s data center, Peer1, switched to an emergency diesel generator on the 17th floor, just as planned. Fog Creek’s bug tracking system, FogBugz, remained online. So did its code review service Kiln, productivity tool Trello, and sister site Stack Exchange. But around 9 a.m. the next morning, there came an urgent phone call. Water had surged into the basement and lobby of the data center, immersing the 20,000-gallon tank of diesel fuel and wiping out the fuel pumps and monitoring equipment. There was no way to know how much fuel was left, but Peer1 estimated it at about three hours of power.
The Fog Creek family went into crisis mode. The Trello team hustled to get its service transferred to Amazon’s cloud hosting within 10 hours. Fog Creek had to locate one of its systems administrators, who was incommunicado. An employee trekked to the apartment where his coworker was relaxing without power or cell service, climbed 13 flights to surprise the administrator at his door, and yanked him back to reality.
Then, employees picked up a few five-gallon buckets normally used to hold supplies for the office fish, purchased drums of diesel fuel from gas stations around the city, and headed down to their darkened, flooded data center.
Googles Datacenter-Porn
Schnieker Datacenter-Porn von Google, etwas großkotzig mit „See where the Internet lives“ überschrieben, aber sei’s drum… Datacenter-Porn ist Datacenter-Porn.
Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit. On Where the Internet lives, our new site featuring beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you’ll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.
In addition, you can now explore our Lenoir, NC data center at your own pace in Street View. Walk in the front door, head up the stairs, turn right at the ping-pong table and head down the hall to the data center floor. Or take a stroll around the exterior of the facility to see our energy-efficient cooling infrastructure. You can also watch a video tour to learn more about what you’re viewing in Street View and see some of our equipment in action.
Finally, we invited author and WIRED reporter Steven Levy to talk to the architects of our infrastructure and get an unprecedented look at its inner workings. His new story is an exploration of the history and evolution of our infrastructure, with a first-time-ever report from the floor of a Google data center.
Google’s data centers: an inside look
[update] Hihihi…
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.“
Denki Puzzle: Designer Circuits for Electronics-N00bs
Schickes Elektronik-Bauteil-Puzzle von Yuri Suzuki namens Denki Puzzle, mit dem man DIY-Radios wie Lego zusammensetzen kann. Genau das richtige für Hardware-N00bs wie mich, die als Kind immer Radios auseinandergenommen haben, weil’s ja schon interessiert, was da so drin ist, die aber kein einziges mal wieder zusammenbekamen.
using a kit of [Denki Puzzles'] printed circuit board (PCB) components, each individual part retains a unique shape which visually represents its function and can be built to form working appliances such as a radio or lighting systems. through the process of assembly, an understanding and appreciation of the building blocks of more complex technologies is gained.
yuri suzuki + technology will save us: denki puzzle
Vor nem ‘halben Jahr bloggte Suzukis Androps World Word Lights-Video mit jeder Menge selbstgemachter Robot-Toys und sowas. Guter Mann.
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.
