A fascinating story.
I owned a Linn Sondek turntabe in the 70's with a Denon cartridge.
Spent a crazy amount on Hi-Fi chasing the audiophile dream :-)
The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#22Very interesting and well written article. This sentence in particular:
"Linn Products is the Glasgow company Ivor Tiefenbrun founded in 1972, and if you know it at all you know it for the Sondek LP12, still widely regarded by its partisans as the finest record deck ever made."
I was a big audiophile right at that time. Auditioned both Sondek and Sota Star Saphire. Went with the latter which I still proudly own (Alphason Tonearm). Note how carefully the author phrased "...by its partisans..." when describing the Sondek as the best. Nothing, not even programing code style zealots today can compare to audiophiles and their "take" on what made for the best playback. Pretty sure the author did not want to open that can of worms by simply declaring the Sondek the best.
Turntables back then were pretty damn detailed re: technology. Not surprised Linn could make a great computer (in the day).
HTH, NSC
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
canals have negligible water flow (except during disasters!) so I don't think that'd work very well. They also get dredged occasionally so there's a decent chance anything you leave down there won't last more than a couple of years
They do have tides though, so make it a big fan that points up.
Depends on the canal. The UK narrow boat network has locked everywhere so minimal current in most sections similarly the Netherlands. In fact most canals. But then you have something like Suez which is just open to the ocean.
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#24I don't think this is AI, but the writing style keeps reminding me of AI. I'm trying to isolate why. I think it's something to do with the information density. The sentences twist and turn, have lots of related ideas, digressions, and little details without much lead-in. The wording is also very precise, which is another characteristic of AI writing. This sounds like a critique, but I actually find it charming.
This sentence is a strong illustration of what I'm talking about:
> Since only OBJEKT ever knew where anything physically lived, objects could be relocated freely without touching a reference, so garbage collection went into the silicon too: a two-space compacting collector that walked the live objects and slid them into the other half of DRAM while execution carried on above, oblivious.
I mean, come on. Run-ons are one thing, but this is practically a lecture in a single sentence. :P
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#25It’s crazy what a small group of smart people can achieve if they’re not captive to conventional wisdom. They got crushed by the commodity curve and Moore’s Law. But still a great story - and thankfully written by a real person. The author’s idea that the commodity curve is over and that hardware is now cheap enough to make special purpose hardware viable is intriguing. Standardization used to be important because yo…
There are several cycles that bring tech ideas in and out of fashion because of market conditions, intersecting tech cycles, other implications of Moore's Law, or whatever.
Another trend, for example, might be centralized vs distributed: terminals (thin clients) and mainframes gave way to fat client PCs on prem, and then back to thin clients with cloud stuff.
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to the surface through the drilling mud.
Downhole tools used in MWD/LWD do not use ultrasonic frequencies. Drilling is a very noisy environment. The first tool that I used employed a downhole pulser with a surface transducer and operated at about 0.5-1 Hz. That's not ultrasonic. It was a pretty low frequency signal. Data transmission rates limit the volume of information that can be transmitted from the downhole tool to the surface where they are decoded. Y…
Oh derp. It’s been a while since I worked adjacent to this, so I clearly misremembered some important bits. Thanks for the correction!
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#27Thing is capability machines (like this and the 432 and lots of research machines) were very much the thing at the time - cutting edge even. The research literature was full of them. I did a paper design at the time. What ate them up was "what can you fit all on a chip with not many pins", followed by "what can you fit along with a cache on a chip with more pins", things move so much faster if everything's on the sam…
Can you expand on your paper computer? It sounds fascinating.
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#28I don't think this is AI, but the writing style keeps reminding me of AI. I'm trying to isolate why. I think it's something to do with the information density. The sentences twist and turn, have lots of related ideas, digressions, and little details without much lead-in. The wording is also very precise, which is another characteristic of AI writing. This sounds like a critique, but I actually find it charming. This…
Very well-written text, not a whiff of AI generation to it.
Your example is not even a run-on sentence!
I enjoyed reading it, many thanks to the author.
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#29I don't think this is AI, but the writing style keeps reminding me of AI. I'm trying to isolate why. I think it's something to do with the information density. The sentences twist and turn, have lots of related ideas, digressions, and little details without much lead-in. The wording is also very precise, which is another characteristic of AI writing. This sounds like a critique, but I actually find it charming. This…
Very well-written text, not a whiff of AI generation to it. Your example is not even a run-on sentence! I enjoyed reading it, many thanks to the author.
Yeah I'm not sure, just identifying that subjectively, this is the impression I get. Maybe I just associate any style which is especially fluent and avoids vernacular with AI at this point.
Re: The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downhole tools used in MWD/LWD do not use ultrasonic frequencies. Drilling is a very noisy environment. The first tool that I used employed a downhole pulser with a surface transducer and operated at about 0.5-1 Hz. That's not ultrasonic. It was a pretty low frequency signal. Data transmission rates limit the volume of information that can be transmitted from the downhole tool to the surface where they are decoded. Y…
Oh derp. It’s been a while since I worked adjacent to this, so I clearly misremembered some important bits. Thanks for the correction!
Boy how I wish it had used ultrasonic frequencies. Sadly enough though, I spent large parts of every day in front of a laptop connected to a transducer waiting for signals to appear in the noisy stream of data coming from the standpipe transducer. Every few seconds if your tool still functioned you would get the first bit of a signal that contained toolface orientation information and gamma ray data if you had a gamma ray sub. It was a binary stream of ones and zeroes where a 1 was a pressure increase and a zero was a decrease to background. You needed to be quick on the decode because the directional driller on the rig floor was using the real-time toolface orientation to help steer the drill bit to the target formation and on to TD (total depth).
As the days went by and the hole was progessively deeper it was inevitable that some part of the downhole BHA (bottom-hole assembly) would fail due to erosion from the drilling mud, erosion at the bit/formation interface, friction along the borehole wall, etc. The hope was always that your tool would function well enough until something else failed and necessitated a round trip to replace a critical component. The costs of the round trip were placed on the service company that had the failed equipment so even if your company supplied the MWD/LWD services and the directional drilling services (DD), if your tool failed the cost of the trip fell on your service and impacted your service quality assessment which affected your rig bonus calculation.
It was common for a DD with a failing mud motor to hang around the MWD shack or keep the MWD engineers on the phone, harassing the engineers to get them to admit that their tool is nearing the point where the toolface data was so low level that it was undecodable. If he could hang the trip on the MWD he would every time so the MWD engineers were incentivized to struggle through poor signal for as long as possible when they knew from the pressure data that the mud motor was about to crater or that the drill bit needed to be replaced.
Battery failures and erosion of the pulser valve components that resulted in signal amplitudes diminishing to the point where they were undetectable were the things you knew would happen and you just hoped that downhole conditions killed someone else's tool before yours inevitably failed.