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Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

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Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#131

Post by xorcist »

dsr_ wrote: post #53
ohazi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a student even had their own printers set up. Students aren't allowed to have a printer? O_o

Printers used to be expensive and noisy. In 1993 I was one of about 3 people on a dorm floor of ultraturbonerds who had a printer in my room; it was a Canon BJ130, I think, which had the distinction of being a tractor-fed 300dpi black-and-white inkjet, and thus much much quieter than my friend's IBM ProPrinter 24XL. How much quieter? It wouldn't wake up people in the next room.

I too had a ProPrinter 24XL! Compared to daisy wheel printers, they were very quiet.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#132

Post by eps »

2sk21 wrote: post #38

I have a similar story but I was not quite so clever. Back in 1990 and 1991, I used a cluster of IBM RS6000 workstations in my university to train neural networks. I had previously tried to get backpropagation to work on a Connection Machine but found it too frustrating to work with. The cluster of RS6000s actually ran my code (written in C) very fast and was able top get some good results and graduate with PhD. I bu…

There used to be something called PVM - Parallel Virtual Machine - a fairly simple library for distributed computing. Had to use it once back in Uni, it wasn't bad.

Edit - http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#133

Post by jacobolus »

kqr wrote: post #130
a3n wrote: post #45

In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper f…

It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…

https://blog.reverberate.org/2020/05/29/hoares-rebuttal-bubb...

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#134

Post by Tepix »

munificent wrote: post #35
thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

Ah yes, good memories. I'm having a really hard time right now remembering the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder; I think it was "Easy"-something. Google fails me on the name too. Breaking it was a hobby. Some school labs had left access to Hypercard available through that program, so you could just pull up Hypercard and make a new stack that would tell the program to quit. The other way to get a…

> To youths with curious mindsets, an anti-authoritarian streak, and seemingly limitless amounts of free time, little restrictions like these only improved our skills. Systems with challenging but imperfect security are a great way to foster new young talent. I miss the days when the stakes for testing boundaries and experimenting were lower.

I setup a MAC based internet filter at home, secretly hoping my kids will figure out how to bypass it.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#135

Post by kqr »

jacobolus wrote: post #133
kqr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…

https://blog.reverberate.org/2020/05/29/hoares-rebuttal-bubb...

I did not expect that, but sure enough, makes sense when I look at it. Thanks!

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#136

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

elengyel wrote: post #19

I'd like to clarify that my code was running only on machines that were otherwise idle. Not many people were in the lab late in the evenings. MPQS processing nodes could be added and removed dynamically, so if somebody needed a computer that was part of my cluster, they could just quit my program and everything would go back to normal. Also, once the number theory professor learned of what I had implemented, he worke…

what a wild story. the first thing that came to my mind reading through wasn't a picture of a modern Mac but of TempleOS. It's amazing how we study computing changed since then as in we're focusing more on learning about all the required plumbing and duct tape than the actual machines. Not that this isn't fun too but it has essentially shifted everything. Getting into "mainstream" computers back then was such a different world than what it is now.

Suppose you could get the same type of "fun" today by playing with breadboards but you'd have to seek it out on purpose. Sitting in front of a modern machine is just so much more abstraction that gets in the way.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#137

Post by Tepix »

statico wrote: post #108
rahimiali wrote: post #65

Anyone else's muscles still remember these keystrokes from the early 90's? sm fa700 a9f4 pc fa700 g

Ah, yes! I knew a shorter one: sm 0 a9f4 g 0

FYI

    SM 0 a9f4 writes a9 f4 into memory at address 0
    G 0 starts executing at address 0

    A9F4 is the ExitToShell A-trap, which terminates the
    current process.
With those commands you could terminate the foreground task on System 7 and were (usually) given a chance to save or recover something before rebooting.

It could also be used to kill At Ease on most school setups.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#139

Post by gsliepen »

kqr wrote: post #130
a3n wrote: post #45

In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships. We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form. Paper f…

It sounds like you essentially invented the spreadsheet. Nice work! > Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that. I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told ho…

> I would like to politely contest the authenticity of this specific detail. In my fairly strong collection of evidence, people just do not bubble sort without being told how to do that.

I taught a C programming class for first-year students for a few years at the end of the 90s, where one of the tasks was to sort an array of words, with no hints given as to what kind of algorithm they should implement. Most students came up with bubble sort. Insertion sort was much less prevalent, and the few students who did typically did a kind of out-of-place insertion sort. (I also saw a O(N^4) algorithm once.)

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#140

Post by eru »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #136
elengyel wrote: post #19

I'd like to clarify that my code was running only on machines that were otherwise idle. Not many people were in the lab late in the evenings. MPQS processing nodes could be added and removed dynamically, so if somebody needed a computer that was part of my cluster, they could just quit my program and everything would go back to normal. Also, once the number theory professor learned of what I had implemented, he worke…

what a wild story. the first thing that came to my mind reading through wasn't a picture of a modern Mac but of TempleOS. It's amazing how we study computing changed since then as in we're focusing more on learning about all the required plumbing and duct tape than the actual machines. Not that this isn't fun too but it has essentially shifted everything. Getting into "mainstream" computers back then was such a diffe…

Almost the same lament could have been written in the 1990s in nostalgia for the glory days of the 1960s.
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