71–80 of 193 posts
Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”
Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”
Smart kid, thinking out of the box!
I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray-1 supercomputer, in a machine room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through. Just before a big tour group of VIPs he knew would come by, he hid inside the Cray-1, and waited patiently for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from inside the Cray-1, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved…
It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.
Didn’t the Apollo guidance computer, which took people to the moon, have 4K of RAM? Today, 1 million times that barely runs the OS and a few Chrome tabs.
The computer had 2048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory and 36,864 words of read-only core rope memory. Both had cycle times of 11.72 microseconds. The memory word length was 16 bits: 15 bits of data and one odd-parity bit. The CPU-internal 16-bit word format was 14 bits of data, one overflow bit, and one sign bit (ones' complement representation). [1]
This is actually quite depressing considering the amount of Raspberry pi's doing tasks like watering a plant, Reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.
This is actually quite depressing considering the amount of Raspberry pi's doing tasks like watering a plant, Reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.
Esp32 ( https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 ) are what most folks should be using to do that stuff. It’s a great platform to build upon.
It supports valves, pumps, schedules, etc. I programmed mine once a few years ago with YAML (no code!) and now I just power cycle them once every month or so. Been running great.
The author's CV is as interesting as the benchmarks
Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”
In your household, the children tell the dad jokes to dad.
When I see comparisons like this, the first thought I have is not the benchmarks, but rather what the most “heroic” real-world calculation of the day would have been on something like the Cray-1, and how to replicate those calculations today on something like a RPi. Weather/climate models? Rad-hydro? The fidelity would almost certainly be super low compared to modern FEA software, but it would be a fun exercise to tr…