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Author here for your obscure Pentium questions...
I get the feeling Intel needed to "bribe" the Navajo by ordering this work. Why did they need to do that? Was it part of an agreement with tribe leadership?
This triggered a memory about the Native American code talkers employed by the US military during WWII to encode communications using their own languages which were unknown to the Axis forces. First thought: "ha! Now they're doing firmware?":) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker
Author here for your obscure Pentium questions...
I get the feeling Intel needed to "bribe" the Navajo by ordering this work. Why did they need to do that? Was it part of an agreement with tribe leadership?
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I thought the same thing reading this! I'm currently reading Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone, which details the life of John von Neumann. According to his brother Nicholas, von Neumann likely got the idea to use punch cards for computers from the Jacquard loom. One of his father's (Maxwell von Neumann) clients at the turn of the century was a Jacquard loom manufacturer, and Max would evidently discuss his wo…
That doesn't make sense, since computers were using punch cards before von Neumann got involved.
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That doesn't make sense, since computers were using punch cards before von Neumann got involved.
Ah, you're right. Babbage's Analytic Engine was designed to use punch cards, and I totally forgot about the Hollerith Machine that I read about just last year. I wonder what other false information Poundstone's book has. Thanks for the heads up!
I'm building a stained glass window for our front entrance, as a sometimes chip designer it's going to be a half adder (so much much smaller than a pentium) - the big challenge is showing all the layers (si, implantation, poly, metal, vias etc) I'm only doing 1 level of metal. The result is going to be more of a thin layered sculpture than a traditional stained glass window
this sounds awesome! do you have drawings?
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That's a remarkable question. Have you, reader of this comment, ever created something that will subsequently never interact with a living being? I don't think I have... except maybe when I've blinked Morse into the sky with a flashlight or laser. There's always someone or something on the other end. I try to remember that.
The classic excercise is: write a poem, tear the paper to pieces and throw it away.
This sounds like the backstory for Alan Dean Foster's "Cyber Way". I enjoyed the novel, didn't realize how well rooted it was in actual history.