🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 3 Aug 2018, Mike Spencer wrote:

>
> David Wade <g4ugm@dave.invalid> writes:
>
>> On 30/07/2018 23:25, Quadibloc wrote:
>>
>>> I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
>>> - Attributed to Thomas J. Watson (Sr.), but likely spurious
>>
>> That was supposed to be in 1943 when no one had built a computer that
>> stored its program in RAM.
>
> I love the scene in Cryptonomicon, circa 1944, in which Lawrence
> Waterhouse is contemplating the problem of "bury" & "disinter" while
> playing the great organ in the Qwlgmian church, all stops out and the
> air full of dust from decades-disused pipes, envisions mercury tube
> [1] RAM [2] in much the same way as Tesla claimed to have imagined the
> alternating current motor, tears out of the church barefoot in
> mid-arpeggio, love and lust forgotten in his wild enthusiasm to build
> it *now*.
>
In Heinlein's "Door into SUmmer" he has some memory tube that was created 
for military use.  From the descrption, it's hard to figure out what he 
was imagining.  But he can train his robotic devices by sending them 
through the motions, and the memory tube has lots of space for that. But, 
for a "secretary" type robot, he'll only give it a limited vocabulary and 
it may have to ask for a spelling of a woard.  The limitation was that the 
memory tube was too limited in capacity.  Now maybe it's some analog form 
of memory, but a dictionary won't take up much room, but I'd think 
controlling a robot doing fine work would require a lot more memory.

>
> [1] Someone will surely correct my choice of technical terms. Y'all
>    are career hackers; I'm just a blacksmith with pretentions to
>    technology.
>
Blacksmithing isn't technology?  Just because something is familiar 
doesn't cease to make it technology.  It might be "old technology" but 
still technology.

   Michael