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What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

478 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I don't mean BETTER. That's a different conversation. I mean cooler.

An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.

If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.

That's just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Older forms of computer RAM.

Before integrated circuits, we had core memory which was a grid of wires and at each intersection was a little magnetic donut that held a single 1 or 0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

Before that they had delay line memory, where they used vibrations traveling down a long tube of mercury, and more bits meant a longer tube to store a longer wave train.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Even though the story involves drum memory instead, your mention of delay-lines reminds me of The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer. Y'all should read the whole thing (it's not long), but here's a quick excerpt:

 Mel's job was to re-write
 the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
 (Port?  What does that mean?)
 The new computer had a one-plus-one
 addressing scheme,
 in which each machine instruction,
 in addition to the operation code
 and the address of the needed operand,
 had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
 the next instruction was located.

 In modern parlance,
 every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
 Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.

 Mel loved the RPC-4000
 because he could optimize his code:
 that is, locate instructions on the drum
 so that just as one finished its job,
 the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
 and available for immediate execution.
 There was a program to do that job,
 an "optimizing assembler",
 but Mel refused to use it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

They use to have weaving grannies for the magnetic core memory production.