488 private links
Wednesday 19th June 2013 08:28 GMT
John Smith 19Gold badge
Coat
PDP 11 odds and ends.
The PDP 11 (like the PARC Alto) had a main processor built from standard 4 bit TTL "ALU" parts and their companion "register file." So 2nd, 3rd,4th sourced. I'm not sure how many mfg still list them on their available list in the old standard 0.1" pin spacing.
El Reg ran a story that Chorus (formerly British Steel) ran them for controlling all sorts of bits of their rolling mills but I can't recall if they are
I think the core role for this task is the refueling robots for the CANDU reactors. CANDU allows "on load" refuelling. The robots work in pairs locked onto each end of the pressurized pipes that carry the fuel and heavy water coolant/moderator. They then pressurize their internal storage areas, open the ends and one pushes new fuel bundles in while the other stores the old ones, before sealing the ends. However CANDU have been working on new designs with different fuel mixes (CANDU's special sauce (C Lewis Page) is that it's run with unenriched Uranium, which is much cheaper and does not need a bomb making enrichment facility) and new fuel bundle geometries, so time for a software upgrade.
And 128 users on a PDP 11/70. Certain customers ran bespoke OSes in the early 90s that could get 300+ when VMS could only support about less than 20 on the same spec.
Note for embedded use this is likely to be RSX rather than VMS, which also hosted the ICI developed RTL/2, which was partly what hosted the BBC CEEFAX service for decades.
Yes, it's an anorak.. //
Wednesday 19th June 2013 18:20 GMT
Jamie JonesSilver badge
Thumb Up
Who's laughing?
I feel much better knowing this.
What is the alternative? Buggy software written by the "'Have you tried switching it off and on again" generation? Wednesday 19th June 2013 20:24 GMT
bscottm
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Re: It just costs money
It's not the GHz clock cycle that is the problem. It's the smaller feature size of the transistors that increases the single event upset (SEU) rate. Yes, the two are inter-related, but one could conceivably build multi-core, chip symmetric multiprocessors based on the PDP-11 at today's feature sizes and not have GHz clock cycle times (and still end up with significant SEU rates.)
A couple of years ago, a NASA/JPL scientist pointed out that the alpha particles (helium nuclei) from lead solder were causing interesting issues with current x86_64 I/O pins -- radiation issues on commodity hardware. //
Wednesday 19th June 2013 07:32 GMT
Duncan Macdonald
RSX11M - Dave Cutler
Anyone who read the RSX11M sources (driver writers especially) realised that Dave Cutler was a very very good programmer long before he worked on VMS and later Windows NT. He managed to get a multiuser protected general purpose operating system to work with a minimum memory footprint of under 32kbytes on machines with about the same CPU power as the chip on a credit card. (A 96kByte PDP 11/40 (1/3 mip) with 2 RK05 disks (2.4Mbyte each) could support 2 concurrent programmers - a PDP 11/70 (1 mip) with 1Mbyte and 2 RM03 disk packs (65Mbyte each) could support 10 or more.) During the many years that the CEGB used PDP-11 computers with RSX11M, I did not hear of a single OS failure that was not caused by a hardware fault - I wish that current systems were as good. //
Wednesday 19th June 2013 17:23 GMT
MD Rackham
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Re: RSX11M - Dave Cutler
Of course, that was several years after there was a protected, multi-user timesharing system running on the PDP-8, TSS/8. And it would run in 8K of memory, although you had to spring for 12K for decent performance. Swapped off a fixed-head 256K word disk.
You PDP-11 kids get off my lawn! //
Wednesday 19th June 2013 15:28 GMT
Bastage
Reply Icon
Go
Re: there are alternatives
There is replacement hardware available. NuPDP replacment CPU's including QBUS support and peripheral cards. Also NuVAX for the new kids.
The Reviver boards for PDP-11 and HP1000.
The Osprey PDP-11 and Kestral HP1000 hardware from Strobe Data.
There are also the Stromasys/Charon software emulators VAX/AXP/HP3000. //
Go
Re: there are alternatives
@Peter Gathercole
There is already a well established PDP-11 project on OpenCores:
http://opencores.org/project,w11 //
PDP 11 odds and ends.
The PDP 11 (like the PARC Alto) had a main processor built from standard 4 bit TTL "ALU" parts and their companion "register file." So 2nd, 3rd,4th sourced. I'm not sure how many mfg still list them on their available list in the old standard 0.1" pin spacing.
El Reg ran a story that Chorus (formerly British Steel) ran them for controlling all sorts of bits of their rolling mills but I can't recall if they are
I think the core role for this task is the refueling robots for the CANDU reactors. CANDU allows "on load" refuelling. The robots work in pairs locked onto each end of the pressurized pipes that carry the fuel and heavy water coolant/moderator. They then pressurize their internal storage areas, open the ends and one pushes new fuel bundles in while the other stores the old ones, before sealing the ends. However CANDU have been working on new designs with different fuel mixes (CANDU's special sauce (C Lewis Page) is that it's run with unenriched Uranium, which is much cheaper and does not need a bomb making enrichment facility) and new fuel bundle geometries, so time for a software upgrade.
And 128 users on a PDP 11/70. Certain customers ran bespoke OSes in the early 90s that could get 300+ when VMS could only support about less than 20 on the same spec.
Note for embedded use this is likely to be RSX rather than VMS, which also hosted the ICI developed RTL/2, which was partly what hosted the BBC CEEFAX service for decades. //
Wednesday 19th June 2013 13:20 GMT
PhilBuk
Reply Icon
Happy
Re: PDP 11 odds and ends.
Most real-time systems stayed as PDP-11 when the industry realised that the interupt latency on VAX/VMS was too slow for a lot of applications. You could improve it with a ccustomised VMS kernel but, in most cases, it was cheaper to stick with the devil you knew. Similarly, a friend worked for a measuring company that were using embedded PDP-8 systems as controllers well into the end of the 90s. used to drive round with a clip-on PDP-8 front panel in the boot of his car.
Phil. //
Thursday 20th June 2013 08:25 GMT
FrankAlphaXII
Reply Icon
Re: PDP 11 odds and ends.
Its a certainly a CANDU reactor and its fuel bundle loader robots from what it looks like.
CANDU is a different type of reactor than what gets built most of the time, they can burn just about anything, from some unenriched uranium with some slightly enriched uranium at the same time, to thorium, to Mixed Oxide fuels partially from decommissioned nuclear weapons, to "fun" transuranic actinides and also (as a proliferation concern) some quite nasty fuel mixes which can breed massive (relatively speaking of course) amounts of Plutonium if the reactor isn't properly safeguarded. Thats where India and probably Pakistan bred most of their Special Materials.
And what's cool about this is if the PDP-11 is what GE is using in Canada for their loaders, then its probably what they're using in India, South Korea, Romania, Argentina and China as well, as they also have CANDU reactors or designs derived from CANDU. //
Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history. //
Systems Approach A few weeks ago I stumbled onto an article titled "Traceroute isn’t real," which was reasonably entertaining while also not quite right in places.
I assume the title is an allusion to birds aren’t real, a well-known satirical conspiracy theory, so perhaps the article should also be read as satire. You don’t need me to critique the piece because that task has been taken on by the tireless contributors of Hacker News, who have, on this occasion, done a pretty good job of criticism.
One line that jumped out at me in the traceroute essay was the claim "it is completely impossible for [MPLS] to satisfy the expectations of traceroute." //
Many of them hated ATM with a passion – this was the height of the nethead vs bellhead wars – and one reason for that was the “cell tax.” ATM imposed a constant overhead (tax) of five header bytes for every 48 bytes of payload (over 10 percent), and this was the best case. A 20-byte IP header, by contrast, could be amortized over 1500-byte or longer packets (less than 2 percent).
Even with average packet sizes around 300 bytes (as they were at that time) IP came out a fair bit more efficient. And the ATM cell tax was in addition to the IP header overhead. ISPs paid a lot for their high-speed links and most were keen to use them efficiently. //
The other field that we quickly decided was essential for the tag header was time-to-live (TTL). It is the nature of distributed routing algorithms that transient loops can happen, and packets stuck in loops consume forwarding resources – potentially even interfering with the updates that will resolve the loop. Since labelled packets (usually) follow the path established by IP routing, a TTL was non-negotiable. I think we might have briefly considered something less than eight bits for TTL – who really needs to count up to 255 hops? – but that idea was discarded.
Route account
Which brings us to traceroute. Unlike the presumed reader of “Traceroute isn’t real,” we knew how traceroute worked, and we considered it an important tool for debugging. There is a very easy way to make traceroute operate over any sort of tunnel, since traceroute depends on packets with short TTLs getting dropped due to TTL expiry. //
ISPs didn’t love the fact that random end users can get a picture of their internal topology by running traceroute. And MPLS (or other tunnelling technologies) gave them a perfect tool for obscuring the topology.
First of all you can make sure that interior routers don’t send ICMP time exceeded messages. But you can also fudge the TTL when a packet exits a tunnel. Rather than copying the outer (MPLS) TTL to the inner (IP) TTL on egress, you can just decrement the IP TTL by one. Hey presto, your tunnel looks (to traceroute) like a single hop, since the IP TTL only decrements by one as packets traverse the tunnel, no matter how many router hops actually exist along the tunnel path. We made this a configurable option in our implementation and allowed for it in RFC 3032. //
John Smith 19Gold badge
Coat
Interesting stuff
Sorry but yes I do find this sort of stuff interesting.
Without an understanding of how we got here, how will we know where to go next?
Just a thought. //
doublelayerSilver badge
Responding to headlines never helps
This article's author goes to great lengths to argue against another post based on that post's admittedly bad headline. The reason for that is simple: the author has seen the "isn't real" bit of the headline and jumped to bad conclusions. It's not literal, but it's also not satire a la "birds aren't real". The article itself explains what they mean with the frequent claims that traceroute "doesn't exist":
From a network perspective, traceroute does not exist. It's simply an exploit, a trick someone discovered, so it's to be expected that it has no defined qualities. It's just random junk being thrown at a host, hoping that everything along the paths responds in a way that they are explicitly not required to. Is it any surprise that the resulting signal to noise ratio is awful?
I would have phrased this differently, without the hyperbole, because that clearly causes problems. This response makes no point relevant to the network administration consequences of a traceroute command that is pretty much only usable by people with a lot of knowledge about the topology of any networks they're tracing through and plenty more about what that command is actually doing. Where it does respond, specifically the viability of traceroute in MPLS, it simplifies the problem by pointing out that you can, if you desire, manually implement the TTL field, then goes on to describe the many different ways you can choose not to, ways that everyone chose to use. It is fair to say the author of the anti-traceroute article got it wrong when they claimed that MPLS couldn't support it, but in practice, "couldn't support" looks very similar to "doesn't because they deliberately chose not to". It is similar enough that it doesn't invalidate the author's main point, that traceroute is a command that is dangerous in the hands of people who aren't good at understanding why it doesn't give them as much information as they think it does. //
ColinPaSilver badge
It's the old problem
You get the first version out there, and see how popular it is. If it is popular you can add more widgets to it.
If you spend time up front doing all things, that with hindsight, you should have done, you would never ship it. Another problem is you can also add all the features you think might be used, in the original version, and then find they are not used, or have been superseded.
I was told, get something out there, for people to try. When people come hammering on your door, add the things that multiple people want.
20 hrs
the spectacularly refined chapSilver badge
Re: It's the old problem
Cf the OSI network stack, which took so long to standardise that widespread adoption of IP had already filled the void it was intended to.
In some ways that is not ideal, 30+ years on there is still no standard job submission protocol for IP, OSI had it from the start.
Florida is known as the “Sunshine State” but South Dakota may have claimed it before Florida.
The first South Dakota flag was made in 1909. One side of the state flag was to include a sun and the words “The Sunshine State” according to the South Dakota Secretary of State website. //
The state also has more sun than its neighbors to the east. Multiple weather data websites said the state averages about 213 sunny days. There are about 200 days in Iowa and about 198 sunny days in Minneapolis, Minnesota. North Dakota has about 201 sunny days. //
Thrifty South Dakotans may have led to the loss of the “Sunshine State” nickname.
The two-side flag with the words “The Sunshine State” existed until 1962. Legislators decided that a flag with two distinct sides was too costly to make. It cost residents too much to buy it, so few state flags were flown, according to the S.D. SOS website said.
The flag design was changed in 1963 but “Sunshine State” hung around, apparently.
“In 1992, a measure sponsored by State Rep. Gordon Pederson of Pennington County, South Dakota, changed the wording on the flag to read “The Mount Rushmore State,” the S.D. SOS website said.
Out with the sun, in with the faces of the famous four.
But perhaps known to South Dakotans by 1992, the Florida Legislature had already taken action 22 years prior to officially adopt the nickname “The Sunshine State.”
Statesymbolsusa.org said the Florida lawmakers passed the measure in 1970. That state is also known as the “Peninsula State” for its shape. Florida has on average 273 sunny days.
Have you ever wondered how the chips inside your computer work? How they process information and run programs? Are you maybe a bit let down by the low resolution of chip photographs on the web or by complex diagrams that reveal very little about how circuits work? Then you've come to the right place!
The first of our projects is aimed at the classic MOS 6502 cpu processor. ///
load some assembly language and watch the paths light up on the CPU die
Heroes. They encourage us to hope, to trust, to believe, and to achieve. For 50 years, Moody Bible Institute’s Stories of Great Christians informed and inspired listeners with biographies of real people . . . average men and women . . . who were called and equipped by God to show His love to the world. These dramatized, 15-minute stories bring to life 600 years of heroes of the faith. Listeners hear the voices, music, and sound effects of classic radio. They’ll be reintroduced to historic men and women they admired since childhood and meet new heroes whose stories will expand their world and deepen their Christian faith.
Tomas van Houtyryve's striking photographs for National Geographic capture the restoration process.
Neither the great plans that William R. Tolbert had for the transformation of Liberia, nor his plans for Bensonville, which he renamed Benton, came to fruit. The mansions of the presidential clan have been reduced to rubble, and Benton is again called Bensonville.
The only building which has survived intact up to this day is the Mt.Zion Praise Church, where Tolbert frequently took the pulpit. //
Yak Dorzon on January 8, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Tolbert renamed it Bentol, not Benton, Mr Foreigner. There was a logic to his megalomania – the “Ben” was for Bensonville and the “tol” was for Tolbert. Not satisfied, he went further and made Bentol the capital of Montserrado county.
Blast from the past.
150-year-old love notes written by high school students were found in the floorboards of a school in Maine, according to Bangor Daily News.
Preservation contractor Lee Hoagland started working on the University of Southern Maine’s Academy Building in 2022, and over the course of a year he found hidden papers in a space between the first and second floors of the building built in 1806.
The papers included love letters between former students of what used to be a private college preparatory school for children aged 10 to 17 for upper-class families. //
While students wrote things about their fellow classmates and teachers on paper back then, nowadays “it’s all text and Snapchat,” Bischof pointed out.
“We’re not going to have this for future generations,” he added.
According to Bangor Daily News, the old papers are currently being kept in USM’s Department of Art. There are plans to archive the notes in the school’s Special Collections.
We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan but saved itself when it embraced something very different.
In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?
Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”
The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.
Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The “people over profits” mentality produced fewer people until profit—earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement—saved the people.
We have all heard of the Mayflower Compact, the set of laws that all agreed to live by, But it included something else. Before the Pilgrims left Holland, they needed to fund the trip. They found sponsors who would do just that. But their merchant sponsors in London and Holland required that the Pilgrims agree that everything they produced went into a common store, a common bank, and every family would be entitled to one share of the common store.
So, the Pilgrims got down to the business of living life in the New World. They cleared land, and they grew crops. The other part of the story we have heard was of the Pilgrims' first winter. Nearly half of them died of starvation, sickness, and exposure. The group's leader, William Bradford, who later became the governor of the colony, realized early on that the whole "common store" idea was a huge failure. He decided to scrap that portion of the Mayflower Compact and came up with another idea.
American Thinker @AmericanThinker
·
The Pilgrims' Abolition of Socialism (Photo Credit: Jenny A. Brownscombe) William Bradford delivered the Pilgrims from the ills of socialism to a healthy culture of economic freedom based upon individual property rights.
americanthinker.com
The Pilgrims' Abolition of Socialism
5:44 AM · Nov 28, 2024 //
Even though they didn't call it socialism or capitalism back then, the Pilgrims soon figured out that a common bank and collectivism were not going to work. It was only when they implemented the incentive to work and invest themselves in the land that they became prosperous, and it benefitted themselves and the Indians.
Makes you wonder, if we have only heard the "official" story of Thanksgiving for this long, what else have we only heard the "official" story of? //
Jill Savage @Jill_Savage
·
I looked forward to Rush Limbaugh telling us the true story of Thanksgiving every year. Let’s keep it going.
2:33 / 8:22
12:10 PM · Nov 27, 2024
“It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history,” Coolidge said in his 1926 speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Liberia gained its independence on this day in 1847. Rightfully claiming its title as Africa’s oldest democratic republic, Liberia gained its independence well over a hundred years before the rest of Africa.
The never-before-colonized nation was founded in 1822 by former slaves and free-born blacks who resettled from the United States. The independence declaration of Liberia was done by its first black governor Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who later on became the country’s first elected president.
To commemorate their independence day, Face2Face Africa takes you through a list of the presidents of Africa’s oldest democratic republic.
Young Americans’ historical and civic illiteracy is a danger to the Republic, and it cannot be allowed to continue. //
Trump created the commission the day before Election Day in 2020 with the purpose of “[establishing] a clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding.” Its goal was to provide a much-needed corrective to anti-American propaganda masquerading as history such as the “1619 Project,” whose “radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured.” The commission’s report, published two days before Trump left office, sketched out a basic curriculum that balanced American exceptionalism as reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the darker aspects of our history, such as slavery and Jim Crow.
On October 11, 1798, John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia that
Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
But are we still a moral and religious people? In “The Real American Founding: A Conversation,” professors of politics David Azerrad and Thomas West help us answer that question.
In the fifth lecture of that course, titled “Morality and Virtue,” professors Azerrad and West discuss the fact that government always legislates morality, but what that morality consists of depends on the beliefs of those who make the laws. The nature of the legislative power is to tell people what they can and cannot do, what is right and wrong.
In the Founders’ understanding, they believed that government ought to support true morality and virtue. That is, morality and virtue grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God, from which they derived man’s natural rights and duties.
The Founders also believed that the laws of nature and of nature’s God, along with the natural rights and duties derived from them, were in accord with their Christian beliefs. Government therefore ought not to be hostile to Christianity, but rather should support it with laws that are friendly to it and encourage its flourishing among the citizenry.
[Abraham Lincoln] helped fell trees to build a large river raft to carry farm goods down a local river and then the treacherous Mississippi to New Orleans. There, they took the raft apart and sold the logs to build houses in the first bustling big city the future president had ever seen.
Lincoln then walked the nearly 800 miles back to central Illinois. //
The 1860 presidential election has always seemed like a political presidential watershed to me. //
That was the first national confrontation between the two major parties that have shaped American politics ever since and endure today. That's because their ideologies and platforms have been – shall we say – malleable, adapting adeptly to society's changing times, interests, and priorities and starving third parties of lasting issues.
The Republican Party was created in Wisconsin in 1854 around the dominant issue of the day, slavery. In its first presidential contest, the anti-slavery GOP carried the day with Abraham Lincoln as nominee. //
When slavery split Democrats into northern and southern wings in 1860, that election became a four-way race. The northern Democrat was old friend Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, who fared the worst.
There were 33 states then. Douglas won one of them, Arkansas. Lincoln needed 152 electoral votes. He got 180 from 18 states with only 39.7 percent of the splintered popular vote.
Welcome to the White House, Mr. President. Until 1933, Inauguration Days back then were in March. By March of 1861, seven states had seceded. Five weeks later, Confederates started the Civil War in South Carolina.
In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved people in the South.
As an attempt to begin national healing, for his 1864 reelection, Lincoln chose as his vice-presidential running mate a southern Democrat, Sen. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.
That’s the only time a U.S. political party has nominated a bipartisan national ticket. It worked for the election. But not so well after, when GOP Congress met Democrat president. Post-presidency, Johnson became the only president to later serve in the Senate.
Lincoln’s second inauguration came outside the Capitol with John Wilkes Booth reportedly watching from nearby. Like much of what the self-educated Lincoln wrote, the speech was full of humanity, grace, and humility, and far shorter than today's wordy promise agendas salted with calculated applause lines:
With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds…
The ensuing celebration lacked Lincoln’s favorite food, chicken fricassee. But the 250-foot-long buffet table was laden with veal, venison, quail, oyster stew, and six flavors of ice cream, including Lincoln’s favorite, vanilla.
Twenty-five days later, the Civil War ended as the deadliest conflict still in U.S. history.
Thirty days after that inauguration, the Lincolns went to a play at Ford’s Theater. It was Good Friday.
Allegedly to see the performance better, the president’s bodyguard, John Parker, left his post outside the Lincolns' box. But he wound up in a nearby saloon.
Confederate sympathizer Booth had no trouble sneaking in behind the president with his .44 Derringer. The bullet entered the left side of Lincoln’s head, passed through the brain, lodging just behind the right eye.
The 56-year-old president, who had maintained the Union but would lose three of his four sons to illness, never regained consciousness and died the next morning.
(In a bizarre twist, Lincoln's eternal rest was interrupted 12 years later by a band of grave robbers who successfully absconded with the presidential corpse for some weeks, seeking ransom for the kidnapped body. Which explains why Abraham Lincoln now rests in a Springfield memorial in a coffin sealed within two tons of cement and steel.)
mopani Retired Professor
11 hours ago
I predict that, unlike Joe Biden in 2017, she will not show up.
BTW, has this happened before, were a failed Presidential candidate was required to certify the election victory of their opponent? If so I would like to run a comparison.
ECoolidge19 mopani
11 hours ago
Yes it has. The year 2000. Al Gore against George Bush Jr. Gore was Clinton's VP
Retired Professor mopani
8 hours ago
Although that most recently happened in 2000, 1968 is the closest analogy. Humphrey was LBJ's VP, and he bypassed the primaries to get the nomination at the convention after LBJ unexpectedly dropped out at the end of March, due to his overwhelming unpopularity caused by the Vietnam war. Humphrey wound up with the nomination by default after RFK's assassination in June (does any of this kind of rhyme with current events?).
After Humphrey lost to Nixon in November, LBJ spared Humphrey the embarrassment of having to certify his own loss on January 6, 1969, by sending him out of the country on some contrived diplomatic mission. Thus, the Constitutional duty of opening and counting the electoral votes fell to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Richard Russell of Georgia, who was indubitably the greatest U.S. Senator of the 20th Century. Uncle Dick may have secretly enjoyed it. Although he was a lifetime [conservative, Southern] Democrat, he also had an excellent working relationship with Nixon, going back to the latter's own tenure in the Senate twenty years earlier.
Were Trump to win next week (please, Lord!), the same scenario would be repeating itself, and VP Harris would have the delightful duty of certifying her opponent's election. I think Biden will want to rub her nose in it, so he won't let her off the hook like LBJ did for Humphrey. However, even if she renigs reneges on her Constitutional duty, the certification process will still go forward, presided over by the President Pro Tempore, who I assume at that point will be Sen. Grassley of Iowa.
This current election is crazy, but I could make the case that 1968 was even crazier. Go read up on it and LMK what you think.
Gone are the glory days of the Boeing 747, the 'Queen of the Skies'. The first commercial double-decker aircraft flew in 1969, and though several are still flying today, only a few airlines operate the type on commercial passenger flights. According to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, there are only four airlines operating 747s this month: Air China, Korean Air, Lufthansa, and Aeroflot. //
In October 2014, 33 airlines operated 747 passenger flights, and British Airways (BA) had the most. Ten years ago, 12,171 747 flights were scheduled worldwide, more than 2,000 of which were operated by BA. More than half of BA's 747 flights were to and from the United States (US). //
Data shows that in October 2014, 1,112 flights were scheduled to and from the US on BA 747s. This included 11 cities and more than 350,000 seats. It should come as no surprise that the busiest 747 route was from Heathrow to John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York. Ten years ago, there were 215 flights scheduled in each direction to JFK on 747s, up to eight flights in one day.
Mass storage has come a long way since the introduction of the personal computer. [Tech Time Traveller] has an interesting video about the dawn of PC hard drives focusing on a company called MiniScribe. After a promising start, they lost an IBM contract and fell on hard times.
Apparently, the company was faking inventory to the tune of $15 million because executives feared for their jobs if profits weren’t forthcoming. Once they discovered the incorrect inventory, they not only set out to alter the company’s records to match it, but they also broke into an outside auditing firm’s records to change things there, too.
Senior management hatched a plan to charge off the fake inventory in small amounts to escape the notice of investors and government regulators. But to do that, they need to be able to explain where the balance of the nonexistent inventory was. So they leased a warehouse to hold the fraud inventory and filled it with bricks. Real bricks like you use to build a house. Around 26,000 bricks were packaged in boxes, assigned serial numbers, and placed on pallets. Auditors would see the product ready to ship and there were even plans to pretend to ship them to CompuAdd and CalAbco, two customers, who had agreed to accept and return the bricks on paper allowing them to absorb the $15 million write off a little at a time.
Unfortunately, the fictitious excellent financial performance led to an expectation of even better performance in the future which necessitated even further fraud.
Joshua says:
September 29, 2023 at 10:38 am
Indeed, certain black/white models were of fine quality.
And their power suppliers weren’t such a Russian murks, either (see Junost TV internals juck).
Whoever wanted to get a large, but pure b/w TV back in late 20th century simply had to give them a try.
By the time, West Germany had stopped production of big b/w CCIR TVs and had focused on PAL color TVs.
So even West Germans had to think about importing a b/w TV from GDR.
Also interesting: The GDR was about the last county still operating pure b/w transmitters.
That’s because SECAM had reduced b/w quality, even if the source material didn’t have color. So pure b/w programme were being aired in plain CCIR norm, not SECAM.
Joshua says:
September 29, 2023 at 10:45 am
What’s also notable, East German products were also being used by us West Germans.
They were sold via Quelle catalog, albeit with their origin being hidden.
Which is kind of sad, because we had no problems using GDR appliances.
Their RG28 mixer wasn’t worse than our Krupp model.
In general, GDR products weren’t made with planned obsolescence in mind yet, because the GDR didn’t even thought about such business practices (too naive, I suppose).
So yes, a lot of West Germans grew up with East German products, either knowingly or unknowingly.
The tip of the ice berg was that many gifts from West German relatives were from Quelle catalog. So East Germans literally got their own products back, depending on how we see it. :)
milldude says:
September 29, 2023 at 12:07 pm
The “lack” of planned obsolescence was not out of naiveté, but born out of necessity. The scarce resources and low production volumes meant long-lasting products came naturally. Also, in the “Planwirtschaft” system theory, if there would be no further (or rater, reduced) need of a certain product, the state-owned factorys just would reduce output of that good and produce something else instead. There was also an extensive recycling system for glass and metal containers, much like we have today.
Joshua says:
September 29, 2023 at 2:29 pm
Yes, but GDR had produced twofold, as far as I know.
a) for own use, to satisfy the needs of the people
b) for export, to make good money (D-Mark)
Usually, it was the way that the norm that the ‘good’ products were sold for export and the stuff with small defects (scratches etc) was sold in GDR to the own people.
Same goes for sweets and chewing gum. The export version was being sold in a shiny package, while the version for the people was sold in a dull package.
Officially, the explanation was that this was a trick, to fight capitalism with its own weapons. Unofficially, it was clear that the own people were less being worth to the regime.
Dude says:
October 1, 2023 at 12:18 am
GDR was a Potemkin village of the soviet system in the first place, so the quality of products was higher for the show of it.
Otherwise the soviet system was searching for the lowest “socially necessary” cost. The reason why soviet products were built so robust was because of a quirk of the accounting system: not money but kilometer-tonnes. People had production quotas, which could be filled more easily if you put unnecessary amounts of material in the design. Whether the product actually works – who cares?
It’s thus interesting on more than one level to find a promotional film from the mid 1970s showcasing VEB Fernsehgerätewerk Stassfurt (German, Anglophones will need to enable subtitle translation), the factory which produced televisions for East Germans. It provides a pretty comprehensive look at how a 1970s TV set was made, gives us a gateway into the East German consumer electronics business as a whole, and a chance to see how the East Germany preferred to see itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0xMK6UZBys //
The film is at pains to talk about the factory as a part of the idealised community of a socialist state, and we’re given a tour of the workers’ facilities to a backdrop of some choice pieces of music. References to the collective and some of the Communist apparatus abound, and finally we’re shown the factory’s Order of Karl Marx. As far as it goes then we Westerners finally get to see the lives of each genosse, but only through an authorised lens.
The TVs made at Stassfurt were sold under the RFT East German technology combine brand, and the factory continued in operation through the period of German re-unification. Given that many former East German businesses collapsed with the fall of the Wall, and that the European consumer electronics industry all but imploded in the period following the 1990s then, it’s something of a surprise to find that it survives today, albeit in a much reduced form. The plant is now owned by the German company TechniSat, and manufactures the latest-spec digital TVs. //
As a juxtaposition of how a communist TV factory saw itself, have a watch of a capitalist one doing a bit of self-promotion.
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/29/retrotechtacular-1950s-televisions-were-beasts/#more-287834