The General thread for Computers And Internet

[Reddog]

I had one, don’t remember why. I did really like the j-mouse. Back before track pads, didn’t need to carry a mouse. It was a true notebook. 8.5”x 11”. Laptops we used for programming were huge and heavy with monochrome plasma screens. The PB was an early color monitor.
With the j- mouse I could type and move cursor without fingers leaving the home position. I got really good at it

[raison de arizona]

In a weird bit of internet news, Overstock.com bought Bed, Bath and Beyond's web address:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/bed ... -100495343

They had their reasons, like...

He estimated Overstock.com has about 5 million customers; Bed Bath & Beyond's online customers number about 10 million.

[Estiveo]

Overstock won't gain a single customer in this deal without offering a bankruptcy inducing number of coupons. The Bloodbath & Beyond customers are conditioned to expect it.

[neonzx]

Overstock won't gain a single customer in this deal without offering a bankruptcy inducing number of coupons. The Bloodbath & Beyond customers are conditioned to expect it.

I think it is too soon to tell if their name change to BB&B will work, but I never really got the intrigue of those 20%-off coupons they gave or mailed out. The discount was for a single item at 20% off the retail price, but then small print of a whole bunch of excluded brands and items. I never purchased anything at their stores although I did like to browse sometimes.

[keith]

I always wondered what happened to Sears mail order customer database when they went belly up just before Amazon went balistic.

Talk about bad timing.

[John Thomas8]

The internet weighs as much as a fat house cat?

[RTH10260]

[MN-Skeptic]

The other day, as I retrieved my mouse after it had fallen on the floor for the second time that day, I pondered... maybe if my mouse had a cable to connect it to my laptop.

[RTH10260]

BUT... But.... but... --- the cat will still want to shove it over the edge of the Flat Earth

[neonzx]

The other day, as I retrieved my mouse after it had fallen on the floor for the second time that day, I pondered... maybe if my mouse had a cable to connect it to my laptop.

I still have a wired mouse. It makes it much easier to retrieve when it falls. Plus, I don't have to put in new batteries every few months.

[keith]

Yeah I still do a wired mouse.

Mostly because the unwired connection was always cutting out in mid stroke. So I just gave up on 'em and went wired.

[Reddog]

I liked to use a wired mouse on my laptop in the field. I had a cheap one with a retractable cord. It took a beating along with my laptop. For some reason I never liked touchpads commonplace on laptops nowadays.
I also prefer trackballs. They never fell off, and are great in limited flat space, and poor tracking surfaces. An added bonus; built in theft protection, I found a lot of people didn’t like them. (RPN calculators also, never had one taken)

{edit: corrected fat-fingered misspelling}

[keith]

My palm pilot still works perfectly. I dont have the Pascal compiler any more though.

IMAX Movies Rely On Old-School PalmPilot Program

[Maybenaut]

Say what you will about Elon Musk, but Starlink is awesome!

It took well over a year from the time I reserved it for SpaceX to get satellite coverage in my area. But then they sent me an email a week or so ago asking if I still wanted it. I confirmed the order and it showed up today.

So easy to set up - download an app and follow the instructions, which were, find a location to set up (might be harder for some people but we have lots of open space); connect the satellite cable to the router and plug the router in; then give your network a name and password.

It is blazing fast. I don’t know from download speeds, but over cellular (which is what we’ve had until now) certain pages took forever to load (Washington Post, for ex.). Some streaming services (appletv, max) buffered like crazy, but no longer!

Some people might need to mount theirs on the roof, but we don’t. I’m glad about that, because some years we get dumped on with snow.

Anyhoo, I’m exceptionally pleased. It’s expensive ($599 for the equipment then $120 per month), but that’s not that much more than I’d pay for Hughes net, which has data caps.

[Foggy]

Very cool, Maybenaut.

I don’t know from download speeds

Very simple, in your browser search for "internet speed test".

[somerset]

We're also considering Starlink for our house in Cebu. Internet in the Philippines is spotty at best, and even the "best" fiberoptic service from Globe or PLDT it caps out at <10Mbs and goes down at least once a month (and takes repair crews at least a week to show up). Mrs Somerset is balking at the price, but ultimately I think we'll end up getting it

[Maybenaut]

We're also considering Starlink for our house in Cebu. Internet in the Philippines is spotty at best, and even the "best" fiberoptic service from Globe or PLDT it caps out at <10Mbs and goes down at least once a month (and takes repair crews at least a week to show up). Mrs Somerset is balking at the price, but ultimately I think we'll end up getting it

It’s worth it!

[neonzx]

Say what you will about Elon Musk, but Starlink is awesome!

Great to hear. I think RC was also on the waiting list for his home outside Florida.

Elmo is a crazy nutjob artist (super intelligent and creative and weird) but he has built some cool projects. Elon just doesn't know when to stay in the background and leave the kids to run it. But it seems he did that with Starlink.

Richard Branson could teach him a thing or two. .

[MN-Skeptic]

Elon just doesn't know when to stay in the background and leave the kids to run it. But it seems he did that with Starlink.

Ukraine relies on Starlink and Putin's buddy Musk has withheld access to their satellites at times so as to protect Russia.

Gift Link - Elon Musk’s control over satellite internet demands a reckoning

[RTH10260]

early days of computing

[Reality Check]

Say what you will about Elon Musk, but Starlink is awesome!

It took well over a year from the time I reserved it for SpaceX to get satellite coverage in my area. But then they sent me an email a week or so ago asking if I still wanted it. I confirmed the order and it showed up today.

I have had Starlink for over a year here in CO. We stream YouTube TV on 2 TV's and have no issue. We also use WiFi calling over Starlink. We had really poor to no cell service before and calling over Hughesnet was a joke.

As far as speeds there is a speedtest in the Starlink app or you can use speedtest.net. I just ran one and got 118 Mb down and 19 Mb up. I generally do even better than that except during the evening it can slow down.

[johnpcapitalist]

early days of computing

Near as I can figure, that was from 1954, possibly 1953. I think the IBM electronic computer featured was a 601 which is from that year. They also talked about the possibility of a transistor powering computers instead of vacuum tubes. Experimental machines were being built circa 1953, and IBM's first all-transistor (solid state) product was announced in early 1955 and shipped in late 1957.

Notably, they talked about magnetic delay storage, tape and revolving drums, but not disk drives. RAMAC, the first commercial drive, was announced in 1955. It had 50 24-inch platters (98 sides) spinning at 1,200 rpm and stored a whopping five megabytes. I suspect it was clear starting on the day that RAMAC was announced that disks were going to displace delay lines and drum storage because of the cost-per-bit, which was already lower.

Tape, of course, held out for a long time because cost-per-bit was dramatically cheaper than disk, and lots of business applications done in batch mode could do perfectly well with tape storage. Even as late as the early 2000s, well into the internet era, the late Turing award winner Jim Gray said "never underestimate the I/O bandwidth of a semi truck full of tapes barreling down the interstate." If you did the math, he was right until fairly recently.

[keith]

I thought that was gonna talk about CSIRAC the first electronic computer designed and built in Australia.

(Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer), originally known as CSIR Mk 1, was Australia's first digital computer, and the fifth stored program computer in the world. It is the oldest surviving first-generation electronic computer (the Zuse Z4 at the Deutsches Museum is older, but was electro-mechanical, not electronic), and was the first in the world to play digital music.

The CSIRAC was constructed by a team led by Trevor Pearcy and Maston Beard,working in large part independently of similar efforts across Europe and the United States, and ran its first test program (multiplication of numbers) sometime in November 1949. In restricted operation from late 1950, publicly demonstrated and operational in 1951.

In 1964, CSIRAC was shut down for the last time. Its historical significance was already recognised at that stage, and it was placed in storage with plans for its later exhibition in a museum.

The machine was stored in a warehouse through the 1960s and 1970s, before being set up for exhibit at Caulfield Institute of Technology (later the Caulfield Campus of Chisholm Institute of Technology, and later again the Caulfield Campus of Monash University) from 1980 to 1992 (Where it was when I was studying there) . It was then returned to storage.

Interest in the machine was revived in the 1990s, as it was realised that many of its developers were aging and history was being lost forever. A conference about the machine was held in 1996.

The machine found a permanent home with Museums Victoria in 2000. It has not been operable since its shutdown, but many of the programs that ran on it have been preserved, and an emulator has been written for it. The curators have decided that, aside from the cost of restoring the device, the huge number of repairs that would be required to make it safe to operate (CSIRAC used 30 kilowatts of power in operation) would detract from its historical authenticity.

After being exhibited at Melbourne Museum for many years, it was relocated to Scienceworks in 2018 and is now on permanent display in the Think Ahead gallery.

CSIRAC is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register and is included in a Heritage Overlay.[2]

It is listed as a National Engineering Landmark by Engineers Australia as part of its Engineering Heritage Recognition Program.

I met Dr. Pearcy a couple of times and ran a couple of courses for the Pearcy Centre for Computing.

[RTH10260]

"The Sound Of Music"

[Flatpoint High]

"The Sound Of Music"

Mem'ries...