Favourite Youtube videos v2.0

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

There was a very early program called Spacewar! It was one of the very first computer games, played on a PDP-1 computer at the MIT Media Lab. That was 1962, and I was there. Got to play it, too. It was so much fun that when I went to grad school and the U of Minnesota, and found a Control Data 3100 there, I set to making joysticks and re-creating Spacewar. Did it well and thoroughly, then sold an article about it to John W. Campbell. You can find a modern emulation at https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/minnesota/.

[Spica75]

The real funny part is knowing where we are now, with virtualization, cloud, internet, terabytes to exabytes of storage and broadband... running circles around most anything being said

True, but at the same time? Computers today are a thousand times higher clocked, AND are drastically more capable of doing things per tick, not to mention having multiple cores/processors all over the place. And literally millions times more memory and faster access to storage.
And yet, how much faster are actually the programs? Uh, for anything that isn't raw datacrunching using specialised software, it's closer to maybe 10 times faster or something.

The Amiga 500 of mid 80s with its 4 processors running at <8Mhz, with a GUI, which by the way just happens to be like a precursor of Windows or something, amazing that coincidence, running from a FLOPPY DISKDRIVE, much of the time, is only a little bit slower than modern windows running on an SSD. An SSD that can read and write hundreds of times more per second than the Amiga Workbench disk of 860kB can store in total.
And it is by the way less than 10 years since the last place i knew of that used an Amiga 500 to do graphical work for TV broadcasting, and there's still that old machines doing professional sound editing/mixing. The graphics people have had to replace their Amigas with PCs because of the increased resolutions used, but most i've heard would have preferred not to.
Because that old stuff still WORKS better. Which of course is one of the reasons you can still today buy brand new accelerator plugins for the Amiga, adding SSDs, modern level of CPU power and a whole host of stuff. Because again, despite the age, it's more reliable and works better than the "latest'n'greatest".

That, is really, really sad and pathetic.

Not that i'm surprised really. Even if you just look at hardware alone, well, the Pentium 4 was one of the most amazing fuckups ever. And then Intel came up with what became the basis of their current line, the Nehalem.
When AMD switched to integrated memory controller earlier, their CPUs gained overall around 30% performance.
When Intel did it with Nehalem? Despite switching from a drastically more inferior structure than AMD did, they gained less than 10% on average. And the ACTUAL improvements Nehalem brought with it should have, probably DID provide at least a 15% improvement in performance.

Meaning that the integrated memory controller was such damned shoddy work that instead of improving performance by 40-50% as it should have, it reduced it. The only other option is that the architechture overall instead was so utterly terrible, that it managed to nullify what should be a 50-60% performance improvement per tick.

Of course, the Nehalem was at the time still heralded as a wonderful new innovation by the vast majority.

And now that we're closing in on the limits of what nodeshrinks can be done, something that has been VERY much shown off by how Intel has failed with their dieshrink for year after year now, despite having by far the most resources to fix problems with, once designers cant just throw more transistors at every problem and hope the next shrink keeps down the production costs enough to make it work cheap enough anyway, well that and the fact that the next set of increased size in chip-wafers has essentially been put on indefinite hold because it's just too expensive, the cost reductions for production doesn't make up enough for the investments needed, soon we're going to either see an even sharper slowdown or even halt in hardware performance, or designers are going to have to start really doing a drastically better job.

Which is where it could get "funny" from the side of the software... Because software designers have been relying on hardware performance increasing drastically year after year now for decades. Aaand now, already most big increases comes from tricks instead of overall improvements, and with less nodeshrinks, meaning no room for adding more transistors to just keep adding tricks, unless software writing suddenly shapes up one helluva lot, we could start seeing software that is markedly SLOWER than the same existing stuff on the above Amiga 500 in less than 10 years or so.

Kinda wish i had kept going with my short little forage into Assembler and machinecode, coulda made a fortune today when almost noone seems capable of even considering it.
Even worse, when my friend was learning programming in university, we tried a little competition once, i wrote a program in Amiga Basic, he wrote in, IIRC C++, i wrote my program in 1/4 the time, and it ran faster, despite his running on a 500Mhz CPU.
And i wasn't even using any tricks to employ anything beyond the primary CPU of the Amiga. So, <8Mhz beat 500Mhz, took less time to program, was much EASIER to program, took up a few kB compared to the MB required of the "modern" software.
After that my friend stopped trying to claim modern programming was superior.

[Spica75]

There was a very early program called Spacewar! It was one of the very first computer games, played on a PDP-1 computer at the MIT Media Lab. That was 1962, and I was there. Got to play it, too. It was so much fun that when I went to grad school and the U of Minnesota, and found a Control Data 3100 there, I set to making joysticks and re-creating Spacewar. Did it well and thoroughly, then sold an article about it to John W. Campbell. You can find a modern emulation at https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/minnesota/.

Oh yeah, Spacewar was a lovely little piece of a game.
Have it on my old 286. Played it lots of times against my friend and even sometimes against the AI, which despite its overall shoddiness could actually be dangerous and even effective sometimes. Though activating gravity usually made the AI pisspoor, which was a pity, since playing with gravity on was one of the fun sides of it.

[Té Rowan]

The real funny part is knowing where we are now, with virtualization, cloud, internet, terabytes to exabytes of storage and broadband... running circles around most anything being said

Thing is… I was still in my teens then, and any old grumpy fart will gladly and loquaciously tell you how much magic was in things from his/her teens and early adulthood.

I don't feel that magic in today's 64-bit super-everything.

[Neko-]

I wasn't making light of the shows presented. They were I guess pretty spot on for their time.

But you can't help somehow comparing it to todays state of tech and what we all do with computers and kind of laugh at the show looking back

To get this back on track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2WIOa7CEI - Mum It Ain't Half Hot... Gotta love sgt Major Williams

[Té Rowan]

Funny… well, that was me trying to remember where I had heard the opening song of The Computer Programme and then having it pointed out to me — on a Kraftwerk album I had bought not that long before. Bloody embarrassing, that was.

[Té Rowan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l2NJFrvYls — Ercoupe landing on a windy day.
The Ercoupe is definitely a neat little aircraft, with that twin rudder.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

The Ercoupe was designed to be both simple and safe. No foot pedals, and it was almost impossible to spin or stall. And oh, the visibility! If I were to take up light plane flying, it's what I'd want.

[Té Rowan]

There were quite a few thousand Ercoupes built of all variants, so spotting one is still possible. Now, finding one for sale…

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2018/february/pilot/budget-buy-ercoupe

[Spica75]

Weird, had never heard of the Ercoupe before, despite me looking at maaaybe getting pilot's license back in the 80s specifically because of the idea of those kinds of e-z fliers.
Though at the time the one i was looking at was a tiny amphibious, canard pusher prop plane that i now just cannot remember the name of any longer(damnit!), cheap to build, cheap to fly and could land on any little lake or river.

I remember it intentionally took the idea of trying to be safe to the next level, as the canard wings and overall layout were made to make it absolutely impossible to stall or spin and pretty much everything and the kitchen sink. And even a gliderate like a poor glider rather than a nonglider.
Only downside was the low topspeed and cruise, notably less than the Ercoupe, though also with a notably smaller engine.

[Cheb]

How to turn a well-rounded character into a whiny "we will all die!" coward
https://youtu.be/t_ydRkxBPrI?t=1597
(and why I prefer to never use dubs)

[Té Rowan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBDgMXEOjB4 — Piper Archer makes forced landing near Quebec Airport.
Directions to Rescue: "He's on Highway 40, just west of IKEA."

A bit of comedy, namely "The Plank".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKJcR24njrs (1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUbcaE44cSw (1979)
These links are current as of today.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

Perhaps a short Tale From The Far Side?

[Té Rowan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bzWnaH-0sg — A bit of music and a bit of Spacewar, both on a restored PDP-1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EWQYAfuMYw — A lot more Spacewar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmWg7CtN0Ac — Wut? There's a Back-up Washuu?

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bzWnaH-0sg — A bit of music and a bit of Spacewar, both on a restored PDP-1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EWQYAfuMYw — A lot more Spacewar.

I got the chance to play Spacewar at MIT, but I can't remember those control boxes. When I did it at the U of Minnesota, decent control boxes were one of the first things I made. You can play Spacewar here, on an emulator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmWg7CtN0Ac — Wut? There's a Back-up Washuu?

That's no Washuu - the hairstyle is wrong, and the voice far too mellow.