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From wikipedia:
CPU @ 500 kHz
Memory 2K (2048) 35-bit words (i.e., 83⁄4 kilobytes) (ultrasonic delay-line memory based on tanks of mercury)
Good lord! And that was probably state of the art at the time.
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It was. If the mercury tanks were open, working in that room must have been more dangerous than being a hatter in the Good Old Days. 
(The mad hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame was mad because of the mercury used in those days to make hats. Mercury is known today as a neurological poison.)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I think "tanks" is a very misleading term. It should rather be called a "tube" - you can see a photo of one at Mercury delay tube[^]. The tube is is capped in one end by an electric transducer (actuator) producing pressure waves in the mercury, in the other end by a sensor converting the waves back to an electric signal. If the tube wasn't closed, the device wouldn't work, or would work poorly.
The tube in the photo is referred to as a 'short mercury delay tube'. I've got other photos of such tubes, and they are indeed longer. The length of the tube sets its storage capacity. There was an obvious tradeoff: Once you put some data value into the actuator end of the tube, it is unavailable until it comes out of the other end. So a long tube gives you more storage capacity, but slower operation. Other photos of such tubes show 'fans' of rows of tubes: If you could afford it, you would rather use many short tubes in parallel than fewer long ones.
Long tubes would slow down your computer to the speed of wave propagation through mercury  The device was directly based on the low wave propagation speed. The actuator can transmit several hundred or thousand bits (waves) before the first one reaches the sensor in the other end. When it comes out, it it is immediately cycled back to the actuator - but you may steal a copy for copying into a register, or you may replace it with bits from a register rather than the value that comes from a sensor. One article from 1951 says that each tube holds '16 45-digit numbers', which I assume means is decimal digits. This article has a photo of the short tube in the link, as well as two longer tubes but otherwise identically looking. It doesn't indicate which length holds 16 numbers.
(This 1951 article also has a photo of a magnetic storage device from the Manchester computer: Along the rim, the cylinder has "20 rows of digits, each row of 2560 digits in the binary system. To realize how compact the unit is, note that the height of the cylinder is no more than 5 cm.")
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I started out in front of an Altair 8800 entering machine instructions with switches and staring at the lights.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
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Respect, my brother in arms... I mean bytes. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Quote: Imagine having this chat with devs in the 1960s.
Imagine trying to carry a 24TB hard drive back then.
>64
It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
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I have 3 small furry laptops, and a home free of bugs as a consequence - despite the windows being open all summer.
In exchange I feed them and change their litterboxes.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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They also provide entertainment and stress relief (sometimes).
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I've got two of those laptops, and one large floor model. The laptops provide rodent control, the latter wet kisses and ball retrieval services.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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This looks a lot like a site driving attempt.
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Yeah, his profile says US. Not sure if he noticed or not, but most people speak English in the US.
Jeremy Falcon
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Default profile of a new registrant is likely US, and most new users don't prefer to change it to their country of citizenry, because this is an opportunity to attend least virtually become a US resident.
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Good point. It makes me not trust the person though. At worst, they're too lazy to click a button. At best, they're trying to pretend to be something they're not online. Either way, doesn't inspire confidence. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: most people speak English in the US.
I beg to differ. Most people in the US speak a language which has many similarities to English, but is not English. That is why outside of the US it is known as "US English".
The same argument applies to the English spoken in other countries, e.g. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: I beg to differ.
Ok, most people in the US speak proper English. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Assuming your post is legit...
Last PC I bought (a bit over a year ago) was through NZXT. I used to always build my own computers, but nah I'd rather pay a few bucks and have someone do it for me these days and help the economy to boot.
I did have two issues, but I'd still recommend them.
1) Took a while for me to get the PC, but I get their beefy selection and higher end GPUs were still in a shortage a year ago. Can't blame them for that, but I had to wait on my order because of it.
2) Every now and again I get one fan that likes to do its clicky thing. But, IMO the water cooling is the most important part to get right. Haven't had a problem with temps yet and it's been a year.
All-in-all, can't complain. And, they don't preload the PC with a bunch of garbage either. There is an NZXT system monitor app, but you can uninstall it if you don't want it.
Jeremy Falcon
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So, I've been applying to a couple of Tech Lead positions recently. I've been in Software development since 2008, and have worked with .NET since 2011. I went through several codebases throughout the years, and I have seen my fair share of atrocities done in codebases (including a critical software with 13 KLOC inside Program.cs). I believe that at least, nowadays, I know how NOT to screw things up.
Recently, I had an interview with a big company in the restaurant management sector (with customers like Burger King and others in the same range). The interviewer asked me what I thought about the usage of Stored Procedures. I told them something along the lines of:
"Well, they have their place. There might be situations worth considering their usage, but not always.
E.g., Let's say you have a highly complex report that depends on several rounds of aggregations and calculations, and it is time critical, it might be worth considering the usage of Stored Procedures, instead of doing everything on the .NET codebase. Since the database has mechanisms to handle data better (indexes, query plans and whatnot) and it is closer to the data than the application, we could leverage these things to reduce the time needed to produce this specific report".
Then, two days later, I got a rejection letter saying that my way of thinking was outdated, and that they do everything inside application code, so they would not move on with my application. So, my question is: Did I dodge a bullet, or did I in fact screw this up? How would you guys reply to this question if you were in my shoes?
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I'm not sure what you/they mean when you wrote "they do everything inside the application code"
The reporting?
If so, good thing you moved on. Also, it's rare and kind of off putting for an interviewer to say something like "your way of thinking is outdated"
It tells me you've got a primadonna infestation in that team.
When I interviewed for Expedia, some interviewer asked me to defend my lack of a BS degree.
It was at that point that I responded "I just whiteboarded all of your problems, because while you were struggling through English lit to round out your requirements, I was coding, so defend your degree first - after all I didn't pay 80k for mine"
I didn't get the job I didn't want at that point anyway.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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honey the codewitch wrote: asked me to defend my lack of a BS degree.
That is entirely stupid line of interviewing. So, interviewer just wants to have an argument about, "Is it necessary to have a college degree?"
honey the codewitch wrote: "I just whiteboarded all of your problems, because while you were struggling through English lit to round out your requirements, I was coding, so defend your degree first - after all I didn't pay 80k for mine"
Of course there can be value in a college degree, but there is nothing that 100% proves you'll be a good dev anyways.
Maybe they should make their litmus test: Have you read the entire The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth?
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raddevus wrote: Maybe they should make their litmus test: Have you read the entire The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth?
I own and have read all four volumes. Knuth simply isn't that good outside the theoretical arena, using mathematical syntax and making APL look readable. (Yes, I wrote some in APL back in high school.) There are far better books on the same subjects.
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I would have gone to uni probably had my mental health and housing situation not been dreadfully unstable through my teens. When I landed at Microsoft at 18 it was a lifeline, so I never went to higher ed - i was too busy working.
I'm going to make a confession - I have only read excerpts of Knuth. I find such material far too dry and math formalisms confound me.
What I liked was the whiteboards. Those are what saved me. Implement an AVL tree on a whiteboard. Okay.
Implement atoi. Okay
That got me through my entry level years.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I've been working in IT for >33 years now.
For the past 20 years, each year I'll go out to O'Reilly.com account, pull up one of the volumes of The Art of Programming and read 2 or 3 paragraphs then bail out. Until the next year when I do it all again.
honey the codewitch wrote: I'm going to make a confession - I have only read excerpts of Knuth.
Uh, yeah, me too. And, it's the same paragraph or two every year.
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Self-taught? So am I.
What is a BS degree anyway? It's a directed learning path, with some discussion, a bunch of lecturing, a lot of book reading, and a little experimentation. That's something we can do entirely on our own without spending $80K on it.
Hell, we can even get the same/updated books, keep them to boot, and not spend the kind of money on them the students are getting fleeced for!
Of course, we do a lot more work experimenting and learning, but that's the fun part!
The only downside is a lack of feedback on our work.
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Any time I hear stuff like this it reminds me of an interview with Scientific Atlanta. At the time I was a pure C coder, dabbled in C++ and I could spell object oriented. This was back in the day when companies spent BILLIONS making sure it was all designed OO and never produced anything. The techies were great, I answered all of their questions, actually debugged a problem that had been plaguing them, but the PM and the architect were two of the most pretentious pricks I ever had the displeasure to meet.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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