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Re: Trouble ahead
Jerry You probably already know that the Google "TensorFlow" AI core is available for FREE from Google.? It only needs 90K or memory (you have to customize your own interface) and is quite complete.? TensorFlow is already present in many of the on-line question-and-answer systems and in many medical diagnostics systems.? How long will it be until we have an AI interface for our uBITX transceivers?? What will the user interface look like, and how long until it becomes the norm for ham radio equipment?? Seems that we may be on the very edge of setting new interface protocols for our hobby. Arv _._ On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:28 PM Jerry Gaffke via <jgaffke=[email protected]> wrote: If Musk is halfway right, it's about to get more than amazing: |
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Re: Trouble ahead
Jack, W8TEE
Arv: I had a chance to meet Gary Killdal near Monterey when I was with Dick Summe (President and co-founder of Que) during that same book-launch trip to SF. I always wanted to know about his "FM Encoding" that he developed for CP/M. I asked him if FM was some form of Frequency Modulation of the digital data. (What did I know...I'm a software guy.) He smiled and said: "No. It stands for F*&%ing Magic!" I then asked about his new double-density disks that used MFM encoding. He smiled again: "More F*&%ing Magic". I instantly liked the guy! Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 3:57:51 PM EDT, Arv Evans <arvid.evans@...> wrote:
Bill The number of players back in those "bad old days" was much smaller than the number of players today.? Back then it was not unusual to know or have met 50% of the experts.? Today there are thousands of "experts", with many now being "self anointed experts" to the point that knowing just a few percent of the most worthy is mostly impossible. Many of those past year experts have now passed on (Gary Kildare-CP/M, Steve Jobs-Apple, Dennis Richie-UNIX, etc.). Arv _._ On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:17 PM Bill Cromwell <wrcromwell@...> wrote:
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Jack, W8TEE |
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Re: Trouble ahead
I do recall goimg to MacWorld in Boston with my (now longtime-ex) girlfriend, and practically swooning over the fact that we could buy 2 megs of addin RAM for less than 2 grand! Now it's all like water; abundance brings complacency -- Rich WB2GXM Sent from my MetroPCS 4G LTE Android device ------ Original message------ From: Arv Evans Date: Thu, Mar 25, 2021 1:46 PM To: [email protected]; Cc: Subject:Re: [BITX20] Trouble ahead Exciting times are still with us.? It seems though that as we aged, somehow we lost the excitement.? Today we can buy components for a few pennies, and there are a myriad of software languages to play with.? Must be that we are just not that excitable these days. Arv _._ On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 8:18 PM Jack, W8TEE via <jjpurdum=[email protected]> wrote:
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Re: Trouble ahead
Bill The number of players back in those "bad old days" was much smaller than the number of players today.? Back then it was not unusual to know or have met 50% of the experts.? Today there are thousands of "experts", with many now being "self anointed experts" to the point that knowing just a few percent of the most worthy is mostly impossible. Many of those past year experts have now passed on (Gary Kildare-CP/M, Steve Jobs-Apple, Dennis Richie-UNIX, etc.). Arv _._ On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:17 PM Bill Cromwell <wrcromwell@...> wrote:
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Re: Trouble ahead
SUG meetings were always interesting.? I took my older son to these and now he and his younger brother are both programmers.? Fun times. _._ On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 8:13 AM Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote: On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 06:57 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote: |
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Power requirements for uBITX
Has any one here checked the current on transmit and receive on their uBITX V6? I blew out the current measurement part of my DMM so I can't check mine. I'm trying to figure out what size battery to get for portable use and to size a fuse in the power cable. What battery are others here using? Thanks Max |
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Re: Trouble ahead
If Musk is halfway right, it's about to get more than amazing:
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? ?? Opinions vary, but most researchers in AI do expect the singularity to arrive in the next few decades. And when it happens, things will get just plain weird. Hopefully IT will find amusement in allowing us to pass the time coding in Forth on our Nano clones. Shouldn't pose much of a threat. Jerry, KE7ER On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 11:02 AM, Tom, wb6b wrote:
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 10:45 AM, Arv Evans wrote: |
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Re: Problems with adding Nextion Display and CEC Software
Well I've had one heck of a time getting a Nano programmed that would actually function. I've got two here that appear to program fine however they only show all zeros on the display. Now that I have one somewhat running I can't seem to get it calibrated. Are there any values that might get me close? Right now I can't hear anything? Thanks, Max KG4PID
On Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 03:35:12 PM CDT, Evan Hand <elhandjr@...> wrote:
Max, To get into the calibration menu you need to press the encoder on the main screen.? A yellow box should come up with Band?? You can then rotate the encoder to get the Setup On? menu selection.? Press the encoder and the screen clears.? Press the encoder again to now get the setup options near the end of the list of menu items.? There should be calibration and BFO options as well as some others that I do not remember off hand. Once you get the rig calibrated, be sure to save the settings with the KD8CEC Memory Manager: You can then use it to adjust other options easier than with the yellow box menu. 73 Evan AC9TU |
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Re: Trouble ahead
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýHi, This thread has gone on and on and on for almost ever and so far off topic! No. This is not a complaint. Those who do not want to see it can click on the "ignore this thread" button - sometines labeled "ignore this subject" - and never see it again. You won't even to overexert your poor, exhausted index finger wearing out your delete key. Just *gone* forever. Once upon a time I started programming too. I had "real" work to do and those newfangled computers looked like very useful tools. I could buy (or steal) software to do inventory or accounting tasks but they always di a job the way somebody else wanted to do it and not *MY* way. So I started programming. My "real" work suffered due to time wasted writing programs. Then I found better software packages that could be configured to do my work the way I wanted it done and I dumped that programming stuff. I moved right out of the closet and went to doing "real" work. I was labeled "power user" - not programmer. Not that such programming isn't 'real" work. If you like it or somebody is paying you to it - or even better, both - it qualifies as "real" work. I am only in it again because I can use it to help do some "real" work that I am interested in and the Arduino type tools are much closer to the configurable software I chose all those weeks ago. The lies that are getting swapped in this thread are remarkably similar to my own fables of the past:) 73, Bill? KU8H bark less - wag more On 3/25/21 1:28 PM, Arv Evans wrote:
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Re: Trouble ahead
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 10:45 AM, Arv Evans wrote:
Must be that we are just not that excitable these days.It is still amazing. This current computer revolution has been going on for about 40 years.? It is amazing how much is still fundamentally the same. Although in the last five years, it seems there have been actual new things introduced, not just rehashed or rediscovered old things. Although I'm at a loss to enumerate them at the moment.? Tom, wb6b |
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Re: Trouble ahead
Exciting times are still with us.? It seems though that as we aged, somehow we lost the excitement.? Today we can buy components for a few pennies, and there are a myriad of software languages to play with.? Must be that we are just not that excitable these days. Arv _._ On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 8:18 PM Jack, W8TEE via <jjpurdum=[email protected]> wrote:
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Re: Trouble ahead
Jack, W8TEE
I only met Woz once, and that was just a brief introduction by Chris DeVoney, VP at Que. However, he seemed very engaging when we met. I wish I could have had more time with him. Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 1:38:00 PM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 08:30 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote: Gates: "I'll bet you wish now that you had taken it, don't you?"That is an amazing story. Yes, what a memory he must have. If I'd ever taken a job at Apple (phone interviewed a couple of times, but that is as far as it went), heaven help me if I'd run into Jobs. He may have remembered me from those early days.? I've heard Steve Wozniak is actually a really nice guy. When I lived in the Bay Area, a friend of mine her son went to the same school that I assume his kids went to. But, in any case Woz volunteered as a computer teacher for the kids at the school.? Tom, wb6b -- Jack, W8TEE |
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Re: Trouble ahead
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 08:30 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote:
Gates: "I'll bet you wish now that you had taken it, don't you?"That is an amazing story. Yes, what a memory he must have. If I'd ever taken a job at Apple (phone interviewed a couple of times, but that is as far as it went), heaven help me if I'd run into Jobs. He may have remembered me from those early days.? I've heard Steve Wozniak is actually a really nice guy. When I lived in the Bay Area, a friend of mine her son went to the same school that I assume his kids went to. But, in any case Woz volunteered as a computer teacher for the kids at the school.? Tom, wb6b |
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Re: Trouble ahead
Tom Great!? I am not quite ready to include the Tiny Basic part, but it is getting close.? I'm obviously not going to have the pico-OS ready for 1 April publication.? Making the former April Fools day project into a real project has added too much coding to meet my 1 April deadline, so I will have to publish it a bit later.? This has turned into a fun project.? More later... Arv _._ On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 4:01 PM Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote: On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 06:26 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote: |
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Re: Trouble ahead
Jack, W8TEE
Tom: I never met Jobs, but did meet Steve Wozniak in SF once. Back in 1981, I was writing a Basic80 book and found a bug in the compiler. So I called Microsoft and asked to speak with Bill Gates. The lady asked what the call was about and I explained I was writing a book on Basic80 and found a bug in the compiler. Ten seconds later and I was talking with Gates about the bug. He said they were aware of it and that it had been fixed and would be in the next release. We continued to talk for, perhaps, 10 more minutes. At the end, he said: "Would you consider coming to work for Microsoft?" At the time, Microsoft had about 25 employees and I was a tenured economics professor with two young kids. I told him I was flattered, but I was pretty happy where I was. That's not the end of the story. Fast forward about 12 years to the Software Development Conference in SF. I had given a paper earlier that day and was enjoying my 5PM anti-malaria medicine when the organizer of the conference asked me to come to their suite for drinks around 10PM. I was exhausted, but knew it would be bad politics to say no, so I agreed. I trundled up to the suite and recognized Dan Saks sitting at the end of a couch. An adjoining couch had an empty space, so I plunked down and started talking with Dan. We talked for a few minutes, after which Dan said: "Do I need to introduce you to the man next to you?" I turned only to find that my butt was sharing a cushion with Bill Gates. Before I could recover, Dan said: "Bill, this is Jack Purdum" Gates said: "Purdum...Purdum...Didn't I talk to you about 10 years ago about a book you were writing?" Stunned, I said: "Yes." Gates: "In fact, didn't I offer you a job?" Gulp..."Yes" Gates: "I'll bet you wish now that you had taken it, don't you?" Me: ...can't talk... To me, the amazing part of the story is that Gates, with everything that had transpired to him in the intervening years could remember a 10 minute phone conversation from 12 years in the past. My guess is that's one reason he's such an adept businessman. Amazing... Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 12:15:08 AM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 07:17 PM, Jack, W8TEE wrote: That's really great. I had a IMSAI 8080, but used the Processor Technology video board. Same one as in your computer. Then, waited, and waited for a good Basic. Processor Technology finally came up with a very good Basic, so I burned the Processor Technology boot loader into some EPROMs and added their cassette tape card and was very happy. Finally got a 2.5MB hard drive and surplus controller and wrote my own CP/M drivers for the hard drive. 2.5MB, I was in heaven. Great that you actually built a business based in the early computer revolution. I wonder how many people have ever had the pleasure of dressing down Steve Jobs. Talk about hubris! He personally came to our computer club to sell his new Apple Twos. I was using my IMSAI 8080 for small accounting jobs for my business at the time.? Steve was telling me how wonderful his Apple two was. I saw it as a play toy for people who couldn't solder and only wanted to play games. Not a "Real" computer. I told him I just did not think the Apple II was good enough. It only had integer basic, and I was doing "serious" programming of business programs. He paused and looked for a moment. Then said, ah, ah, you could scale your numbers in your calculations. But, (in all my geeky young arrogance) said that simply was not good enough. He better put a floating point basic in it before I could take it seriously. Well, apparently my opinion of the Apple did not harm the success of Apple one bit. He got very rich, I haven't. I still take pride in soldering, but I'm wiser (maybe a little) to what is practical and people actually want. ? ? Not dead yet, maybe I'll still make some money from this computer revolution.? Tom, wb6b -- Jack, W8TEE |
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Re: Trouble ahead
When in high school back in the dark ages, I remember thinking if I was hugely successful and lucky, I might someday have an HP calculator to play with.? In college, started out submitting card decks in FORTRAN to the CDC3300 at the OSU computer center, this was not exciting.? Later, getting time on the ASR33 teletype machines with a very bogged down time shared serial line into that same machine, it started to be kind of fun.? What really hooked me was an assembly language class where we got to program a PDP8 on an ASR33.? One of the assignments was to create a multiply routine by simply adding one number to itself n times, which struck me as awfully lame.? I spent several days during boring lectures in another class (electromagnetics) figuring out PDP8 code to do this efficiently using shifts and adds, when I submitted the code is was marked down for being obviously plagiarized.? Senior project was decoding Morse off the air on an IMSAI-8080.? My first job out of school involved building a graphics workstation running UCSD Pascal on a Z80.? I didn't feel a need to have a computer at home, I could just work late.? Did blow $100 on a Timex Sinclair ZX81, hacked a bunch of static RAM on the back, wrote a game of life for it and a Runga-Kutta differential equation solver, but it mostly sat unused.? In the late 80's I finally threw $1000 at a Toshiba T1000, which was a game changer for me.? It ran MSDOS, but the Thompson PCNT shell gave me vi and awk and a unix-like shell prompt that all got sucked into a RAM disk from a floppy at boot.? Also on the floppy was a TurboC compiler (a single memory model and a minimum of libraries) so I could code in C anywhere.? On the job when having to code for some strange machine, I could use it as an RS232 terminal into that machine and pipe code I had written in vi out to the crippled text editor resident on that machine (writing a DMA device driver for a Gould in FORTRAN comes to mind), not sit for days with that machine.? ?Since it lacked internet, I'd probably be more productive today if I was still using that T1000.? When I cracked the screen in the mid 90's I was bereft, couldn't find a cheap lightweight machine that would replace it till netbooks came out around 2008.
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Re: Trouble ahead
Jack, W8TEE
I went to a number of those shows. The first one was in SF at the (Brown??) Convention Center. I went because Que Publishing was going to launch my C Programming Guide book at the show. The Stanford Computer Book Store (??) agreed to dedicate a table to the book and I stood in the background when the show opened. I saw a young lady stop at the table, pick up the book, leaf through it and, to my heart's discontent, put it back on the table. A few minutes later, she was back and repeated the process, but again put it back. Finally, she came back a third time and I couldn't stand it any more. I walked over and said: Me: "That's a really good book. You should buy it." Her: "Have you read it?" Me: "Yes" Her: "OK. I've heard a lot about C, so I'll by it!" Me: "Would you like me to autograph it?" Her: "You wrote it??" Me: "Yep." She damn-near fainted on me. That was the first copy sold. The book went on for 3 editions, sold 237,000 copies domestically, and was translated into 10 foreign languages. Today, in part due to torrent sites that rip off books, selling 10,000 copies is considered a successful book. Sad, because we will never know how many great books didn't get written because authors knew it wasn't worth writing any more. Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 10:13:33 AM EDT, Tom, wb6b <wb6b@...> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 06:57 AM, Jack, W8TEE wrote: Those were fun times!Yes the were. I remember the West Coast Computer Fairs. Everything from crazy to amazing on display from both companies and individuals showing off their creations.? Would hop on a Southwest Airlines flight in the morning, spend the day at the fair and hop another flight back to Orange County in the evening. Amazing. $20 flights, no security delays. One time they even delayed the rollout, by a minute or so, of the plane because they saw me running towards the checkin counter for the flight. Tom, wb6b -- Jack, W8TEE |
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Re: Trouble ahead
Jack, W8TEE
Farhan: The first C compiler I used was Ron Cain's Tiny C, which was published in Dr. Dobbs. As I recall, it did not support FP, nor did it do structures. Still, it was free and an easy way to get your feet wet in the C pool. Philippe Kahn, president of Borland, actually bought 25 Eco-C88 compilers at one time. He also bought virtually all of the competitors, too. I couldn't figure out why, since I knew he had a team from Sweden (??) working on what was to eventually become Turbo-C. However, they had a falling out with Philippe and, the next day, Philippe went into their offices and they took everything and left during the night. Because Philippe had carefully leaked the advent of the Turbo-C product, it was vaporware when the leaks started to appear. The result was to find a C compiler he could buy...and fast! The Eco-C88 already had an IDE, but we lacked what was called the Large Model code generator. I can't remember the name of the compiler that ended up being Turbo-C, but I did meet the guy who wrote it at the Software Development Conference in Boston once and he did have a very good C compiler. The Lattice C compiler by Dave Schmidt ended up morphing into the Microsoft C compiler. When Borland and Microsoft jumped into the sandbox, there wasn't much room left for us small guys. Still, it was fun while it lasted! Jack, W8TEE
On Thursday, March 25, 2021, 2:43:38 AM EDT, Ashhar Farhan <farhanbox@...> wrote:
Dr. Dobbs usually arrived in India a couple of months late on some magazine stands (actually, just one, in bombay). I was always fascinated by the Ads, I remember seeing Eco-88 in the backpages as a small black and white Ad. Those days, I was trying to get the Brain Damage Software C (BDS-C) going on a cp/m system that i had put together for my undergraduate, final year project. I never worked, but I did manage to write the BIOS, get it to boot from a 5-1/4 inch floppy. It was a miracle as I only had a multimeter to debug. My Elmer's office had a 5 Mhz Tek that I could never figure out how to use. What changed everything was Turbo C. It was an integrated development system for the rest of us. Even today, the Arduino IDE is just a clone of that, as much as the visual studio is. four tabs: editor, file list, status/command window and the debugger. it was a heavens! it takes me a good ten minutes to configure that system with tmux on linux. does anyone have a script for that? - f On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 12:06 PM mister35mm via <mister35mm=[email protected]> wrote: I'd love a SOL-20 and an Edixy Sorcerer and Intertec Superbrain and a DEC VT-180 and a NorthStar Advantage and.... --
Jack, W8TEE |
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