RunawaySpoons
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This is a repost but may be a TIL moment for anyone who hasn't already read it / doesn't already know about it.
Edit: noooo of course I had to make a typo in the title, the one place it can't be edited *facepalm*
freedomslave
I read it all, thanks!
Omnimorph2112
This was cool
DecapodianSaysWoopWoopWoopWoop
So I guess Gottried Lebniz had nothing to do with binary code.
Jimbo64
I had to write Fortran programs on punch cards in college. It wasn't fun.
SoraHjort
You know, it's kinda ironic that it was bras that sent us to the moon and not panties.
androgenoide
If Babbage had ever finished his analytical engine it would have used punched cards.
tylerlarson
Mild correction: Punch cards were invented for textiles as described, but it's only binary if those holes are grouped together to represent larger numbers, which it wasn't. The textiles used them to represent spatial patterns, not numerical data.
However, those cards WERE the inspiration for using punch cards for computing with IBMs tabulation machine for tracking taxes... Which was also sold to the Nazis for their own.. uh.. numerical tracking needs. So.. some downsides too.
doctorwut02
The textile industry was already pretty important what with keeping us all from having to walk around naked.
AmyBethMegJo
James Burke talks about this in his series Connections. https://youtu.be/z6yL0_sDnX0?si=gc4HbZLLrSyAedBW
L0rdinquisit0r
father used to be a textile worker before they wiped the factory out. He use to write those punch cards up and fix and repair them as well when code was wrong. The factory went to indonesia i think and they tore the foundations out so noone else could use the site. 40+yrs later the site is still unused.
film888master9
Yes but can it run Doom?
RunawaySpoons
… kinda, in a sense, maybe? /gallery/byoRBvS/comment/2401133893
welluhwhatdoyouwantmetosay
Here is one in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQzpLLhN0fY
PassiveCommenter
chrismofer
magnetic core memory was absolutely NOT the first form of computer storage
Dolenmorgul
Oh man, that takes me back. My mom had a knitting machine like that with those punch cards for patterns. I sold it to another old lady when we had to empty her house, I hope it got to make a lot more sweaters.
sometimesarobot
I'm faiiiirly sure binary was made by a bunch of renaissance math guys, not the textile industry. Jacquard loom, however, is the coolest shit ever.
malexmatt
Boole (19th century) is the guy who invented what we today thing of as binary math but, of course, he 'stood on the shoulders of giants' 1/
malexmatt
from all over the world. 2/2
Malcondrion
If you’re old enough you may remember a show called “connections” which was full of cool shit like this.
TivoMan
Always number your cards, if you drop them, you could be screwed
drduffer
I learned this when I learned Basic in 1974.
youreathing
Rolling On The Floor Little Old Ladying
FuckingTurtleBear
Idontspellcheck
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
MissIWasntItching
I had that on a t-shirt twenty years ago. Fuck, am I old?
Idontspellcheck
Don't feel.bad. I'm so old I remember when the Dead Sea was just sick.
Korkenknopfus
Euchre
My grandmother used to make punch card programs for computers. The irony to me is that her experience in how slowly and how little computers changed in the early years convinced her that development of better machines would take ages. She was not a believer in Moore's Law. She didn't think our Radio Shack computer in our home was a 'real computer', because it didn't take up a whole room. Odd combo of bleeding edge and Luddite.
Trimule
Now, THAT was a thought provoking story. Thanks.
DdCno1
This is very odd, since computers changed incredibly rapidly when punch cards were being used. There were breakthroughs and revolutionary new developments every year.
Euchre
Punched cards lasted around 30 years as the main way to store and run programs. That's a very long time compared to the iterations we made with other storage media. In the time from when she'd been doing punch card programming and I was using our first computer in the house, we'd gone to reel to reel magnetic tape, to cassette tapes and 8" floppies, to the 'new' 5.25" and 3.5" floppies. We're talking less than 15 years.
quzar
You'll see that in the old school bearded sysadmin circles. Deep knowledge of the technology they know and utter rejection of any other.
Euchre
I mused about the future where we'd have big, flat screens like we saw on space ships like Star Trek's Enterprise, and she said we wouldn't have those in my lifetime, likely well over 100 years before we got close. Her last husband, the only grandfather I ever knew, was a TV repairman. He stayed out of her discussions on the matter - happy wife, happy life, you know. Of course, we know what kind of TVs we have now...
ACatNamedJonesy
important history to know in what we now seem to take for granted
ChallengerDeep
Textron.
theMonkeyTrap
I'd bet somebody could try and store crypto keys in these 'knitware' and pass as heirloom to next generation. then upon their death the children will have no clue they've been wearing multi-million (or multi-penny) dollars worth of ancient coins.. sounds like a novel in making.
softsuit
Well, Jinx my RNA/DNA.
HomoSumHumaniAMeNihilAlienumPuto
#3 I now want a knitted blanket with the source code of DOOM as it's pattern. The original DOOM v1.10 is like 2.39 MB which is less than the limit in #5 . Depending on how much space that takes up, Doom Ultimate(1995) came on 5 disks so It cant be much more than ~7MB. You might be able to fit the whole thing on a blanket.
RunawaySpoons
I believe I've read of somebody knitting it into a scarf.
… WAIT WAIT WAIT!
These posts are in response to a previous one:
dudbdjf
The circle is complete.
RunawaySpoons
That original post ALSO inspired the person who did start knitting it (but probably not a scarf at 96 stitches wide):
https://knittingdoom.tumblr.com/
tmpvisitor
Wait. Tumblr is still around? But i have to sign in or up to see posts? Nah, won‘t bother seeing my old profile again. 🥲
wadatahmydamie
This is the coolest post I have seen in a long while
YetAnotherUserNameToRememberDangit
If memory serves me right, dutch weavers watching the Jacquard loom take over their highly paid jobs, would kick their wooden over shoes off into the running mechanism, tearing it up. Those shoes are, and were, called 'sabot', leading to sabotage.
executivedisfunction
Fun side story, the Luddites weren't angry about mechanical progress, they were offended that the first machines replacing them made crap textiles. Owners could still sell the cheaper product, and didn't care.
fleetmind
'Hence the word 'Sabotage'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKLIivrA3g0
JahSureYouBetcha
Yes! I think of this every time I hear the word sabotage.
sometimesarobot
Industrialization killed a lot of jobs and made a lot of people very angry.
dudbdjf
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
sometimesarobot
That's what I think of whenever I say something like this.
Pheehelm
astrangehop
The word "text" comes from "textile"
mikeatike
At first i was like "bullshit" but then I was like "wait I better check". Yep. https://www.etymonline.com/word/text0
astrangehop
GRAMMAR GIRL LIED TO ME?!?!?
astrangehop
Oh wait, it doee check out. Dang ambiguous sentences.
RunawaySpoons
Oooooh cool! See also: 'invest(ment)' because garments were originally so expensive.
mikeatike
Holy shit.
SithElephant
Core memory was not the first, that was several decades in. First, if we're ignoring mechanical computers, was electromagnetic relay storage. A solenoid energised or not, to keep contacts in one position or the other. The first computer was of this sort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z2_(computer) A couple of decades, going through around a dozen options was needed to get to core memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum-tube_computer has a list.
PostTraumaticSouthDisorder
Bad source
SithElephant
'first electronic memory computer
Nalianna
I had a computer that used a mercury delay line as ram... long time ago.
straha242
I forget what it's called, but storing data in mechanical twist-waves in a coil of wire is my fave primitive memory. Waves would be constantly read at the end of the coil, signal cleaned up and reemitted at the start. Data would go round and round until changed.
SithElephant
There were a number of various sorts of 'delay line' type computers, it's a fascinating subset.
gman003
Core memory was not the first, but it was quite common in the early days of computing. To this day, the UNIX/Linux term for a memory dump of a crashed program is a "core dump", because it contains the state of the computer's core memory (now DRAM) at the time of the crash (but not disk memory or other storage).
SithElephant
Depending on how you define early days. It came to dominate wholly fairly shortly after its introduction for a long time. But there were thirty or so years where it hadn't kicked in yet.
gman003
Another neat thing about core memory is that, even though it's random-access and was the fastest tier of memory available at the time, it's non-volatile. Take the power out, the data remains - unlike modern DRAM, which is used for the same roles but loses data after a few seconds without power. NASA was able to find details of how Challenger blew up, by recovering the *pieces* of core memory from the ocean and reconstructing events based on how the computers acted as they were blown apart.
imperfectregulator
What’s that a tumblr post with vague sorta correct information being uploaded and upvoted on Imgur as if it was gospel! Isn’t 100% factual and correct, I’m shocked, shocked I Say!
imperfectregulator
DarkSock
It's wild to think that the guy who invented the first programmable computer in Germany in 1940, Konrad Zuse, was still alive and well in the 90s around the time Pearl Jam released their first album "Ten". He passed away in 1995, the same year Val Kilmer put on the bat nipple suit in "Batman Forever" also starring Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones.
DdCno1
A couple of years ago, my uncle randomly dropped the fact that he met Konrad Zuse at a party. I was the only one freaking out when he mentioned it, since nobody else in the family had heard of him.
echoawoo
Arguably, the first general purpose and Turing complete programmable computer was actually invented by Charles Babbage. The reason I say arguably is because Babbage never actually built the Analytical Engine, only the much simpler Difference Engine. He did provide a bunch of detailed schematics, which was later constructed well after modern computing and transistors took off, and it did work. It required a level of precision that Babbage didn't have in construction but was available for the time
fforw
Babbage's machine was unnecessarily complex because he tried to use decimal instead of the much simpler binary later machines like Zuse's did.
malkavian3str
The thing is Konrad Zuse started out by actually building a mechnical computer, and that thing needed a lot of coaxing to actually work, so he decided to make an electromechnical design with telephone relais, Babbage's machine was never actually build in full, so it is to be questioned if it would have worked reliably.
ThePastmaster
Because no-one wanted to fund him. The English government gave him some funds to make the Difference Engine which they thought could help with bureaucracy. Then they cut funding when they figured out that Babbage was trying to make them an Analytical Engine instead.
SithElephant
I did say 'non mechanical'. At some point, performance of a computer is lower than the performance of an equivalent investment in humans with quill-pens, and mechanical computers are a bit too close to that point often.
echoawoo
Countess Ada von Lovelace ended up writing a number of algorithms for this mechanical computer that only existed on paper, some of which are still in common use today, despite being well over 150 years old at this point.
This is why she's frequently considered the world's first programmer.
echoawoo
And in true programmer fashion, nobody wrote great docs.
malexmatt
The successful implementation of the Analytical Engine and the success of Ms Lovelace in programming for it demonstrate 1/
malexmatt
that there is no 'arguably' going on here -- the Analytical Engine was a modern computer and modern computer 2/