Thomlex - History

1952 Computer $62,500

bill — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 16:02:00 -0500

Complete with tapedrive and typewriter. Operates at around 0.12Mhz, has roughly 2K of memory and each tape holds around 360K. It has 200 tubes, compared to hundreds of millions of transistors in a modern PC.

The thing that caught my eye about this is the typewriter. It's a Flexowriter by Singer. I bought one when I was 15 (it was 20+ years old by then). It was basically a typewriter that could read and write punched tape. I used it to print receipts for customers on my paper-route, and I was the shizits among my fellow paperboys.

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The Fog of War

bill — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:56:00 -0500

This is one of my favorite movies. It's an interview with Robert McNamara, who is a fascinating individual. Born into humble beginnings, he has a professor at Harvard, fought in WWII, moved up the ranks in Ford (where he introduced seat belts into cars) becoming the first CEO who wasn't a member of the Ford family, was tapped by President Kennedy to be Secretary of Defense, continued to serve under President Johnson, and later ran the World Bank.

This movie focuses on his involvement in Vietnam, World War II, and his thoughts on war in general. He's in his 80's (he'll be 90 this year), but is still amazingly sharp and eloquent. When I grow up I want to be just like him.

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Science's Top Ten Experiments

bill — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:04:00 -0500

Robert P. Crease recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiments of all time; this is a list of the top ten.

This graphic demonstrates an experiment done by Galileo where he rolled a ball down a plane and used a water clock to time it's speed. He discovered that the ball accelerated, something commonly known now, but at the time, this conflicted with Aristotle's prediction that the rate would be constant.

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