Proper breakthroughs/inventions.

[Mark Walsh]

"Stefan Heinzmann" <stefan_heinzmann@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:cmonvk$6uo$03$1@news.t-online.com...

ChrisGibboGibson wrote:

But if you are content with innovations of that scale, you could cite
some of Widlar's work, for example the bandgap reference.

Things I also find outstanding is the planar process, the DRAM, and on a
higher scale the invention of virtual memory.

--
Cheers
Stefan

Widlar would definitely come near the top of my list. I'm not aware of a
modern op amp that doesn't use some variation of his current mirror in the
diff amp input stage.

Mark Walsh

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 22:45:26 +0000, Andrew Holme wrote:

ChrisGibboGibson wrote:
"Andrew Holme" wrote:
[snip]
It only solved simultaneous equations so it wasn't a truly general
purpose computer.

Oh yes, that's another one - the computer.


Where is the dividing line? You know like, that wasn't a compuer but
this is?

Gibbo

Quite. Who was first? USA, UK or DE? Was it ENIAC, Colossus or Conrad
Zuse's Z1?

I would say it's down to -
1. electronic vs electro-mechanical
2. fixed / hard-wired programming vs stored program

but I digress.

Napier's Bones.

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 00:06:21 +0000, ChrisGibboGibson wrote:

Paul Burridge wrote:

[snip]

No, no, no! Every pizza comes as standard with a sub-topping of tomato
puree, rendering the addition of tomato katsup the culinary equivalent
of tautology.
A recent survey published by some European health advisory body (and
reported in the Financial Times of 6/7 November) has found that eating
more pizza helps prevent heart disease. The same study also showed
that eating fresh fruit and vegetables is a waste of time and doesn't
prevent bowel cancer.


And my GP told me that whenever I wished to eat a kebab or curry to make sure I
got properly pissed beforehand.

That way I will shit out all the bacteria and maggots, that both substances are
full of, before they infest me and make me ill.

Anyway puree tastes bland compared to red sorce.

Ketchup would be awful on pizza. Proper pizza sauce is Italian

pasta sauce, with garlic, and oregano, and gawdknowsall what else,
but it's got a way different flavor from ketchup.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Robert Baer]

ChrisGibboGibson wrote:

I was thinking about electronic inventions. Ones that *really* made a
difference or represented a *huge* leap in either technology or thinking.

Obviously the transistor and IC, but when you look into those they weren't
really flash inventions, more a development. History shows similar properties
in the case of the transistor had been demonstrated for years beforehand. The
IC was really just bunging more than one of them together. Not really a
breakthrough.

The two that spring to my mind initially are the HP wein oscillator using the
bulb and the Wadley triple loop, drift cancelling superhet, which I still think
is amazing.

What would others propose for sheer inventiveness?

Gibbo

Yes; Lilienfeld has 3 patents on the transistor in Jan 1930, Sep 1932
and Mar 1933.
Seems that whats his name and Bardeen copied some of the wording and
took all the credit they could squeeze out.

 

[Active8]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:47:07 GMT, Kevin Aylward wrote:

ChrisGibboGibson wrote:
snip
Virtual memory? An invention that would have no use whatsoever if PC
programmers learnt how to write software properly.

I disagree. There are many valid reasons why virtual memory is pretty
much indispensable for *good* code. For example, simply handling large
data files, e.g. Spice output files. These could be 100's MB. One simple
opens up the file, even if one doesn't have enough RAM.

Opening a file proves nothing. You have to read the file to get it
into memory. You know malloc will return NULL if there ain't enough
to satisfy your request and that a stack array will overflow. That
VirtualAlloc() was good for something, but often we can just read
parts of a file into memory and reuse it for the next chunk of data.

Maybe a better example of virtual memory is when I have these 20
some winders open and all those processes have to be swapped out to
swap space. It gets ugly when you're out of memory and swap space.
You can get a cup of tea (or a bigger HD) waiting for XP/2k to
increase the swap space.

To write
specialised code to handle this sort of thing would be very messy
indeed.

The real world is always going to have more data than RAM available to
handle it, so its got nothing to do with poor software writing. Its just
the way it is.

Until one finds the need to have it all in memory - parallel
processing. distributed computing, supercomputers, etc.
--
Best Regards,
Mike

 

[Paul Burridge]

On 09 Nov 2004 00:06:21 GMT, chrisgibbogibson@aol.com
(ChrisGibboGibson) wrote:

And my GP told me that whenever I wished to eat a kebab or curry to make sure I
got properly pissed beforehand.

Who's your GP? It's about time I changed mine, anyway.

That way I will shit out all the bacteria and maggots, that both substances are
full of, before they infest me and make me ill.

Eminently sensible!

Anyway puree tastes bland compared to red sorce.

I would strongly urge all democrats to buy and consume as much tomato
ketchup as possible. Just make sure it's Heinz. That nice Mrs.
Kerry-Heinz needs to recoup the millions of bucks she vainly and
fruitlessly spunked on desperately trying to become the new First
Lady. ;-}
--

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

 

[Paul Burridge]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 03:14:33 GMT, Rich The Philosophizer
<null@example.net> wrote:

Ketchup would be awful on pizza. Proper pizza sauce is Italian
pasta sauce, with garlic, and oregano, and gawdknowsall what else,
but it's got a way different flavor from ketchup.

Indeed, Rich. When I used to make my own pizzas right from scratch, I
used this Italian sauce called pasatta for the purpose. I'm not sure
if that's what the officionardos use, but it must be pretty darn close
to it. The secret of a good pizza to is to go sparingly with the
cheese and whatever you're using for the tomato sauce base. Oh, and
scorch the base before baking.
--

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"ChrisGibboGibson" <chrisgibbogibson@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20041108164856.23255.00000337@mb-m03.aol.com...

Virtual memory? An invention that would have no use whatsoever if PC
programmers learnt how to write software properly.

Funny how the teenagers always think they are the first humans on the
planet:

Virtual Memory is a "Big-Iron" thing; Mainframes, from when they built them
from discrete flip-flops on baking-tray-size PCB's and Cache was physical
loops of steel wire.

It is obvious that the PeeCee crowd does not bother to learn anything that
is not on MTV, thus they re-invent everything - badly ;-)

 

[Kevin Aylward]

Active8 wrote:

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:47:07 GMT, Kevin Aylward wrote:

ChrisGibboGibson wrote:
snip
Virtual memory? An invention that would have no use whatsoever if PC
programmers learnt how to write software properly.

I disagree. There are many valid reasons why virtual memory is pretty
much indispensable for *good* code. For example, simply handling
large data files, e.g. Spice output files. These could be 100's MB.
One simple opens up the file, even if one doesn't have enough RAM.

Opening a file proves nothing. You have to read the file to get it
into memory. You know malloc will return NULL if there ain't enough
to satisfy your request and that a stack array will overflow.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I was skipping the details to keep it simple.

That
VirtualAlloc() was good for something, but often we can just read
parts of a file into memory and reuse it for the next chunk of data.

But this is messy. When I read spice data in I just allocate a CArray
based on the size of the data in the file. I don't care a shit about the
details and don't want to be bothered with them. I just want to write
the simplest code I can to get my function working.

Maybe a better example of virtual memory is when I have these 20
some winders open and all those processes have to be swapped out to
swap space. It gets ugly when you're out of memory and swap space.
You can get a cup of tea (or a bigger HD) waiting for XP/2k to
increase the swap space.

I generally have about 10 open programs at once.

To write
specialised code to handle this sort of thing would be very messy
indeed.

The real world is always going to have more data than RAM available
to handle it, so its got nothing to do with poor software writing.
Its just the way it is.


Until one finds the need to have it all in memory - parallel
processing. distributed computing, supercomputers, etc.

Of course its great to have it all in RAM, but RAM size for us
cheapskates is always behind what the state of the art physics
computations can afford.

Kevin Aylward
salesEXTRACT@anasoft.co.uk
http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

 

[JeffM]

Andrew Holme

UK of course. As always.
Gibbo

Yes, but not with Colossus...Babbage's Difference Engine.
Paul Burridge

Any evidence it was ever built, or was it like Harold Black's work?
Hey. Would Negative Feedback qualify?

 

[Steve Taylor]

JeffM wrote:

Andrew Holme

UK of course. As always.
Gibbo

Yes, but not with Colossus...Babbage's Difference Engine.
Paul Burridge


Any evidence it was ever built,

Yes, but only conceptual bits. The thing HAS been built using the
drawings and isin the Science Museumin London. Nathan Myhrvold was
paying to get the output printer Babbage designed, built and fitted to
the engine.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/babbage/index.asp

Steve

 

[Andrew Holme]

JeffM wrote:

Andrew Holme

UK of course. As always.
Gibbo

Yes, but not with Colossus...Babbage's Difference Engine.
Paul Burridge

Any evidence it was ever built, or was it like Harold Black's work?
Hey. Would Negative Feedback qualify?

Babbage finished niether the Difference Engine, which tabulated polynomials,
nor his Analytical Engine which was a general purpose computer. Later,
others did build difference engines including, recently, a team at the
London Science Museum.

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <afpvo09m8bd10erqffov49dp5chce7e5o0@4ax.com>,
John Larkin <jjlarkin@highSNIPlandTHIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 22:20:52 +0100, Stefan Heinzmann
stefan_heinzmann@yahoo.com> wrote:


Things I also find outstanding is the planar process, the DRAM, and on a
higher scale the invention of virtual memory.


Virtual memory is *the* enabling technology of slow, buggy, bloated
code.

But virtual machines makes debugging of OSs easier so there is a bit of a
pay back from the same area.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 14:23:27 -0800, JeffM wrote:

Andrew Holme

UK of course. As always.
Gibbo

Yes, but not with Colossus...Babbage's Difference Engine.
Paul Burridge

Any evidence it was ever built, or was it like Harold Black's work?
Hey. Would Negative Feedback qualify?

Of course not.

Unless you mean the _discovery_ of negative feedback?

Negative feedback has been what's kept us all from falling off the
edge lo these many years.

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 07:47:07 +0000, Kevin Aylward wrote:
....

The real world is always going to have more data than RAM available to
handle it, so its got nothing to do with poor software writing. Its just
the way it is.

Kevin, you sure know how to hurt a guy. Here I am, Joe Apostrophe Police,
ever vigilant for extraneous apostrophes, and here, you've gone and left
out a couple that were _supposed_ to be there!

Give a guy a break, OK?

;-)
Rich

 

[Product developer]

Active8 <reply2group@ndbbm.net> wrote in message news:<289iptdj4izt.dlg@news.individual.net>...

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 03:14:33 GMT, Rich The Philosophizer wrote:

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 00:06:21 +0000, ChrisGibboGibson wrote:

Still an idiot Paul Burridge wrote:

A recent survey published by some European health advisory body (and
reported in the Financial Times of 6/7 November) has found that eating
more pizza helps prevent heart disease.

Then please eat more.

snip
And my GP told me that whenever I wished to eat a kebab or curry to make sure I
got properly pissed beforehand.

That way I will shit out all the bacteria and maggots, that both substances are
full of, before they infest me and make me ill.

hmmm...
Anyway puree tastes bland compared to red sorce.

Pizza shops go throuh lots of sauce, so they don't go whole hog on
it like they do with Marinara.

Ketchup would be awful on pizza. Proper pizza sauce is Italian
pasta sauce,

not. Puree, paste, water, spices, ... but not a full blown Marinara.

with garlic, and oregano, and gawdknowsall what else,
but it's got a way different flavor from ketchup.

And most people/families have a "secret" ingredient. BTW, I think
it's the licopene (?) in tomatoes (not pizza with all that
counterproductive cheese) that prevents heart disease and cancer.

Without a doubt one of my favorite inventions beside my own has to be
the better of the two original buffalo wing sauces from Buffalo N.Y.
My favorite is the Santora's recipe which I have determined is the
best wing sauce on the planet. The only remaining restaurant is in
Mission Viejo California where I have pleasured my palate nearly every
week since 1980. 40 to 50K in wings later it is still the best damn
sauce I have ever experienced. People fly into Orange County from all
over just to get their fix.

As embarrassing as it is, my favorite abandoned invention was the LED
tennis shoe that I invented in 1978. I was designing disco light
controllers for Tivoli Industries, the company that patented strip
lighting you can see in theaters and amusement parks all over the
world. After designing many famous lighted dance floors I came to the
conclusion that the lights could go into shoes too. It eventually led
to the LED apparel craze that resulted in LED's in tee shirts and
other apparel. After introducing the disco shoe with flashing lights
in the heels that was sold all over the U.S. during the disco era, I
was approached by a tennis shoe manufacturer at a shoe show in Dallas
to design a lighted jogging shoe. The original intent was to provide a
safe shoe for night jogging. Just a couple years after the shoes were
released the market died and I lost interest in keeping up my
maintenance fees on the patent thinking that no one would ever do LEDs
in shoes again!

Every time I see kids wearing LED flashing shoes I reflect back on my
brilliant decision to let the patent go. It was my first realization
that fads do come back for an encore now and then!

I gladly pay all my patent maintenance fees now in advance.

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:32:44 +0000, Paul Burridge wrote:

On 09 Nov 2004 00:06:21 GMT, chrisgibbogibson@aol.com
(ChrisGibboGibson) wrote:

And my GP told me that whenever I wished to eat a kebab or curry to make sure I
got properly pissed beforehand.

Who's your GP? It's about time I changed mine, anyway.

That way I will shit out all the bacteria and maggots, that both substances are
full of, before they infest me and make me ill.

Eminently sensible!

Anyway puree tastes bland compared to red sorce.

I would strongly urge all democrats to buy and consume as much tomato
ketchup as possible. Just make sure it's Heinz. That nice Mrs.
Kerry-Heinz needs to recoup the millions of bucks she vainly and
fruitlessly spunked on desperately trying to become the new First
Lady. ;-}

She must have got lucky. One of the projects I was a document
coder on (a job where data entry drones build a cross-reference
database in litigation discovery) was a little band of five millionaires,
who wanted to get in on the "sell power to the electric company"
bandwagon, and one of their big projects was a cogeneration plant,
where the waste heat from the generator was used to heat a greenhouse,
where they had planned to raise tomatoes, and break into the Ketchup
market.

They went bust, and I made $8.00/hr for a couple of months coding
documents for the lawsuit(s).

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:55:10 +0000, Ken Smith wrote:

In article <afpvo09m8bd10erqffov49dp5chce7e5o0@4ax.com>,
John Larkin <jjlarkin@highSNIPlandTHIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote:
On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 22:20:52 +0100, Stefan Heinzmann
stefan_heinzmann@yahoo.com> wrote:


Things I also find outstanding is the planar process, the DRAM, and on a
higher scale the invention of virtual memory.


Virtual memory is *the* enabling technology of slow, buggy, bloated
code.

But virtual machines makes debugging of OSs easier so there is a bit of a
pay back from the same area.

So the challenge, then, apparently, is to find a way to bring all this

virtual crap into real reality, right?

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:02:41 -0800, Product developer wrote:

As embarrassing as it is, my favorite abandoned invention was the LED
tennis shoe that I invented in 1978. I was designing disco light
controllers for Tivoli Industries, the company that patented strip
lighting you can see in theaters and amusement parks all over the
world. After designing many famous lighted dance floors I came to the
conclusion that the lights could go into shoes too. It eventually led
to the LED apparel craze that resulted in LED's in tee shirts and
other apparel. After introducing the disco shoe with flashing lights
in the heels that was sold all over the U.S. during the disco era, I
was approached by a tennis shoe manufacturer at a shoe show in Dallas
to design a lighted jogging shoe. The original intent was to provide a
safe shoe for night jogging. Just a couple years after the shoes were
released the market died and I lost interest in keeping up my
maintenance fees on the patent thinking that no one would ever do LEDs
in shoes again!

Every time I see kids wearing LED flashing shoes I reflect back on my
brilliant decision to let the patent go. It was my first realization
that fads do come back for an encore now and then!

I gladly pay all my patent maintenance fees now in advance.

The thing that stands out in my alleged mind is the story under either
"dumb criminals" or "the Darwin effect" where some kid wearing LED
sneakers ripped somebody off and tried to escape by running into the
woods.

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Tim Shoppa]

Stefan Heinzmann <stefan_heinzmann@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<cmonvk$6uo$03$1@news.t-online.com>...

Strange that you single out the inventiveness of the Wien bridge
oscillator with the bulb over the development of the transistor. Both
were developments that relied on previous work. That's not to belittle
their achievement, but Hewlett's thesis for example contains a reference
to a paper by Meacham that described the usage of a lamp in a crystal
oscillator. (I got this from Jim William's book).

The Meacham bridge is phenomenally clever. The lamp for output
regulation is clever enough, but the way that the bridge is used to
multiply the Q of an already high-Q resonator is mind-blowing. A
good ovenized Meacham bridge oscillator has stability not too far different
from the early atomic clocks. (Of course there are other differences...
having the second redefined in terms of an atomic transition makes the
crystal at best a secondary reference).

The whole bridge concept (esp Wheatstone bridge) is a fundamental change
in thinking (maybe "wrapping your mind around a problem" is a better
phrase!), and new uses (esp in active or feedback circuits) are
still being developed a century and a half later.

Tim.