This is a bit off-the-wall but maybe you could use a variant of the approach used to see tiny movements in video? There you offset two clips by a frame and "subtract" them so that anything not moving just kind of vanishes, and purposeful movement shows up as a bright line.
Maybe doing something similar with a spectrogram would work? Two spectrograms, one delayed slightly with respect to the other, and subtract one from the other, and you might see bright spots that appear where the sound changes.
> It started at $27,000 [in 2026 dollars about $282,000], a surprisingly low cost for the era, and about a thousand were sold.
To give you a sense of scale, in 1963 when the first PDP8 was launched at $27k, here in the UK the very first JCB 3C backhoe loader was launched at around £2500 - roughly a quarter of the price of a PDP8 in real terms, or about three year's salary for its driver.
So think in terms of how much "You know what? It'd save us so much time and money to just buy ourselves one of *these* things" you could buy yourself with the money :-)
I was also thinking about the prices and what problems they were being used for to motivate the investment.
It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:
> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”
> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.
> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].
> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].
I'd like it if it would actually show me how much sun it thinks I'd get at the postcode I put in. I've got about a third of an acre of garden in a 6 acre field to play with, before I start having to dig up roads. I can afford to be quite free and easy with placement ;-)
Same. Want to update the firmware in the computer? Sure but you'll need to unscrew the driver's seat, unscrew the desktop PC sized ECU, unscrew its four pencil-thick battery connections, unplug its 27 connectors, unscrew the 50 screws in three slightly different sizes holding the top cover on, remove the heatsinks, unscrew the eight screws holding the motherboard in, and desolder both the 144-pin 68HCxxx chips that do all the thinking.
There's a big custom chip made by GEC Plessey that has a small flash chip beside it, but it's totally undocumented. They also make the custom chips in the door, window switch, and seat outstations. I found some very very general documentation about them but nothing enough to start picking the firmware apart.
They did. AND, OR and NOT were bitwise operations as well as conditional operators. E.g. POKE 254, PEEK(254) AND 127 would turn off bit 7 of memory location 254 without affecting other bits.
I did actually know that Commodore BASIC had it but had forgotten. I don't think I'd ever used GW-BASIC or QBASIC, weren't they on PCs?
Apple IIs weren't really a thing over here although the very first home computer I ever used was an Apple II belonging to a friend of my mother's - Tony van der Kuyl, father of video games magnate Chris van der Kuyl ;-)
> send miniature programs to the disk controller to have it seek out the precise record you're looking for
A very long time ago, a guy I used to work with was porting a sales and stock control database he'd written on the Commodore PET to a PC. By then he had a 286 with a 20MB hard disk and 2MB of RAM to play with - whopping stuff! - but his original program would assemble up a query routine, and transmit it to the 6502 in the PET disk drives over HPIB. Then it would chunter away discovering the records it needed to construct a reply while the host computer could continue working as normal. It was absolutely genius stuff, and it made the whole system seem really responsive even though in reality it was pretty slow.
I grew up driving tractors and diggers, it's a very similar thing. Up and down, up and down, Perkins AD3 at 1700rpm for 540rpm PTO shaft speed, it all sounds like a mantra. Write a prayer on a strip of paper, wrap it round the shaft, offer up a prayer nine times a second.
I'm not a Buddhist either but the Tao helps me find the Way to accept diesel being nearly two quid a litre right when the good weather starts and all the fields need worked.
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