Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer Boston-based auction house RR Auction currently has an out of this world item up for bid: IBM computers collectively used aboard twenty Space Shuttle missions. Between 1981 and 1991, NASA used computers with separate CPU and IOP (input/output processor) components. The CPU and IOP on offer saw the insides of the Columbia, …
"NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet struggles to sell"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61102759
The buyer of a non-fungible token (NFT) of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet says he "may never sell it" after receiving a series of low bids.
Malaysia-based Sina Estavi has been offered just over $6,200 (£4,720), about 0.2% of the $2.9m he paid for it.
There is a court case going on where the advisor to someone accusing someone else of libel has lost her phone overboard when asked to hand it over to the defence and is now claiming her computer was wiped by accident when told to hand that over. I think the only use for NFTs is probably as an "I spent the money on one and then lost the computer" ponzi scheme!
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that this piece of hardware will be easier to restore than the AGM.
The AGM restoration; I was only going to watch five minutes of the second episode. I ended up sitting through the whole thing (30-odd episodes?).
It is mindboggling how much good content there is on YT. The production value is usually sub-par compared with commercial TV, but the actual content is pure gold in comparison.
The algorithm has been effective in my case.
Somebody here turned me onto AvE's channel. From there I accidentally dropped onto the 8-bit guy's content (sadly, his excellent 'Tech companies of Texas' series did not attract adequate viewing numbers, so he discontinued it). That earned me a recommendation to get to CuriousMarc's stuff, and by then the damage had already been done. Hooked, hooked and hooked.
A year ago the 8-bit guy mentioned Mouser a few times. Turns out they ship stuff to Sweden. It wasn't even a paid advert, but mission accomplished. Have bought quite many boxes from them since.
Genuine question here. Some decades ago, a very technical friend I met at the Uni I went to, and had no reason to doubt, told me they used Z80B processors on the shuttle, because it only had <insert a number here I can't remember> official documented errors and therefore it was approved for "USE-IN-SPAAAAACE". They apparently could not use the then current 486, or previous x86 processors, because too many errors were still being discovered, and NASA liked to work with hardware that had not had newly discovered errors in a defined period of time. To this day I've genuinely believed this, because it made sense, but old me is starting to have doubts. It may not have been the Z80B after all, but is there anyone here that can confirm the essence of what I've believed all this time, or is this one of those urban legends, or something that may have started off as true and got carried away etc.
It may be there were no available space hardened versions. For use in space because of the increased radiation everything on the chips were built bigger to reduce the chance of radiation causing glitches. A bigger z80 is a lot more feasible than a bigger 486 and if it does the job then there is no need to go to the massive expense of producing a space hardened device that is at the edge of technology at normal size.
"Old" hardware does get used a lot in space. This Wikipedia page lists rad-hardened CPUs, and there's nothing there with oodles of computing grunt.
My fav is the RCA1802 - a truly unique CPU with clock rates down to zero. It got used (so far as I can remember) in both BT pay phones and the first version of the US's Tomahawk cruise missile.
My fav is the RCA1802 - a truly unique CPU
Which goes to show that you havn't programmed one. An 8 bit cpu without call and return.
with clock rates down to zero.
And up to, well not that much higher than zero (200k instruction rate)
Not that instruction set deficiencies ever stopped anyone...
http://www.forth.org/svfig/kk/10-2014-Rabbie.pdf
It was my first processor. Apart from being almost the only really low power mpu, you could dma your program straight into memory from switches, so no monitor rom was needed.
All you needed was an '1802, cmos ram, and two hex* switches to set the instructions and a push button to write them, and you have a complete computer. 1 output bit, but that was sufficient for a morse beacon keyer.
Excellent training for when I had to bootstrap a pdp11 back to life a few years later
*yeah I know I'm a pussy, and should have used 8 binary switches
You're right about my not having programmed one (my old Dad did that bit, like yourself using hex switches, eventually hooking up an ASR 33), but I liked them for their electrical and physical characteristics. They were, and still are in some regards, a unique odd-ball. You could run them on odd voltages (e.g. a 9V battery), though I notice today's ones from Renesas intend 5V operation. They had very good noise immunity. And, such a temperature range! The any-clock-rate-you-like aspect was interesting too, allowing things like running the clock speed at the data rate of a radio link.
Used to work on a ICL 1902 which had a cassette tape with the OS on it. You needed to key in the cassette loading routine when it crashed (it could detect lightning anywhere within 30 miles and crash) and I dare say 40 years later I could probably key in the code now it I had to - I cant remember it but I bet its somewhere in my brain and the right actions would trigger it!
Great to see these for sale. The summer of 1979 I worked at IBM Federal Systems Div in Owego NY in the "pre assembly dept," 2nd shift and among other duties I mounted and soldered connectors to shuttle computer boards.
Those shuttle jobs stopped after someone (NOT ME!!) was rolling a completed unit down a hall on a cart, and dumped it to the ground upon hitting a crack in the concrete floor. From then on only supervisors touched shuttle components.
Sadly, once the summer came to an end I was told not to apply back again. It seems I made management look bad because most of our DoD business was "cost plus" with reeaaallllly long times associated with each manufacturing step, and I took beating those times as my challenge. On many shifts I exceeded 3 or 4 times rate. Supposedly that made IBM look bad to their customers. And nothing ever came back for bad quality...
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