🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2365@wpi.wpi.edu> jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen) writes:
>In article <184@berlioz.nsc.com> nelson@berlioz.UUCP (Ted Nelson) writes:
>
>>Or we could use National Semiconductor's new memory product:  1 Megabit
>					  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>  Write-Only Memory (WOM).  This is extremely inexpensive, has an access
>>  time of only 10 ns, and will be available in a dual-port version in only
>>  a few months.  If you wish to order any of this great part, pleast
>>  contact me directly -- it is such a secret project that we haven't let
>>  Marketing in on it yet.


The WOM is a great product and has been around since at least 1971.  The
first I saw of it, it was as a real looking spec sheet from the
manufacturer (who was the original manufacturer, anybody remember?)  I see
by your posting that there have been many improvements in the design since
then.  Chief among them a substantial reduction in power requirements,
down from the 6.3A of the original.

>
>Speaking of new products, I'd like to introduce my new display devices: the
>SED (smoke emitting diode) and DED (dark emitting diode).  Actually, normal LEDs
>can be resold as SEDs by simply modifying the specs with reguard to power
>requirements: instead of 5 volts through a current limiting resistor, use 9
>volts (or if you'd like to try to use the diode in the 'EED' range (explosion
>emiting diode) use 12 volts) without the limiting resistor.  Note that a power
>supply capable of 10 amps is preferable.

Here in the College of Engineering we have several students who have
become quite skilled at designing with SED technology.  In fact, it is a
graduation requirement that all students do at least one substantial
experiment with an SED.  As one of our graduates put to me a couple years
ago, "I've had a meltdown, hell you're not an engineer until you've at
least one meltdown."  The program has been quite successful and, unlike
nearly all other graduation requirements, we have never had a student
petition for a waiver from this particular requirement.

>
>Unfortunatly, the SED has several marketing problems:
>
>   * short lifespan (only one puff of smoke)

We have two graduate students, Pleishman and Fons, who are attempting to
produce a voltage controlled SED.  Basically their approach is to attempt
to induce a low temperature, voltage controlled closure of the "Smoke
hole".  They call their process "room temperature fusion".  Their work is
controversial with some groups claiming to be able to reproduce the effect
and others denying it.

Ok, it's war story time.  In 1971 I was a post-doc in the biology
department of a large university.  Computers had just started to make
their way into the lab and several of us picked up on them (so much so we
stopped doing biology, but that's another story).  I had a friend
upstairs, a young hotshot assistant prof who was into complex behavior and
neural modeling.  As part of his startup package the University bought him
a PDP/11-20 (one of the first) with batch of memory (12k), a 64k head per
track disk (yes, those are "k's" not "M's"), a DECtape (you don't know
what that is?  Go ask your mother.), a fancy A/D converter and a CRT (no
more messy Teletypes).  In those days the whole shooting match cost over
$40,000.  (Correct that for inflation and see what you get.)  I was not
part of the group, but we were close enough buddies that I shared in the
excitement of the wait for the arrival of the real computer.

Well, the great day dawned bright and clear.  There it was proudly humming
though its acceptance tests while my buddy and the DEC service man patted
each other on the back and laughed.  They were having the time of their
lives.  We set it up and had the FOCAL interpreter running and we were
even talking about putting Algol up.

The next day it was not so bright and clear.  I walked into the lab and
there was the grad student frantically running back and forth between the
front and back of the computer.  He ran behind the machine and shouted,
"Is the DECtape turning?"

"No." I replied.

"Oh Shit." He said.

It seems he was fooling around in the backplane and somehow had managed to
jumper the logic to the 100V ac.  The smoke leaked out of everything.  It
was a mess.  On the power supply board diodes had exploded.  Where a diode
once sat now we only had two chunks of silver wire and a burned spot on a
circuit board.  Whole runs evaporated.  It is very weird to look at a
circuit board and see only neat black lines where those little metal
ribbons used to be.  You get a sort of sick feeling.  He also blew the
timing tracks right off the disk and completely lost contact with the
upper 8k of memory.  This was about the biggest computer mess I have ever
seen.

I would like to report that they put it all back together and they all
lived happily ever after, but that didn't happen.  The repair bill was
over $20,000 and, since it was such a gross case of user mistreatment
(remember it was our boy who connected the wall to the logic) DEC
(rightly) said it was not covered by the warranty.  They offered to give
him the cheap parts free, sell the expensive ones at cost and supply labor
at cost, but the damage was so total it was still too expensive to fix
given the departmental budget.  Sic transit gloria.