Comments by "Peter S" (@Peter_S_) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. In one documentary I saw on the USSR program, it was said the information from Fuchs was not actually given to the Soviet physicists but it was instead used to double-check their work by their superiors.
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  2. The RCA1802 was more than powerful enough to run a calculator. Thanks to RCA's Silicon-On-Sapphire manufacturing process, they were manufactured in radiation hardened, space rated versions and were used in several displays in the space shuttles, for operating several satellites, and they've been crashed into both Venus and a moon of Jupiter. NASA and JPL have used quite a number of them.
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  3. Ei preamp tubes were the best. Nothing performed like they did in guitar preamps when overdriven. The plate structures were enormous in comparison to others being mae in the 90s, especially in comparisons to the ones out of Chinese factories.
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  4.  @sg5184  Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938. Both superpowers grabbed components of the German program to accelerate their respective weapons programs and Germany's program began 3 years and 4 months before the Manhattan Project began. It's the sort of thing that isn't hard to do once you understand that it CAN be done. There are many different ways to build nuclear weapons; it's not like there's a single secret beyond the one telling that it's possible to crush metal enough to make a fission chain reaction go. Once you know that, the rest is engineering details.
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  5.  @EmsThaBreaks441  No, I'm a nuclear historian and Sandia NL used to be one of my consulting clients. I used to design survey instruments like alpha scintillation spectrometers. Why would you say something so silly?
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  6. Shine on you crazy diamond.
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  7. The first prediction models for US weather that were run on the Cray 1 did not include the Rocky Mountains. Later weather models added such trivial details. Another fun fact is that the only customer to ever take delivery of a Cray 3 supercomputer was the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR in Boulder, Colorado.
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  8. This channel is outrageously good. 👍
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  9. Every presentation on this channel is nothing short of excellent. If YouTube has recommended this channel to you, you likely have excellent tastes.
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  10.  Sem Skywalker  Humon Sem..... Humor.....
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  11. The vector explanation at 21 minutes in inaccurate. In the Cray 1, vector instructions could issue a new result every clock cycle and the adder pipe is 3 cycles long once the opporands have been fetched so the actual time samings is closer to 80 cycles reduced to 25 or 26 rather than 80 reduced to 4.
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  12.  @liesdamnlies3372  Yes, think of that item as an oven thermometer to tell you when your goose has already been cooked. The photomultipliers they're typically attached to have an amplification factor of something huge like 100,000 and they are looking for single photons so don't expect your eyes to have similar sensitivity. Side note: if you power up a photomultiplier tube in room-light, you'll cook it.
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  13.  @nneeerrrd  It was closer to something like NOVA where they interviewed some of the players after the iron curtain fell and glasnost gave some access. Why are you acting all hurt in the rear?
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  14. Also true with the later RGB electron gun illustrations.
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  15. A friend of mine was charged with maintaining an IBM based accounting system for a large city (it ran the Department of Parking and Traffic). He had IBM program listings with commented areas that were marked as 'PPI' where the code just wasted time it seemed. Years later and after retiring his IBM representative told him that PPI stood for Planned Product Improvement. Delete those segments and suddenly everything is X.X times faster!
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  16.  @TheOnlyDamien  Absolutely. My perspective on how fast things run is forever contaminated by starting on 1MHz CPUs. You used to be able to listen to your code run by using an AM radio set between stations. Everything just smokes today.
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  17. Anybody would have been better than Scully or Spindler. A Vic-20 would have been better than Spindler and an old shoe would have been better than Scully.
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  18. You probably watched content about technology and/or finance. I just found the channel recently and I subscribed because I was impressed by the content.
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  19. The US Government has the right to take your patent application for reasons of National Security. They do or at least used to do this all the time when the US still made things in government factories. If the Government doesn't want it then you're given license for exclusive use of the idea for a fixed period of time.
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  20.  @filthyE  I actually know. I actually understand the details like neutron cross sections. Why are you telling me to believe things? 🤣 Actually, those “engineering details" are not that hard. Hard to make the most efficient possible, but not hard at all to make work at lower efficiency.
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  21. Back in the mid 1990s I worked for Sun as a contractor on part of the Internet Gateway for Solaris package. The company campus has some prison-like feelings to it and was called "Sun Quentin" by the people who worked there. Outside the elevators were miniature free "cafes" where you could get goosed up on sugar and caffeine and the engineering team I worked with was shockingly morbidly obese, but they were brilliant and obedient and sat at their keyboards. Andy was famous in Silicon valley for driving around in a red Italian sports car with a pair of ladies would could have been super-models. It was an interesting place.
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  22.  @liesdamnlies3372  🙄
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  23. AMPEX in Redwood City! The video tape recorder was somewhat important in technology history and that campus also produced the word "glitch". Amdahl is another big Silicon Valley company that few know about but holds a very important place.
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  24.  @tommystup5780  StorageTek was actually just down the road in Broomfield, CO. I drive past the empty fields where it once stood on my way to work including the remains of two streets, Disc Drive (spelled with a C) and Tape Drive which was the main entrance. There's little else to suggest the pasture behind the fence used to have more there.
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  25. Excellent. Thank you for posting.
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  26. I'm sure that if the effort is successful it will necessitate the creation of an episode called "The Rise of India's Semiconductor Industry". I look forward to watching it.
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  27. My first 16K came at a cost of $279. I think they were 350ns chips. Finding bad chips in a repair was fun.... Just use your hand. The chip that gave you the 2nd degree burn needed replacement.
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  28. About 10 years ago Avago bought them and their RAID division which came from AMI. You are correct.
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  29. Why do they call them apartments when they're all stuck together?
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  30. @modest mouse colored person I've never heard a chemist mispronounce 'covalent' in a lab, including when English is their second or third language. I used to design scintillation spectrometers and have only heard (VAY-lence). I'm driven nuts by people who say (nuke-U-Lar) too.
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  31. Dee RAM, Ess RAM, PeeEss RAM, Eff RAM, EssDee RAM, and now we have Emm RAM too.
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  32. 🤣🤣🤣
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  33.  @zaxmaxlax  I had one old Telefunken ECC83 with giant plates and it sounded delicious, but Ei was still producing new tubes in the 90s when Telefunken tubes were pieces of history.
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  34. This channel is consistently awesome.
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  35.  @ejomatic7480  Are you smoking polyester? LOL. Ever hear of Albert Einstein? Hans Bethe? Werner Heisenberg? How about Klaus Fuchs? Germans. The American program took full advantage of the nuclear physics abilities of the Germans, Hungarians, Italians, etc., etc. who ran away from involvement at home with the axis powers. The German program also likely had internal sabotage from intentional "miscalculation" of critical mass. The Manhattan project began 3 and 1/3 years AFTER the tiny program run by the German Post Office and the fact the Germans were going after it compelled the US to do the same. The only thing that's hard about making special weapons is getting the special material. The engineering of how to make the special material go boom is not hard at all and can be done in many different ways. You might be shocked at how easy it is to build a small nuke which can be set off with a mechanical timer. We had them in the 1950s. There are even multiple designs that fit into artillery shells.
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  36.  @EmsThaBreaks441  It's just a fact that Klaus Fuchs, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, and other Germans in the American program escaped the potential German program after fission was discovered in Germany in 1938 by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, and Austrian physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. They were simply big on such things. I'm from California, dude, and I'm not German.
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  37. Some older kids like me are just saying, "well, that's an error."
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  38. That was rather wild to see a picture of Tanforan. That mall was suffering from rigor mortis in the 1980s and there were almost no shoppers then as well.
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  39. snifffffffffffffffffffffffffff
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  40. Not really... a thermonuclear device was already constructed and tested by North Korea and India claimed a scaled down thermonuclear device in test Shakti in 1998 which yielded 60kt while the two test of the primary were much smaller. The pictures North Korea released of their thermonuclear design's case demonstrate they understand the concepts as well as any Western physicist with access to open literature.
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  41. A 5¼ full height 330MB drive in 1990 or 1991? A CDC Wren perhaps?
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  42. Interesting perspective. As with the comparison between a Vidicon camera tube and a CRT, many converse analogies do apply.
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  43. The Soviet semiconductor industry took Integrated Injection Logic (IIL) for quite a ride. In the West, IIL was quickly replaced by CMOS and saw limited use.
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  44.  @zachlafond2652  You can easily now get illustrations with a search which represent what a "5-cube" looks like when you visualize the edges and vertices. I used to build such structure models from toothpicks and marshmallows before CAD got good. If you picture a CPU at each vertice, then the interconnections between them run along the cube edges. This was a popular high performance computing architecture in the 1980s and 1990s. The 5-cube allows 32 CPUs to share information at very high bandwidth.
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  45.  @xenuburger7924  Not quite true. Meth is classic amphetamine with an additional methyl group. Meth is a single carbon and three hydrogens away from the core of amphetamines but that's effectively meaningless because it's the how and where of those atoms that counts. Meth is METHylated Alpha Methylated PHenylEThylAMINE. Adderall is a mixture of four different forms of speed including the classic amphetamine sulfate mixed with amphetamine aspartate monohydrate, dextroamphetamine saccharate, and dextroamphetamine sulfate.
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  46.  @floycewhite6991  Data from a large auto insurance company in California showed that cannabis users had lower accident rates and there's a reason most extreme athletes are also heavy pot smokers. Michael Phelps has won 23 Gold medals, 3 Silver medals, and 2 Bronze medals at the Olympics and he's been photographed with a bong. The joke is on you.
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  47. RISC-V is a freely available design for a set of CPU instructions. Google is your friend if there isn't an Asianometry on it, and if there isn't there should be.
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