Museum Exhibit

[beasleybodyshop]

Thought I would share this with you.

As some of you know, I work at a science museum here in Dallas. We have an exhibit hall here that is underwritten by Texas Instruments, and amongst other things electronic we have this "History of the microchip" display I built and installed. One of the donors gave us a collection of cool stuff, such as one of the ENIAC computers rectifier tubes, one of 4 of Jack Kilbys first Integrated Circuit he buit (coincidentally enough, it was a signal generator) along with a modern microchip.

[Phil_S]

Really cool stuff. So, don't keep us in suspense. What tube is that?

[lord preset]

That RCA tube is clearly a re-labeled Chinese knock-off. Shameless.

[beasleybodyshop]

Really cool stuff. So, don't keep us in suspense. What tube is that?

I don't know. Looks like a rectifier tube to me. I looked for an octagon label with the designation but it wasn't on there. I asked the people who donated it and they told me it came from an ENIAC computer. Seemed a bit newer than 40s era to me, but I can't be sure. They made me wear cotton gloves when I installed it. They insisted it was "priceless"

[dcribbs1412]

Very cool stuff!
17000 + tubes in a computer...wow
then in under 10 years shrinking technology down to the size of a pea...
dare I say alien technology...
Funny how fast we are continuing to evolve our technologies
Thanks for sharing

Darin

[NickC]

Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months, Soon to be Every 12 Hours

Knowledge Doubling Curve

Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
Human Brain Indexing Will Consume Several Billion Petabytes

In a recent lecture at Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is attempting to map the human brain, has calculated that several billion petabytes of data storage would be needed to index the entire human brain. The Internet is currently estimated to be 5 million terabytes (TB) of which Google has indexed roughly 200 TB or just .004% of its total size. The numbers involved are astounding especially when considering the size of the human brain and the number of neurons in it.

Full article here:
http://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-do ... hours/3950

[briane]

my pop used to work on one of those old punchcard computers...

one day.....

he tripped and dropped the cards on the way to put them in the reader.....

1 month later of sorting out 10k cards......

[armillary]

I see the tube is courtesy of the Perot foundation. That's Ross Perot. Worked for IBM briefly, before founding EDS. Made lots of money in the computer services business and ran for president in '92 and '96. He's worth over $3.5 billion. I'm sure everything he owns is "priceless."

[cbass]

Anyone up for a heist?

[RWood]

Anyone up for a heist?

I'm in! You find out where he keeps his stuff text me.

[billc]

Thanks, interesting stuff!...and out of curiosity about the power consumption (150kW but not as much as I expected, a medium size telephone office uses more) I looked at the wikipedia article...and learned that many of the tubes were octals we use in our amps today...6SJ7, 6SN7, 6V6, 6L6, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

[eniam rognab]

thats cool that you got to be a part of that! sounds like a fun gig at the myooseeum!

in my one of my microprocessors classes we watched a couple videos about the history of the pyooter and the tube portion was always presented as "look at how ancient and primitive this was" well here we are in the fyooture and i cant spell right

have fun buddy! thanks for the fiberglass btw, look for it here shortly

[Reeltarded]

Swap tubes. Dare.

[martin manning]

Cue Mission: Impossible theme...

[beasleybodyshop]

I see the tube is courtesy of the Perot foundation. That's Ross Perot. Worked for IBM briefly, before founding EDS. Made lots of money in the computer services business and ran for president in '92 and '96. He's worth over $3.5 billion. I'm sure everything he owns is "priceless."

Yeah Mr. Perot comes into the museum all the time....I guess I would too if my name was on the building Truth be told he is a pretty nice guy. I was working on an exhibit a few months ago and he just walked up to me and started talking to me, very casual and normal conversation. He bought me BBQ and talked about his love of football. lol.