asciilifeform: also so happens also that the most recent piece of iron in the torture room , excluding FG, is from '09. ( the opterons in the box i'm sitting on nao. )
asciilifeform: couldn't have all gone to the au recyclers, i dun think.
asciilifeform: iirc in early 2000s, 'american express' unplugged its bolix cluster ( handled fraud detection thingie ) , and surplussed coupla hundred machines. wonder where they went.
asciilifeform: i suspect it's moar like the high prices of illicit cell pnoje in jail. i.e. not high because megatonnes of money circulating, but because supply so thin.
asciilifeform: thing also came complete with a bolix-encharactered 1980s crapple kbd.
asciilifeform: ( this makes for ~3~ original bolix cd sets in asciilifeform's torture room. anybody in l1 want one ? )
asciilifeform: in other noose, phf , mircea_popescu , et al, the bolix is here. dks packs a++ , princely, all parts on manifest , and kilometre of bubbles. will post photos as soon as i wrap up my albatross of this week, ch14
asciilifeform: you'd need a 'shadow mask', like in ye olde crt !
asciilifeform: on 2nd thought, will still produce rubbish, from those very same grazing reflects.
asciilifeform: suppose cassette sat in trough of pb, 2cm or so in thickness. ( i.e. only path for photon onto paper, is through the $object )
asciilifeform: ( believe or not, this is an actual problem for folx keeping stockpile of photopaper, it fogs even without 'sunbathe' , from background gamma . which is likely why scheme wouldn't work.)
asciilifeform: what detectors. photopaper in sealed metallic pouch.
asciilifeform: not given as practical how-to, but 'could or could not'
asciilifeform: btw gedankenexperiment -- given patience, and a rigid, immovable photo subject (e.g. pcb) , can take radiogram... without tube. ( sun. a la the 'erase uv eprom without eraser' method ) . by my napkin calc, 8 or so months of film cassette on rooftop oughta produce an image..
asciilifeform: if they'd watched it glitter from 100m, would've lived, lol
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it was in trilema piece
asciilifeform: i.e. barely detectable output, will need relatively long exposure.
asciilifeform: my particular setup ( and yes have 1 from ~last~ time this came up ) has somewhat opposite problem of 'shoot self and bystanders' -- it aint a dental kit, but surplus tube the size of finger, orig . was used to measure thickness of au on glass sinter
asciilifeform: ( the only kind there is, in that spectrum, sadly, or we'd have microscope )
asciilifeform: incidentally, i had potentially interesting notion: a modern-day digicam ccd, of e.g. 25 'megapixel', is just about dense enuff that one could take a meaningful xray of the ivory die, if one could be found that responds to xray..☟︎
asciilifeform: the item can then be used as fairly compact instrument to probe behaviour of the chip vs. the old emulators.
asciilifeform: phf: i am thinking, instead of burning time on emulating 'nubus' and ancient crapple, when working (from mac-side pov) clone exists i'ma drive it directly via onboard ft2232hl or similar ( the mac-side src , i've had for yrs, and it's quite straightforward re what is done to the card; once i know what specifically happens on the card when nubus regs are written, may as well do it from pc directly to/from the ivory cpu via usb-to-5v-f
asciilifeform: ( didn't exist ~5y ago when i last contemplated doing all of this )☟︎
asciilifeform: ( actually 1st item will actually be to ditch the ancient scsi hdd and replace with solidstate. i'd hate to lose the box to platter rot )
asciilifeform: plus i'ma need ivorytron with direct probes on the cpu lines, and there aint any room for such a thing in the orig
asciilifeform: phf: when thought about it, realized it was mistake : gotta find what the external-to-cpu logic on that thing actually does
asciilifeform: ( and really dun need dram at all, the drams on the daughterboard are all connected through period auto-refresher ic that presents as a sram )☟︎
asciilifeform: ( i aint gonna stick to the period srams/drams, cuz that'd be simply dumb , each really belongs as 1 chip )
asciilifeform distant from subj, cannot comment in detail re how well worx
asciilifeform: the win, when there is a win, is that you can make the jesusbolt 'stateless', i.e. if particle whacks it, it resets and retries the last cycle rather than going into metastable strange
asciilifeform: afaik all such schemes still suffer at least 1 'jesus bolt'.
asciilifeform: reportedly items like this are being orbited , as cost-saving measure in place of ye olde saphire semiconductors. but there's ~nuffin publicly written re just how built.☟︎
asciilifeform: ( i.e. box had multiple cpu that had to majority-agree re outcome of a cycle )
asciilifeform: even the old ibm irons have a few things to teach pc re redundant/votingcircuit scheme.
