asciilifeform currently brain-melting over the total and airtight lack of any public data re beta-luminescence of lanthanide-strontium aluminate vs metal-doped zinc sulphide
asciilifeform: (they eventually resorted to 'credit card' and ended up simply making a titanic black hole for entire ~industry~ to fall into, when it finally imploded)
asciilifeform: or live long enough on 'credit card' to live to see the cheap-enough transistor.
asciilifeform: but were unable to build it economically.
asciilifeform: they built something quite like a proper comp.
asciilifeform: which is in a way a parable re engineers going to the bottom of the sea
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is quite impossible to 'unconsider inconvenient problem' in a thread about bolix
asciilifeform: phf: a bolix-style machine that -- hypothetically - could have cost-competed with the 'i can't believe it's not butter' state of the art, would imho count as 'resolve'
asciilifeform: they took a serious technological risk - and lost, like dirigible; rather than won, like steamboat.
asciilifeform: this dichotomy is a hallucination of mircea_popescu's , and i ain't buying.
asciilifeform: early steamboats were expensive deathtraps (boiler explosions were still a quite familiar thing in mark twain's time, even)
asciilifeform: the trouble is that this is how tech actually advances
asciilifeform: the analogy is not a whim of asciilifeform's, it is quite exact -- what bolix et al did, was a 'stretch' of the tech of the time, quite near its breaking point
asciilifeform: me262 had quite serious problems, from practical pov.
asciilifeform: fairly primitive, early attempt, but -- not continued.
asciilifeform: not knowing any of them in person, i cannot say why some went with one, and others -- other, and third -- with no one, and into the void. presumably agreed with n, or g, or neither.
asciilifeform: ti corp was not even part of this game, they did not hire -- afaik -- any of the original designers.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: my understanding was that greenblatt and noftsker had serious disagreement re how to actually do business. (noftsker favoured external capital, and founded the -- temporarily -- successful symbolics co; greenblatt -- the very soon dead lmi, and believed in 'lift by bootstraps', no external capital.)
asciilifeform: then, quite unlike now, new type of comp had to be made by hand from ttl chips -- few gates each; and connected with semi-reliable wrap wiring. it was quite impossible to offload this to 'brute labour', you had to intimately understand how the thing works in order to debug in any way.
asciilifeform: pretty sure that by the time there was a symbolics -- the handmaking was outsourced.
asciilifeform: phf: i was offering to mircea_popescu that not everyone is born to walk around robbing banks to fund hardware manufacture, or 'burning boston' to extirpate 'socialism', some folks were born to theorems. but mircea_popescu won't have it -- either banks, and burning, or untermenschen, apparently.
asciilifeform: it ended with jail for the 'genius', and junkyard for the iron. all of it.
asciilifeform: he took its remains to canada, and bamboozled their government for years, pretending to make 'french translator machine'
asciilifeform: funnily enough lmi, after bankruptcy, was bought by one such
asciilifeform: yes, some folx are friends with chumpatronicist, or bank robber (stalin et al), who will give them a little dough out of whatever private reason of his own.
asciilifeform: from bamboozling large crowd of derps with slightly more money than sense each ?
asciilifeform: the lispm was a quite audacious and expensive project, and very difficult to justify commercially without at least a set of functioning machines and well-developed soft
asciilifeform: may not even be (horror!) coded by penii
asciilifeform: the reality, even if mircea_popescu doesn't subscribe to it, is that there may very well be more than two types of people alive, and not simply ubermenschen (exact clones of mircea_popescu , presumably ) and untermenschen ('socialists' or anyone who substantially differs psychologically from mircea_popescu )
asciilifeform: not that noftsker, afaik, was a quimby. but lmi's greenblatt, it seems, was an 'anti-quimby'
asciilifeform: or do my hands simply grow from arse ? or ?
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: y'know those 20 ft chainsaws for trees ? i was using one, it sucked, chain slipped maybe 5 times in 1 hr. are there such thing as decent one of these ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu never met a 'modest'+tits ?
asciilifeform: i don't buy this 'was always a trotskyist, from baby' thing. not everyone is born in his particular mental dead end.
asciilifeform: he was just another d00d in those times.
asciilifeform: and pre- him receiving the socialist prizes etc. pre-gnu.
asciilifeform: i have nfi, but must point out that this time was prior to him having written down any such thing.
