Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147383

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

512k is lucky too because as cool as it would have been to get the original, man that memory was a real constraint!

Wish I'd gotten to meet Atkinson, but his influence is still everywhere. More on Kare in this one, as well as some of the really cool innovations that came before.

What was your first digital painting program?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058791

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!

Re: Search Engines, I think I mention this in the video but apparently Sergey Brin was part of the Connection Machine user community, and had that experience on his resume. (A copy of that is still floating around.)

An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars.

But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.

But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.

They went bust not long after this movie.

I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaNuVR75cwY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48807601

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

We've gone from perpetually punting the football on comprehensive immigration reform, to people saying, "Good, go back home, we don't want you here."

The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182790

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

And yea I remember the patent being in effect for so many years. The Spore creators got around it by using the "ear clipping" algorithm.

Negative Metaballs are really fun — included them in our app I mentioned at the end of the video. But they date all the way back to Blinn's paper!

Despite having recently done a video on The Connection Machine, the Links-1 was new to me – and I basically did a double take to learn that they had this parallel ray-tracing super computer back then. Sadly, there's not a ton of documentation beyond a couple of brief papers.

Thanks for watching!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907873

Points: 2

# Comments: 5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706461

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.

Edit: found it!

Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did happen:

"...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car. This may sound easy, but it's not: You have to neutralize the most innocent of motions. At zero gravity, the mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.

This problem was solved by sending up commands to the spacecraft's little rocket engines (called thrusters), machines of exquisite sensitivity. With a little puff of gas at the start and stop of each data-taking sequence, the thrusters compensated for the tape-recorder jiggle by turning the entire spacecraft just a little.

To deal with the low radio power received at Earth, the engineers devised a new and more efficient way to record and transmit the data, and the radio telescopes on Earth were electronically linked together with others to increase their sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at Uranus..."