Los Alamos

[Michael Weber]

Just returned from a two week sidecar ramble through Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. A humorous photo from the Los Alamos visitor center and one from the Science museum I found particularly interesting in light of advances in electronics in the last 35 years. It's the breadboarded first shift register.

[Steve Demuth]

Not sure what the breadboarded artifact is, but it's not the first shift register. Shift registers were implemented in computer architectures decades before that thing was built, and by 1975 shift registers as packaged ICs had been around for some years. The Intel 4004 CPU was already 4 years old by then, along with the companion 4003 10-bit shift register.

[Frederick Skelly]

Great sign! Wish I knew what it meant! :)

[John K Jordan]

Ha! That little sign reminds me of one I cut out of some magazine years ago:

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I love seeing the old electronics and computer things. I built my first computer in the early '70s and still have some wire-wrapped boards in my little "museum". This is a memory card made with ferrite beads, supposedly from a PDP-8 computer (I didn't have the computer). I read accounts of large rooms full of women painstakingly threading the tiny beads onto wires to assemble these boards.

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If you like science history and ever get to Florence, Italy, be sure to visit the Galileo Museum - I could have spent three days there! Three floors full of amazing technology - I've never seen so many precision instruments made from brass. This is one of the simplest things I saw, a battery (Nobili) from about 1830.

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JKJ

[Michael Weber]

Not sure what the breadboarded artifact is, but it's not the first shift register. Shift registers were implemented in computer architectures decades before that thing was built, and by 1975 shift registers as packaged ICs had been around for some years. The Intel 4004 CPU was already 4 years old by then, along with the companion 4003 10-bit shift register.. Perhaps I misunderstood the description and I was thinking I studied shift registers in the mid 70s. Here is a photo of the sign describing it. It does mention analog so may be something entirely different.
And John I do love old scientific apparatus, old analog meters and mechanical/ pneumatic controllers. Wish I had been able to rescue many of the old items where I worked that were untimatly updated to digital.

[Art Mann]

It appears the breadboard could predate integrated circuits entirely. If you will notice, it incorporates individual transistors in the design. Of course, there were vacuum tube shift registers before solid state transistors.


Not sure what the breadboarded artifact is, but it's not the first shift register. Shift registers were implemented in computer architectures decades before that thing was built, and by 1975 shift registers as packaged ICs had been around for some years. The Intel 4004 CPU was already 4 years old by then, along with the companion 4003 10-bit shift register.

[Bruce Page]

I worked at the Los Alamos labs, LASL at the time, as a prototype machinist from 1976 to 1983. I made a lot of hardware that went boom under the Nevada desert. I don’t know if they still have it on display but I made a ¼ scale model (IIRC) of the “Gadget” test bomb used in the 1945 Trinity test for the Bradbury science museum.
I made several models for them but most were classified and will never see the light of day. I left LASL for a job at Sandia National labs in 1983 and retired from there a few years ago. Fun times!

[John Stankus]

Look closely there are integrated circuits on the breadboard(s)
I think essentially this is a high speed sample and hold for neutron counting.

This may be the paper about it or something very similar

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/11/555/11555695.pdf

[John K Jordan]

Bruce, we may have crossed paths at some point. I worked at ORNL and spent some time at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore. (I did scientific, technical, and architectural modeling too (plus software) but with a computer instead of a machine shop. :)) My Lovely Bride also spent time at most of the labs as a manager with the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI).



I worked at the Los Alamos labs, LASL at the time, as a prototype machinist from 1976 to 1983. I made a lot of hardware that went boom under the Nevada desert. I don’t know if they still have it on display but I made a ¼ scale model (IIRC) of the “Gadget” test bomb used in the 1945 Trinity test for the Bradbury science museum.
I made several models for them but most were classified and will never see the light of day. I left LASL for a job at Sandia National labs in 1983 and retired from there a few years ago. Fun times!

[Bruce Page]

John, I bet we were within a few hundred yards from each other at some point. I interviewed at LLNL in ’83 but turned down their job offer after looking at the area. I decided that I didn’t want to move back to California, and Livermore looked much like where I was born & raised in SoCal.

It’s funny looking back, I remember complaining about the mediocre wood base design when I made the model and that I could easily make a much nicer one. They wouldn’t have it and said they wanted the emphasis on the model, not the base.

[Alan Rutherford]

... advances in electronics in the last 35 years.... Or longer. The PDP-8 John mentioned was developed in 1965. Around that time I was in the AF and the AN/FSQ-7 computer I used to tell fighter-interceptor aircraft where to go used 60,000 vacuum tubes and a very small amount of hand-wired core memory similar to John's. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Central). Today a $10 32-gigabyte flash drive would equal the capacity of 8,126,464 of those chunks of core memory and my phone has far more computing power than that AN/FSQ-7 did.

Moore's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law) says that the number of transistors you can put in an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years (or 18 months, depending on whom you listen to). Since 1965 it's gone from less than 1,000 to billions without the rate of increase changing much. Amazing stuff. Using it well will be a challenge.

[glenn bradley]

I worked at the Los Alamos labs, LASL at the time, as a prototype machinist from 1976 to 1983. I made a lot of hardware that went boom under the Nevada desert

Then suddenly . . .

there was a knock at the door . . .

and Bruce was never heard from again . . . :D

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Then suddenly . . .

there was a knock at the door . . .

and Bruce was never heard from again . . . :D

Area 51 Glenn..... Area 51......:rolleyes:;)

[Bruce Page]

Area 51 Glenn..... Area 51......:rolleyes:;)

I will only say that I spent a good amount of time at Area 52. :eek::)

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I will only say that I spent a good amount of time at Area 52. :eek::)

I should have known!:o:D

[John K Jordan]

... Today a $10 32-gigabyte flash drive would equal the capacity of 8,126,464 of those chunks of core memory and my phone has far more computing power than that AN/FSQ-7 did.

...Using it well will be a challenge.

What Mr Moore didn't describe is how much the cost per bit would drop with time!

The computer I built in the '70s had a whopping 56K of memory by the time I got done with it. Took a 20 amp power supply to run it, helped keep the house warm. Each 8K static memory board had 1434 connections to solder and cost $250 in kit form. I once calculated how much the memory in my Motorola smart phone would cost at $30 a kilobyte and the power needed. I can't remember the numbers but it would have needed a building and more power than feeds my shop.

And the computer with 56K was incredible - I built a graphics board I wrote my own "almost" flight simulator and could zoom around and look at a simple database with homebuilt joysticks. The 2MHz computer was fast enough to update the screen at several times per second. I even had a 10 MB hard disk drive connected at the end. Who could possibly need more storage space than that. Good clean fun!

But your last comment says it all. I don't get out much but today I must have seen 10 drivers using their handheld supercomputers to endanger the community.

JKJ