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Thread: Los Alamos

  1. #1
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    Los Alamos

    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.
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    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.

  3. #3
    Great sign! Wish I knew what it meant!
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    Ha! That little sign reminds me of one I cut out of some magazine years ago:

    cartoon_small_2012-02-07_09-29-50_859.jpg

    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.

    core_memory_s.jpg

    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.

    battery_Nobili_1830_IMG_1121.jpg

    JKJ

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    Quote Originally Posted by Steve Demuth View Post
    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.
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    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Steve Demuth View Post
    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.

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    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!
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    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/NCL...5/11555695.pdf

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    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).


    Quote Originally Posted by Bruce Page View Post
    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!

  10. #10
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    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.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Michael Weber View Post
    ... 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...ection_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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Bruce Page View Post
    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 . . .
    "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg".


    – Samuel Butler

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    Quote Originally Posted by glenn bradley View Post
    Then suddenly . . .

    there was a knock at the door . . .

    and Bruce was never heard from again . . .
    Area 51 Glenn..... Area 51......
    Ken

    So much to learn, so little time.....

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ken Fitzgerald View Post
    Area 51 Glenn..... Area 51......
    I will only say that I spent a good amount of time at Area 52.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bruce Page View Post
    I will only say that I spent a good amount of time at Area 52.
    I should have known!
    Ken

    So much to learn, so little time.....

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