An astonishing old calculator - Numberphile
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- Cliff explains his passion for two Friden EC-132s.
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This person is the best kind of eccentric.
He is. I read his book The Cuckoo's Egg many years ago and he's exactly how I imagined him if you multiplied my imagining of him by about 100.
he does have the kinda of personality that you imagine Archimedes had when he lept from the bath tub naked and ran down the street yelling eureka only in this case its when he solves the final problem with getting the damn thing to work lol
He reminds me of John Dilworth somehow
More eccentric than Dave Jones
Is he wealthy enough to be eccentric? Usually ppl are just freaks or lunatics unless they're popular and wealthy, then they're eccentric
"So how will the calculator remember the input?"
" *P I A N O W I R E* "
Oh well, PAL and SECAM color TV sets (and VCRs) also had their analog delay lines (usually sound traveling though a crystal rod). And these were in use up into the 2000s. What sounds exotic to us was actually in a lot of homes a few years ago, and, if you happen to still own a PAL/SECAM compatible VCR, still is.
1960's: Here's a piece of piano wire... go build a calculator with it.
wow...
These were the people that put a habitable tin can on the moon. We owe them a lot.
Absolutely. The ingenuity of that machine is just incredible.
“I’m bringing to life what people who came before me gave birth to.”
Damn
Acoustic memory? Now I have heard everything.
You make a sound point.
I don't *remember hearing* about acoustic memory before...
Remarkable and well-noted.
A more common name is, acoustic delay line. I've seen delay lines based on one technology or another up to the present day.
Bah-pun dish
it felt a bit like a cooking show when Cliff pulled out another working calculator
They could have pretended they actually fixed an old calculator by showing the working one in the end... like some DIY video of some kind.
"You just put the calculator in the oven, wait 20 minutes, and voila! A working calculator!"
LinusOvenTips
"You just put the calculator in the oven for 20 minutes. Here's one I made earlier!"
"Here's one I repaired earlier."
I have a degree in computer science and electrical engineering, have been working professionally in the field for over 20 years, and I have no clue how that coil stores bits.
Jayyy Zeee Thank you
that makes the rest of us feel better.
I think the information that will help you understand how this is memory is the amplifier at the end of the coil feeds the bits of information back into the piano wire, thus continually storing it until it is needed.
Similar to dynamic RAM with a refresh cycle. But unlike DRAM, there must be some logic to the bits to know where the start and ends are etc.
Cliff explained it. It jiggles one end of a long wire using a speaker to convert pulses into jiggles. It detects the jiggles at the other end with a mic (probably closer to another speaker seeing that it's mechanically coupled). By recirculating the pulses until they're needed, you get memory. It's confusing because its much closer to physics than electronics.
I guess it's like a "refreshable" buffer with loop
Amazing. I can’t wait to see his explanation of the flux capacitor.
He described it in a brilliant documentary based around his life called 'Back to the Future'. He plays the doc.
+kumquatmagoo Back to the Future is based on a true story. Christopher Lloyd played the part of Cliff.
I CANT BELIVE THIS PERSON NEVER SAW BACK TO THE FUTURE!!!!
Lol
To be honest I thought what he said about it in BTTF was lackluster in comparison to this video.
I so genuinely love Cliff. He has this genuine joviality and enthusiasm about everything he does, like he's never forgotten his youthful energy for a moment and it's his craving to learn and to know that gives him that energy.
400 likes and no replies? How so?
Anyway, I could not agree with you more!
Cocaine maybe ?
Calyo Delphi One person who resonates with the character "Doc" from the Back to the future movies.
Calyo Delphi And we can joke around with "grandpa is breaking my mind again..."
Can we clone Cliff and make him everyones math teacher? :D
Cliff is going to rebuild a DeLorean DMC-12 next.
He already did, just not in the current timeline.
Luckily our timeline allows us to view that one through film.
6:35
Cliff: *shakes head in excitement*
Computer memory: Did you say 0.100007000109?
Could it be the acoustic memory freaking out?
@@aok76_ Im wondering how easy it is to tamper with the acoustic memory. Will it work in a noisy, or even moderately noisy, enviornment?
I've never seen him before, but that guy is the happiest old man I've ever seen.
This acoustic memory wire is very surprising. And it also appears to be very smart and creative to get it working as memory for the calculating machine.
The expensive way was mercury delay line memory (see wikipedia for explanations), but that is overkill for those machines. Works the same way but with mercury as a medium and was already available for several years in '62.
Yeah its such a crazy solution.
At one time Cliff squawked so sharply, it appeared to scramble the acoustic memory! 6:33 Of course he was also touching it at that moment and it could have been something else that caused what you can see on the screen.
What was wrong with using a loop of audio tape as a delay line, I wonder
SaNjA2659: How many times could you run 1960s audio tape across the recording/pickup heads? There were already drums and disks working on the same principle, but probably too mechanically complicated and expensive for this application. Wikipedia article on this type of memory is at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Magnetostrictive_delay_lines
(See earlier post by Robert Szasz)
Brady's yelp at 2:13 was gold
This shows how the space & aeronautical programs in the 60's were the greatest technological achievements in history.
His passion is infectious
Imagine trying to smuggle that thing into a math test!
I'd like to borrow it just to take thru TSA at the airport.
I think it's probably too big and someone like the invigilator might spot it and accuse you of cheating.
It'd be so quiet in there that the teacher would hear the _ding_ on the piano wire.
It makes life worth living knowing people like Cliff exist
Absolutely! Well said!
As an electrical engineer myself, I can vouch for the fact that the 'Scotty' approach of hacking together a solution from whatever technology is available is alive and well. The details of the problems are perhaps more specialized these days, but it still comes down to finding whatever clever trick will get the job done.
Sometimes you find a math trick to avoid expensive computations. Sometimes you find a clever way to recover 'lost' energy and do something more efficiently. And sometimes you store data on piano wire. Whatever the trick is, there's no feeling quite like MacGyvering your way through a problem.
This man is so happy to work on this. And it warms my heart to no end.
"The reason is, it _teaches_ me, gives me a sense of- **jumps up and down** !!!" -Cliff Stoll
Cliff is great. He spoke, ran, jumped and ate other's food during the Pacificon (Amateur Radio) banquet while measuring the speed of light.
K7AGE does Cliff have a callsign?
K7TA
He seems like a cool guy but I really wouldn't want someone else eating my food
K7AGE where can I find out more?
KF7PCL if someone else was going to eat my food without permission, i’d want it to be cliff.
Display: 10 (Very rarely do modern calculators show you 4 12-digit numbers)
Functionality: 5
Accuracy (Well it depends on how many decimal places you want): 5 (2σ)
Ergonomics: 2 (It's very heavy to carry)
Cred: 3^^^3 (edit)
Durability: 3
Durability 3!??? It's been functioning since 1963
@@YaamFel it a needed a repair in the 2000s and it wont work if its very cold, because of the wire that transmits the data
Cool: 100
coolness : limit of x as x reaches infinity
Coolness: cardinality of ℝ
Kids today have no idea how large electronic devices were decades ago. Great video!
Kids today light themselves on fire, and pour boiling water on their friends as pranks. I don't have a lot of hope for (a lot of) them.
@@halonothing1 time for the second flood
@@halonothing1 kids today are also watching numberphile. the reason you guys are so bitter about the kids these days is because you only pay attention to the ones that upset you
If you tap on the bottom of the calculator, will it become a random number generator?
Double Dare Fan I now have to acquire one and try this.
6:34 you can see he starts yelling and the numbers start to change
Random Answer Generator says, "YMMV".
@@nslouka90 That's awesome!
Please tell me there is a Cliff Stoll fan club and let me know where to send my membership dues.
I can't be the only one anticipating him saying "Great scott!"
Cliff is such a child when it comes to anything mathematics, he can just dive right in and love every second of it, giddy as a schoolboy. I don't possess the same love of math he does, but I sure do enjoy seeing it. The concept of bringing an old piece of gear back from the dead is awesome as well, it really gives you an appreciation for just how far we've come.
Ah, of course! The machine that goes poing!!
Hahahaha
The machine that goes SKRRRRRA-PAP-PAP-KA-KA-KA
Was that a Monty Python's The Meaning of Life reference?
*KiwiBird* rofl
That last sentence was sure beautiful
I'm starting to venture into hardware development. This almost brought me to tears, for real. I feel humbled and in awe by the sheer ingenuity it must have taken to design this device with the technology available back then. Thanks for uploading this video.
Came back years later. The last bit he said is still resoundingly inspirational to me.
I honestly hope that when I get to around Cliff's age, I still have things in my life that elicit such a such a sense of giddy wonder. What an inspiration!
That's the stuff you're buying now.
I watched this entire episode with my jaw dropped. I'm a 35 year old software engineer, and I can't get enough of this stuff.
verdatum And here’s one I prepared earlier
I love the way Cliff expressed his inner joy and happiness about (as I suppose from experience) pure fun it is to him to just dive into this stuff. Electronics, classic (retro) computers, music, DIY (and probably many more - put your favourite here) - could do this to you: make you genuinely joyful and satisfied. I tend to be that expressive too when it comes to appreciation of such clever creations and to pure joy. :)
Back in the 40s and 50s they also used mercury delay lines -- long glass tubes filled with mercury, and similar to the piano wire memory of this video, sent acoustic waves down the tube and either modified or sent the same bit back around again.
fudgesauce Up until about 2000, TVs used ultrasonic acoustic filters inside.
Read the first page of Asimov's first robot novel, "The Caves of Steel" (1954). The detective protagonist requests some data. Asimov describes the data rippling through mercury and when the data is read out it's recorded onto a piece of wire (wire recorders predated tape recorders by half a century -- in one of the first episodes of "Mission Impossible" (1966) the data they sought was recorded on wire which was hidden in a window planter).
In 1978 I was serving as an Air Force computer technician. In a required correspondence course for my AFSC I studied a magneto-strictive wire delay-line memory (identical, I'm sure, to what's in Cliff's calculators). In tech school, we were introduced to delay lines, but by then they were just used to ensure that all the signals got to where they needed to be at the right times (signals travel at about the speed of light, about a foot per nanosecond) -- the 1980 Cray S1 supercomputer ran so fast (for that time) that for a delay line they'd just lay down a few centimeters more trace on the circuit board. However, by 1977 our tech school no longer talked about using delay lines as memory; that was just a historical footnote the instructor added on his own.
Learning how we used to do things is fascinating.
VCRs and camcorders sometimes used "delay line" lines (like blocks with coiled wires/lines in them) to sync different pieces of video channel information cheaply.
@@davidwise1302 read my above comment. Or I'll just retype it lol.
VCRs sometimes used delay line coils for the same syncing and timing in video channel data, as a delay line was cheaper than some expensive super quick memory solution.
Uh oh, didn't you just void the warranty by peeling back that label and opening up the piano wire memory?
John Michaelson It's from 1962. I'm sure the warranty had already expired long ago.
that's the joke.
Whoosh
back in the day, technology came with big manuals that told you how to solve problems, either in lines of code or it told you to open up the PC and what to do
Seriously?
But is it a Klein bottle?
This guy's basement is filled with those. Check the other numberphile video's on klein bottles. this guy's anmazing.
+Marnik Bongers that's part of the joke.
The answer to that one is in your mind...or is it outside your mind?...It's hard to say...
*VSauce theme starts*
It's Kleinculator.
Recirculating Audio Acoustic Memory, or RAAM for short, this guy was ahead of his time.
Every time I watch a video of Cliff Stoll it ends too soon. I could listen to him talk about science and engineering for hours.
Oh man, Cliff is just one of the best person I've ever heard of
6:34 the calculator goes crazy with the professor. xD
postvideo97 probably he accidentally bumped the table messing with the acoustic memory.
"An astonishing old calculator" says the video title with a thumbnail of Cliff
lol roasting him in the thumbnail
5:54 I have never been so excited to do a square root in my life.
Cliff is so over the top and excited! Please make more videos with him, what a guy.
An old man ecstatic about an old piece of technology. You can tell it in his voice. (I’m also ecstatic too though)
Inan Xu I am home sick from seventh grade with the flu, and my eyes are saucers.
I am astounded at the genuine joy he feels. He is amazing.
Seeing people with genuine passion for what they love is always so amazing to me. Thank you for being yourself and keep doing what you love. You can tell Cliff is happy with what he does and that is super inspiring. Absolutely great video!!
It's always nice to look at how things were done during times where resources and means were more scarce; those times bred some brilliant engineers and feats of technological prowess.
The way Cliff captures and expresses the joy of that experience reminds me of Feynman.
That last statement, Cliff... I almost cried (literally)
Fernando Zigunov True, enormous respect
Yes, a kind man as well as a great one.
Cliff, I haven't seen you since you were visiting at MIT sometime in the 1980s, but as soon as I heard that voice, I recognized you. All these years later, you've still got that infectious happy enthusiasm. Wonderful!
Hi Cliff! I finished reading The Cuckoo's Egg last week and enjoyed it immensely. Glad to see you're still doing well and being awesome.
Cliff is an astonishing old calculator
7:37 One of the best lectures and life lessons I've ever heard
I guess the problem about the not working machine is, that the germanium-transistors that were used often create so called "Whiskers" inside.
The whiskers short out one of the electrodes (mostly the emitter) to the case - which is commonly the collector.
These small crystals are a natural aging process and so it can happen that a machine still works fine and a day later it does not anymore, because one of the transistors were finally shorted out.
But you can fix these Transistors! Just tie all three pins together and then put a high DC voltage between the three pins and the case. About 200 Volts are fine.
The whiskers now got burned off and make no more connection to the case. I managed to fix very many germanium transistors with that method that can not be simply replaced by a silicon one.
Phalos Southpaw's Bastelstube interesting, I hope Cliff sees this!
Write an email to cliff! Link’s on the Klein bottle website
I have dabbled in reading up on early transistors, and it was this thing you explain, that made them difficult to create. Very finicky. Obviously they solved the problem, eventually. I have also seen BJT's modeled as two diodes, sharing the same N or P layer, with the understanding that it's more complicated than that :)
It's nice to hear people are excited by the old technology. I worked on the first Anita Mk8 calulators and they used ECC81 valves and trigger tubes. The timing was done with a tube called a Dekatron. The trigger tubes needed a bit of 'cosmic radiation' to actually be able to strike but when the machines casework was on, there was no light entering the works! The trigger tubes has a little device in them called a 'night light' which glowed permanently that took the place of the much needed 'cosmic radiation' 19 meg ohm resistors fed the 'night lights' and often went very high resisstance because they were just carbon. All the fault finding was done using oscilloscopes and Avo8 multimeters down to component level.. The display was done by Nixie tubes which were stepped by these trigger tubes to the appropriate numbers, The machine had just one single transistor called the Highway transistor and was a silicon 2N3053. I still have the blueprints for the Mk8, Mk9/10 machines and they make a great talking point picture for the hallway.
His passion for mathematics and its applications always inspires me and nearly brings me to tears.
I love the how excited Cliff is about the old tech and I really appreciate how much respect he is showing to the inventors of the past.
I like that Cliff is so excited about his signed calculator as I am when I show off my klein bottle he signed.
Makes me think of Richard Feynman and his love for puzzles
I truly love the enthusiasm and childish curiosity that Cliff expell. :)
anyone else notice he has some "10 DM" banknotes in the background?
it was the old currency in germany before the euro came in 2002
it shows Carl Friedrich Gauß, the famous german mathematician
i miss those banknotes, euro's only carry fictional buildings :/
There was indeed a West German 10 DM note with Carl F -- but the note I see in the background is a Swiss 10 franc note with Leonhard Euler (issued in 1979).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Euler-10_Swiss_Franc_banknote_(front).jpg
Peter Lund At 0:29 you can see both notes.
Indeed I can! Carl F is barely peeping up over the calculator!
I don't think that's a real note. It looks too big. So it's a printout I guess.
That fictional is wrong by now, though. An architect and the mayor of Rotterdam actually let them get built: goo.gl/images/i4svq4
I sit in awe at the genius of people that pop up in our species to bring us marvels of creation like the calculators shown in this video.
Incredible person, Cliff. His enthusiasm inspires me and, reading the comments, a lot of other people. Thank you man!
Everytime I see a video with Cliff, I hit "like" before the video even starts playing
T Perm Well it's not meant to be fresh, unlike saying "I'm a simple man [...]" so it is an innovation in being less annoying about stating what you do.
That work bench makes me happy
Oops... I thought the "astonishing old calculator" was the guy in the thumbnail... xD
He certainly is astonishing!
Booooh
That would be even older :D
When I was an undergraduate in the 70s there was a working one of those in the engineering lab. ISTR using it for thermodynamic calculations. Later I went to lectures my MV Wilkes who invented the mercury delay line, the precursor of the wire memory.
This guy is crazy
I love him
I dunno, he seems a bit more sedate than usual... :(
I'm Very Angry It's Not Butter!!
It’s because he’s working with computer stuffs. He was focused.
I think you summed him up perfectly.
Take it from a developer: when debugging software, you often have to get into the mind of the people who wrote it, and it ain't pretty.
haha so true
"It ain't pretty. I should know; *I* wrote this one."
+Stephen Bly - Take it from an OLD developer, all developers says that, and implicitly think they are above everybody around...
So where are those with those "ugly" mind ?
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hint: Dunning Kruger effect alert, Noob developer wanna show off he's the best !
Stephen Bly Do you at least enjoy the odd commented out rant?
Often times when going through someone else's code, you have a much easier time spotting out the wrongs than they would. It's only human.
I love old tech that works, they're almost always some combination of clever and janky but they often work really well and look cool doing it
The "ancient ones" solved so many problems in amazingly clever ways. Then people found better solutions. And sadly, a lot of the now obsolete creative solutions are barely known about. I think the same thing about the old pre video games, the electromechanical games in arcades. So creative, so archaic now. UA-cam has really memorialized a lot of very cool ancient tech, thankfully.
90% of issues with OLD electronic equipment can be found in dirty connections, often edge connectors. Otherwise cold soldered joints account for most of the rest. Actual electronic component failure is actually pretty rare. Nice machine. Radars I worked on in the 70's and 80's had miles of wire as a delay line to compare successive electrical signals to identify moving from stationary targets.
My favorite guy
Harrison William : mine too!
Man, that got unexpectedly emotional at the end :o
I wish to be as excited about anything as Cliff is excited about his vintage calculators.
I've commented this time and time again but the people that feature on the videos of this channel are truly inspirational people!
i love this guy! I think he's gone mad
... Positively mad
There's a thin line inbetween genius and madness.
Wow... that final phrase... chills.
I love the printed pictures of his favourite math "heores" on the wall.
The beauty of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) is that the evaluation of RPN strings is extremely simple to implement in software. You just push the numbers onto a stack, then when you encounter an operation you pop however many operands that operation needs (usually the top two), perform the operation, and push the result onto the stack. In school, that was my first non-trivial program that compiled and ran correctly first-time, which shows how simple it is to implement.
The earlier HP calculators were RPN (AKA "postfix notation") whereas TI calculators had parentheses and used infix notation like humans are taught to do.
I absolutely love how enthusiastic and passionate he is about this!
AWWW YEEEEAAAAAH!!! IT'S A CLIFF EPISODE!!!
Awesome. I found that calculator satisfying... the material, how it sounds, how it feels when tapping the buttons, ect. Even those green numbers and the style.
This gentleman is a mad scientist and I say that without any disrespect. What a treasure!
For some reason, I love this guy.
It's nice seeing people admiring mankind's technology like this guy does.
I always like to work on old problems as well. It's a kind of appreciation to the people who come before me......Revisit what people did in the past is really really an enjoyable process for me.... Thanks for making this video....really appreciated....
his description of why he loved repairing them was absolutely wonderful. To get into the minds of the people who built them.
There are few characteristics that I find more pleasing than enthusiasm.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I am totally on this guy's wavelength.
I’m a simple person. I see Cliff Stoll, I click.
When I serviced these, back in the 70s, most of the service calls were from JPL.
“Fully electrical” -> proceeds to show an acoustic memory system
Its great when one understands the shoulders one stands on
Calculators?
Where we're going we won't need calculators!
This doesn't add up.
Dark
"And the award for the punniest comment so far today, goes to ..... Dark!" 👏👏👏👏😁
yes we do, we are going to do an exam tomorrow morning.
when you grow up you won't have calculators in your pocket
Luiz Felipe kkk I remember that!
From 1966 to 1970 I was a part time draftsman at Rockwell working my way through college. The place I worked for made valves. For stress calculations I used this machine. I thought it was pretty cool gadget but had no inkling how advanced it was. I also learned RPN and can't get a correct answer from a regular pocket calculator this this day.
Gotta love Cliff! Thanks for sharing, it's so cool to meet this kinda people, even if it's on the internet. Keep rockin'!
My word. I've heard of storing light in a fibre coil, but didn't think it was practical. The boards look like the stuff in my father's garage that I used to strip for parts. Absolutely amazing. I have a Gauss note - wish I had the rest.
Christie Nel It is quite practical, because light and electricity are both electromagnetism you can use optical fiber or a wire (such as coax) as the transmission medium. Look in any old analog oscilloscope and you will typically find a long coil of coax that serves as the delay line between the trigger circuit, which must see the trigger signal far enough in advance for the horizontal driver circuit and CRT to react, and the display output. A lot of older hardware made heavy use of delay lines and exploited the fact that the speed of light was around 1 foot per nanosecond or the speed of sound around 1.1 feet per millisecond (adjusted for the velocity factor of the transmission line which may slow things down and allow shorter lines for either medium).
Look up TDR (time domain reflectometry) and you will see the propagation delay in a medium used to identify the length of a transmission line or the distance to a fault that causes and impedance mismatch in that same transmission line. Using such you can determine the actual length, provided you know the characteristic velocity factor, determine the velocity factor if using a known length, or detect the distance to a fault in your cable. Such is often used to locate the approximate location to a fault in buried cables (such as with power transmission) so that crews know about where to begin digging. We also use such knowledge to create stubs or identify coax length or distance to faults in radio transmission line, for example.
Fascinating. I have actually used optical reflectometers to analyze optical products attached to fibres, but this is quite different from using fibre as memory. The main problem I see is that the amount you can store is proportional to how long you have to wait for the data to come around again, which is why I thought it was impractical.
You could make a parallel array the width of your word. That would decrease the latency per amount of data. Same idea as a drum memory with a bunch of read/write heads.
Crazy to think that this was the height of technology only 50-60 years ago - now everybody has access to immensely more powerful machines that fit in their pocket. Makes you feel like we are truly living in the future. Recent advances in technology can be described as nothing less than a revolution/renaissance.
This guy's enthusiasm is infectious!!!!! Brilliant video!
He is the reason I subscribed. This man's joy of learning is honestly so refreshing and inspiring.