Electronics

Somewhere between 1995 and 2000, I was sent to teach a pSOS+ class to Westinghouse engineers in Savannah, Georgia.

Found this at auction for $15. No name plate and nothing to that effect inside.

It’s called a “Denial of Service” attack and it comes from a virus, affectionately named as you can see in the snippet above, “Smurf”.

If so, you may have what I’m calling HDMI Blink.

Ok, Ok, you’re right. It’s a new toy and I wanted to show it off. You’re absolutely right. But I learned some things and can do better on my next wire antenna.

The difference is in dealing with the inevitable “Oops!”

Underside of vacuum tube sockets in the old Eniac-1 computer. The rectangular objects are Mica capacitors whereas the tubular ones are resistors. The color dots and stripes encode the values of the specific parts.

“Analog computers,” he went on, “are faster, more reliable and have some practical uses besides accounting such as cannon trajectory calculations for battleships. But those digital computers like what we just saw have more than a thousand parts, any of which can break down and render the machine useless. They will never last.”

Grand knows his stuff – thank you, Sir!

The tip of the soldering iron I tried to use is too big - it bridges all five wires at once. I should’ve stopped and bought a smaller tip but, no, I had to go ahead and try. So now the right-most two of the bottom five are soldered permanently together. Copper braid and solder suckers have failed to clear the bridge.