I had to explain to a 12yo that not long before she was born, you made a computer display by sucking all the air out of an enormous glass box and then painting one side of it with special paint that sometimes glowed and then applying 2000V to a little bit of hot wire so you ripped electrons out of it and using electromagnets to steer the electrons to hit the special paint so that it glowed, and she seemed increasingly suspicious that I was pulling her leg and at the end she just said "that seems.. ..very inefficient?" and now I feel like a walking exhibit at a mediaeval blacksmithing museum
OTOH in the same discussion I mentioned that you could put a few hundred of the DRAM cells in her laptop together end to end and they'd be about as long as a red blood cell and her eyes bugged out and that never gets old.
@doop Show her a picture of core storage, with three wires woven through each tiny core…
@SteveBellovin @neia @doop I have a 4096 bit core from some old Russian computer.
@lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop this is fascinating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWOxAn3i-f8
@pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop I believe this is a 4K module of core memory. It’s purportedly from one of the Apollo ground computers.
@maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop
That should still be readable.
@zl2tod @maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop Of course it's readable! And you can look right inside it with an MRI scanner.
(Ducks and runs.)
@cstross @maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop
<shudder>
@cstross @zl2tod @maddiefuzz @pikesley @lain_7 @SteveBellovin @neia @doop
In the BBC Horizon episode "Now the chips are down" (1978) there's a sequence of a chip taken with (I assume) an electon microscope in which the bits are seen changing state