Nov 06 09
Sep 06 14
13 September 1956 saw the first release of the RAMAC, the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.
It weighed a ton and was about the size of a refrigerator. It boasted fifty 24-inch disks, coated with iron oxide and stored five million characters - or about 5 MB.
The RAMAC generated so much heat that it had its own separate air compressor to protect the two moving heads that read and wrote information. That made the unit rather noisy. If the size and the noise didn’t deter you the price surely would. IBM didn’t sell them - the company leased them by the year. One RAMAC would set you back $35,000 annually. (Today that would be about $250,000)
Ok so what am I talking about ?
The Hard Drive, of course.
So Happy Birthday to the Hard Drive ….
Aug 06 07
CADAZZ is a history of CAD software according to Chris Bowd.
Apr 06 06
Something special happened this week (Wednesday) when the following event occurred at two minutes and three seconds after one am …
01:02:03 04/05/06 (US date format)
(of course it happens again on 4th May for us Brits…)
Oct 05 13
What is a petabyte ?
1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes (or 1024 terabytes)
But why would you want to know that?
Its actually the amount of data contained within the Internet Archive Wayback Engine (or at least it was ! ). If you want to see how a web site looked back in 1996 chances are that it is archived here.
In addtion to an archive of web pages, the Internet Archive has archives of Moving Images, Live Music, Audio, Texts and Software.
Aug 05 01
New month new topic.
Lets start off with some trivia for those people who enjoy puzzle solving.
A Planar Graph is a graph that can be embedded in a plane so that no edges intersect.
This puzzle allows you to experiment with planar graphs by rearranging the vertices (blue dots) so that none of the edges intersect …
Warning this may be addictive 
Check it out at
Jul 05 02
Are you being driven mad trying to solve fiendishly difficult Sodoku puzzles ?
Here’s a little helper if you ever need a bit of assistance with those really difficult ones SuDoHelper
Jun 05 29
Googles Web Directory integrates their search technology with Open Directory pages to create a useful tool for finding information on the web.
In particular I find the resource related to CAD/CAM useful and thought it might be useful for others too …
Google CAD/CAM
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/CAD_and_CAM/
On another Google note, since I last looked, I see that they are increasing their satellite image coverage of the world
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