Items tagged with: permacomputing

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Items tagged with: permacomputing


U̵p̵d̵a̵t̵e̵:̵ ̵E̵v̵e̵n̵t̵ ̵C̵a̵n̵c̵e̵l̵l̵e̵d̵
Second Update: Event Uncancelled!

Join us this Tuesday, April 23rd for the 3rd edition of the B̵e̵r̵l̵i̵n̵ ̵P̵e̵r̵m̵a̵c̵o̵m̵p̵u̵t̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵M̵e̵e̵t̵u̵p̵!

We are now having an open-ended discussion about how we can apply #permacomputing principles as part of free desktop development with @tbernard, @sonny, @cas, @rmader, @verdre

It starts at 19:00 (also known as 7PM)


The reason why #uxn and concepts like #permacomputing excite me is that I'm a sucker for archival practices.

Today I was reading about a new proposed standard called Records in Context. There is a fantastic text (in German) introducing and overviewing the reasoning behind RiC. Basically it is nothing less than a revolution in digital archival practices as it wants to forego the classical tree model in favor of a relational model for the organization and contextualization of knowledge.

It doesn't sound like much. But when one becomes aware about all the effort that archivists, librarians, restorators, and other people active in GLAM are putting into care, maintenance and organization of their respective archives, proposing new ways of going about your daily business can have huge impacts.

arbido.ch/de/ausgaben-artikel/…




(long post... deleted + redrafted behind CW, sorry!)

An #abacus seems very #permacomputing.

It is frequent to use spare columns to hold intermediate results during a long computation. So... a small abacus is an accumulator machine and a larger one that holds several results is more like a stack machine.

The cpu microcode, like multiply/divide algorithms, are memorized by a human. Lots of microcode can be found here: totton.idirect.com/abacus/

The programs (breaking down your task into math operations) can be come up with on the spot, written on paper, or they can also be memorized if you do them frequently enough.

The biggest thing missing here is RAM, which could also be used for stored programs. I've seen this done with paper, for machines like the CARDIAC: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboar….

Scaling up my abacus to a matrix of 100x10 Abacus-style digits would fit in a 50x25 inch desktop frame and yield 1,000 decimal digits or ~500 bytes of RAM.