You spend decades thinking on how to destroy capitalism, how to fight Goliath as David. How even scratching the monster in the context of national liberation will be a nightmare. And then Goliath procedes to blind himself, cover himself in gasoline and set himself on fire
Fuck me, the amount of time and effort I put into validating data, and they’ve gone and added the fucking hallucination generator to it.
well you can’t blame them, it’s not like excel already had a way to add up numbers or anything
Ok I read the entire Wikipedia page for this thing and several linked pages im still incredibly unclear on what one wouldve…*done* with this??
Math??? Is it just a really fancy calculator???
yeah there’s not a lot you could do with this. math (though more than a calculator), and simple financial stuff is about all. it’s mainly a product because just being able to do that much was really expensive. in 1978 you’ve got, like, the trs-80 and apple II and expensive S100 systems and that’s about it.
this undersells all of them at the expense of not really being able to DO anything with it.
It makes a little more sense as a boxed up fancy KIM-1:
ALT
And that was even less of a computer: it’s a keypad, the same 20 characters of display, and some GPIO pins. There was a time when this was a reasonable amount of computer to sell, but it was a short and limited one.
But yeah. I guess the most likely use for this is for someone doing electronics who needs to add “some computer” to whatever they’re doing, but in 1978 it was pretty expensive to just add some computer to what you’re building.
Processor speed: 1MHz
Onboard RAM: 1kb
It is somewhat terrifying to realize that the computer I’m sitting at has 16 million times the memory, and to say that it runs almost four thousand times faster is actually a massive simplification, as the actual cycles themselves can do more– that was probably a 4-bit computer– and this computer has multiple cores.
this thing is slow enough that your computer’s mouse or battery has more computing power than it
You learn how to computer with this kind of computer.
You CAN run BASIC with some extra RAM and a teletype, but it’s gonna suck. Play some chess perhaps loaded in from a paper tape or cassette tape. Make it talk to a terminal if you’re fancy. Learn you some 6502 assembly, and then… write some applications that you won’t use all that much.
The whole point was exposure and familiarization on embedded stuff with the KIM-1, it wasn’t meant to be your primary general purpose computer, but it was way less expensive than those options. And the world of affordable microcomputers exploded in 1977 with the big three: PET 2001 from Commodore, Apple II from you guessed it – those Steves from California, and the big juggernaut out of the gate, Tandy’s TRS-80 Model I. S-100 was going strong, and diversifying all the time. Heathkit and Ohio Scientific had some kit options, Atari was just around the corner with their home computers, and you had more options than ever before!
What will you do with your newfangled computer? Iunno, you figure it out. But you’ve got a computer!
One of the Things about research on gender-affirming care for trans people is that it falls under the “we already know what would happen to the control group” edge case, alongside:
Can we be sure that setting broken bones helps?
Lack of controlled double-blind studies of insulin in diabetics (Insulin was proven to work when dying kids had it injected and miraculously woke up)
Parachute tests do not need to drop someone without a parachute for reference, because we already know that falls from great heights result in death
The well known psychological fact that forcing people into lives they don’t want makes their mental health worse
No but for real. Are you seriously so EBM-brained that you’ve forgotten that we have an entire present-day reality we can look at? Have you forgotten that the purpose of these methodologies is to distinguish ambiguities, not to confirm what is plainly evident? Would you like to participate in the control group for breathing, and see if we can finally determine whether it has health benefits?
![[a tag from styrofoam-eater reading #I have a simple solution to this problem]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/4fe459f6e8e9c78766ab524526306b9d/e79c121c39e55ca8-fb/s500x750/d7820fb8c3acd23e6fc4547443dc303cfc23b842.png)
ALT
