Energy from tidal heating is a thing for Jovian/Saturnian moons (see Io for a particularly extreme example), so there is a possibility of a 'steady input of energy' that's neither solar nor dependent on residual core heat. I mean, something is keeping that water liquid. I fully confess to not knowing how significant for life that is on Titan (and I guess noone else is sure, either).
Where the 360 crushed home computers was in mass storage
Well...sure, you could put bigger storage on a mainframe. It's just money, after all. But you could put a tape drive on a home computer. And bigger disks. And a card reader, for that matter. Where the 360 really crushed the home computer was in aggregate bandwidth, via the Channel architecture. An Apple 2 could just about keep up with a floppy and a display. A 360 could keep up with dozens to hundreds of tapes, disks, card readers, terminals, printers and other things all at the same time.
Large storage compared to memory meant a lot of focus on external memory algorithms
I would agree with that. I would just argue the real mainframe advantage is a whole-system one and not point to a single factor (memory size).
>BUT. I worked at a place that used IBM 360s...Then one day an engineer brought in an Apple II from home and ran the programs on that.
The 360 was introduced in 1964. The 370 was introduced in 1970. The 3033 was introduced in 1977. The Apple 2 was introduced in 1977. So, yeah, if you were still using 360s contemporary with an Apple 2, no wonder the engineers were frustrated.
Lots of organizations run those computers for very long times. It was not unusual for a medium-sized company, a factory or some local government to be running 10 to 15 years hardware.
You hit on why I got my first used ThinkPad many years ago (a T42): it was so cheap as to be disposable. I was going on a trip that promised to be somewhat...ah...rough on my kit, and I picked up the T42 for dirt so I didn't take my new, very expensive laptop only to have it trashed (I don't remember what it was now...probably some Dell). The Dell(?) is loooong gone. The T42 made it through the trip fine, and over many years has gotten an SSD, a memory upgrade and a new screen (old one worked fine; wanted the pretty SXGA screen) and because it has a real, honest to gawd parallel port, it's still serving duty today controlling some stuff in my lab (PROM programmer, some finicky windows software, etc). It might not be a daily driver, but it gets fired up most every week to do real work.
At one point, I was living somewhere that had access to someone's C64 and I wrote a VT100 emulator in FORTH to access a remote VAX via 300bps modem into MeritNet. Then I wanted to do graphics on the VAX and remembered the GiGi (which ran BASIC with DEC Regus graphics if booted in standalone mode) and began creating my own escape-sequences to draw. This led to discovering the NAPLPS standard and then to building my own backend BBS using 900 (reverse bill) numbers for C64 dialup users. Years later I saw the PRODIGY service at a Sears store and smirked.
They still manufacture 6502s (and some periph chips) and you can license the core IP for your FPGA/ASIC [1]. There are dev boards (I have a W65C02SXB and it's kinda nifty) [2]. You can buy them from Mouser. There's apparently still demand in the embedded space that justifies keeping them in production.
It's a fantastic way to bring up new hardware at the bare metal layer and do nontrivial things. But unless you're Jeff Raskin or something, building out, say, a word processor or something of similar complexity is a bit more daunting.
I assume with the 'popularity' bias (probably not the right phrase) in the modern internet this is pretty much the future of search. Someone comes up with something cool, posts a pix, and someone else puts it on Twit/Face/Tube/whatever and it gets reposted over and over and over and since the original is some worthless peon as far as the algorithm is concerned you'll never, ever find them.
I wonder if that's something that can be addressed by embedding the right metadata into images/videos? Most people don't bother even checking e.g. Exif data (let alone stripping or otherwise altering it) when reposting content they find online.
I can't speak for every platform but when I was working with frequent photo posts, most in-camera or post-editing metadata was stripped out on instagram and facebook. Some smaller sites like Gab didn't seem to mess with it as much, but the bulk did. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the other big ones did, too.
It was incredibly disheartening to have no recourse to attribute my own work, other than to smear some gross watermark on it. The automatic removal of that metadata, along with AI image generation, are some of the reasons why I gave up on the hobby entirely.
It's incredibly hard and stressful to derive any sort of pleasure or interest from something when the second it's exposed to the internet, any sense of humanity you tried to attach to it is stripped away, burned, and commercialized for the monetary benefit of some ethereal financier. It's the sound of an invisible vacuum cleaner, whisking away any sense of joy or life you wanted to share with the world for common love; the death of sharing. For-pay hugs.
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