I remember when Ted Turner bought a scrappy Atlanta TV station, Channel 17.
The channels refer to specific radio frequency allocations. Anything below Channel 12 is "Very High Frequency", and anything above that is "Ultra High Frequency". The Channel number was basically arbitrary, but went up in frequency in numerical order, so Channel 5 had a higher frequency than Channel 17.
The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and in general the smaller the area of coverage. Fewer viewers. The big networks dominated VHF, megawatt transmitters that could reach the entire metro area and beyond. In the Atlanta area, we had all three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC on Channels 2, 5, and 11.
UHF was the domain of independent operators, who filled airtime with anything they could get. Mostly old TV shows and movies from syndicate distributors. Channel 17 was mostly old movies, while Channel 36 featured old TV shows. "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger". "Star Trek". Later in the evening, 1950s schlock horror or flying saucer films...
With an uneven format and transmission range that limited viewership and advertising revenue, it could be more challenging for the UHF stations to make ends meet. When Channel 17 ran into financial difficulties, Ted Turner pumped it up. UHF stations typically signed off at night, went off the air, but the Turner Superstation was 24 hours a day.
Apparently, Ted Turner was playing a long game.
(Also apparently, I watched a lot of television as a 1970s latchkey kid.)
>*Anything below Channel 12 is "Very High Frequency"
VHF covers up to and including channel 13
It's actually something people across the country may feel familiar with because "Channel 13" is New York City's PBS channel (WNET) and they export programming like Sesame Street out to PBS affiliates everywhere (not as much as WGBH in Boston, but a lot)
Think you mean channel 17 had a higher frequency. Channel 5 would be VHF (low) in the range 54 MHz – 88 MHz while Channel 17 would UHV in the range 470 MHz – 698 MHz. You're absolutely right about UHF stations being difficult to tune in.
I watched a lot more movies than TV shows as a kid. I miss the time when my idea of a real-life villain was Turner for colorizing B&W movies. God speed. RIP
I guess the latchkey experience in the '70s wasn't as universal as I thought :-)
1. ...in the show! -- I Love Lucy
2. ...at the tone leave your name and number and I'll get back to you. -- Rockford Files opening.
3. ...squeeze the Charmin! -- Charmin toilet paper commercials
4. ...and Irving. -- The Mosquitos on Gilligan's Island
5. ...that much! -- Get Smart
6. ...him. We can make him faster... -- the Six Million Dollar Man
Growing up, I always thought it curious that my hometown in central Illinois operated only on UHF stations (19/25/31/43/47 I think) despite the fact there was no major metro for over 100 miles in any direction, where when we would visit major cities and see stations in the 2-13 range.
(Not an answer to your question, just a note that "top" and "bottom" refer to the illustration in the article -- the authors printed a printed a vivid color logo on what appears to be a smartphone screen. With the screen on, the image on the display shines through the design printed on top.
That might be a neat effect on the glass roof of a car.)
In theory, the motivation for position independent code was to support the development and use of software libraries that could be "plugged in" to an application.
In practice, RAM was often limited to 16 KB; software reuse that I'm familiar with on a 6809 platform was at the source-code level and optimized by the programmer.
I remember editing and assembling, but not compiling or linking.
That said, I believe Motorola wrote some floating-point libraries.
I was a kid on a Tandy Color Computer, and the $49.95 EDTASM cartridge was a huge investment for our family. So my point of view could be way off... but the simplicity of the Color Computer with the design of the 6809 made programming delightful. (20 years later, my enjoyment in programming the Palm Pilot felt like that... although by then I could use C as a fancy macro assembler.)
Larger and later systems could use OS-9, which reasonably resembled UNIX and maybe supported a C compiler.
I believe that linking became important when programs got too big to compile within the memory limits of the computer. Then you had to compile portions of the code into separate object files, and then "link" those object files by reconciling the identifiers with their addresses. Without having to haul everything back into the compiler at once. It also meant that portions of a program didn't have to be recompiled if they weren't ever changed.
This wasn't the only way to skin the cat. Multi-pass compilers were another way.
Relocatable code could make more efficient use of memory, for instance not having to worry that your object code would end up crossing a page boundary after linkage.
Restaurant portion sizes have definitely increased - a lot - since the 1940s-50s. Maybe some minor pullback the last few years but still way larger than back then. A McDonald's Quarter-pounder was considered very large, that was in 1971, many sit-down restaurant burgers today are 5-8 oz.
One other thing to compare is business and health regulations. Compliance with that is certainly more involved and costly today than in 1940 and would account for part of the price.
The problem with this model is that the staff and insurance are essentially fixed costs, so if they sell 500 burgers on Saturday but only 250 on Tuesday, then the insurance cost-per-burger on Tues is double what it is on Sat. Staffing might increase by an extra body or two on the busy days but won't double, so it also has a much higher cost-per-burger on Tues.
I am not a restauranteur, just a customer (and observer) but I dont think many restaurant operators understand this concept either. Many seem to be raising prices to cover higher costs-per-item due to fewer customers to spread the fixed costs over. And then the higher prices turn more people off, now prices need to be raised again. Death spiraling themselves.
Insurance is not a fixed cost. Property and auto insurance are, but liability is a percentage of sales, its fixed for a year then adjusted for next years planned sales.
Unfortunately no mention of prices, so increase in portion sizes might be below inflation; and I suspect the former could be a strategy of compensation for inflation by making it seem less drastic ("yes it costs more, but we also made it bigger!")
One time when I was a kid and my dad and I were in line at Fuddruckers, we overhead someone else in line say "I don't think I could eat a third of a pound, so I'll have to get a half a pound instead. It's still a reference we laugh about over two decades later.
> Because the 8086 had no facility for emulating an FPU (unlike the 80286 and later processors), the emulation mechanism was somewhat complex and required tight cooperation of assemblers/compilers, linkers, and run-time libraries.
The article goes into some detail on the extra effort required to implement FPU hardware emulation on a platform that did not especially support it.
Modern implementation of FPU emulation might be more straightforward.
I haven't worked with FPU emulation on microcontrollers, which is probably the most common use case these days.
> Modern implementation of FPU emulation might be more straightforward.
Most 32-bit designs throw an exception on an invalid instruction so it can be caught and handled at runtime. Even basic ARM Cortex-M0 chips throw a catchable exception on illegal instructions.
So one option is to just issue the FPU instructions as if the FPU exists, and then catch and emulate.
This is how operating systems emulated FPUs on processors like the 68020, the 386 and early RISC machines, if they didn't have an FPU.
I first studied back-propagation in 1988, at the same time I fell in love with HyperCard programming. This project helps me recall this elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
The playbook has been to manipulate "low-information voters" by promising that you will attack a marginalized group of people. Get the voters to believe that you are on their side by echoing the fear and hatred they have for The Enemy.
Action against The Enemy replaces any action to directly address economic and social marginalization.
It's how we process information. Avoiding this cognitive glitch takes practice.
The article states that "Playboy" magazine creators started "Omni", but I'm almost certain it was "Penthouse".
I would describe both Playboy and Penthouse as primarily pornography. As such, they were both wildly popular in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Omni was not that. I had a subscription to Omni from the first issue in 1978 until about 1983. Pop science, science fiction, fantasy art, interviews and features on space exploration policy... and junk science, UFOs, psychic powers, cults. News of the wierd.
> Playboy Magazine in the 50s and 60s had a reputation for, among other things, reviewing hi-fi systems, pop albums and surprisingly good fiction. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione must have wanted some of the tech + fiction market because he and his wife Kathy Keeton launched Omni Magazine in 1978.
Either that got ninja-edited in the 8 minutes since you posted that comment, or you misread that paragraph.
Well, agreed that people didn't really buy Playboy or Penthouse for the articles. But it was pretty tame compared to PornHub and other online porn of today. You'd see breasts, maybe some pubic hair, but not much more, particulary in Playboy. Hustler was more explicit but none of them showed actual sex; you'd have to go to an "adult" bookstore or theater to find that.
I had something similar. A friend of mine gave me an issue because it had a Borges story in it. I mean, I looked at the centerfold, but mostly paid attention to the story.
The channels refer to specific radio frequency allocations. Anything below Channel 12 is "Very High Frequency", and anything above that is "Ultra High Frequency". The Channel number was basically arbitrary, but went up in frequency in numerical order, so Channel 5 had a higher frequency than Channel 17.
The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and in general the smaller the area of coverage. Fewer viewers. The big networks dominated VHF, megawatt transmitters that could reach the entire metro area and beyond. In the Atlanta area, we had all three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC on Channels 2, 5, and 11.
UHF was the domain of independent operators, who filled airtime with anything they could get. Mostly old TV shows and movies from syndicate distributors. Channel 17 was mostly old movies, while Channel 36 featured old TV shows. "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger". "Star Trek". Later in the evening, 1950s schlock horror or flying saucer films...
With an uneven format and transmission range that limited viewership and advertising revenue, it could be more challenging for the UHF stations to make ends meet. When Channel 17 ran into financial difficulties, Ted Turner pumped it up. UHF stations typically signed off at night, went off the air, but the Turner Superstation was 24 hours a day.
Apparently, Ted Turner was playing a long game.
(Also apparently, I watched a lot of television as a 1970s latchkey kid.)
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