Proper breakthroughs/inventions.

[Rich The Philosophizer]

Who was first? [computer]
Andrew Holme

UK of course. As always.
Gibbo

Yes, but not with Colossus...Babbage's Difference Engine.
Paul Burridge

Any evidence it was ever built, or was it like Harold Black's work?
Hey. Would Negative Feedback qualify?

Of course not.

Unless you mean the _discovery_ of negative feedback?

Negative feedback has been what's kept us all from falling off the
edge lo these many years.

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

.

The real world is always going to have more data than RAM available to
handle it, so its got nothing to do with poor software writing. Its just
the way it is.

Kevin, you sure know how to hurt a guy. Here I am, Joe Apostrophe Police,
ever vigilant for extraneous apostrophes, and here, you've gone and left
out a couple that were _supposed_ to be there!

Give a guy a break, OK?

;-)
Rich

 

[Product developer]

Then please eat more.



Pizza shops go throuh lots of sauce, so they don't go whole hog on
it like they do with Marinara.

not. Puree, paste, water, spices, ... but not a full blown Marinara.

And most people/families have a "secret" ingredient. BTW, I think
it's the licopene (?) in tomatoes (not pizza with all that
counterproductive cheese) that prevents heart disease and cancer.

Without a doubt one of my favorite inventions beside my own has to be
the better of the two original buffalo wing sauces from Buffalo N.Y.
My favorite is the Santora's recipe which I have determined is the
best wing sauce on the planet. The only remaining restaurant is in
Mission Viejo California where I have pleasured my palate nearly every
week since 1980. 40 to 50K in wings later it is still the best damn
sauce I have ever experienced. People fly into Orange County from all
over just to get their fix.

As embarrassing as it is, my favorite abandoned invention was the LED
tennis shoe that I invented in 1978. I was designing disco light
controllers for Tivoli Industries, the company that patented strip
lighting you can see in theaters and amusement parks all over the
world. After designing many famous lighted dance floors I came to the
conclusion that the lights could go into shoes too. It eventually led
to the LED apparel craze that resulted in LED's in tee shirts and
other apparel. After introducing the disco shoe with flashing lights
in the heels that was sold all over the U.S. during the disco era, I
was approached by a tennis shoe manufacturer at a shoe show in Dallas
to design a lighted jogging shoe. The original intent was to provide a
safe shoe for night jogging. Just a couple years after the shoes were
released the market died and I lost interest in keeping up my
maintenance fees on the patent thinking that no one would ever do LEDs
in shoes again!

Every time I see kids wearing LED flashing shoes I reflect back on my
brilliant decision to let the patent go. It was my first realization
that fads do come back for an encore now and then!

I gladly pay all my patent maintenance fees now in advance.

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

Who's your GP? It's about time I changed mine, anyway.


Eminently sensible!


I would strongly urge all democrats to buy and consume as much tomato
ketchup as possible. Just make sure it's Heinz. That nice Mrs.
Kerry-Heinz needs to recoup the millions of bucks she vainly and
fruitlessly spunked on desperately trying to become the new First
Lady. ;-}

She must have got lucky. One of the projects I was a document
coder on (a job where data entry drones build a cross-reference
database in litigation discovery) was a little band of five millionaires,
who wanted to get in on the "sell power to the electric company"
bandwagon, and one of their big projects was a cogeneration plant,
where the waste heat from the generator was used to heat a greenhouse,
where they had planned to raise tomatoes, and break into the Ketchup
market.

They went bust, and I made $8.00/hr for a couple of months coding
documents for the lawsuit(s).

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

Yes; Lilienfeld has 3 patents on the transistor in Jan 1930, Sep 1932
and Mar 1933.
Seems that whats his name and Bardeen copied some of the wording and
took all the credit they could squeeze out.

Gail Lilienfeld took me to Sadie Hawkins, ca. 1967.

Wasn't Lilienfeld the guy who invented the hot air balloon? ;-)

Thanks,
Rich

[0]Otto Lillenfeld - it's a joke.

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

But virtual machines makes debugging of OSs easier so there is a bit of a
pay back from the same area.

So the challenge, then, apparently, is to find a way to bring all this
virtual crap into real reality, right?

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Rich The Philosophizer]

As embarrassing as it is, my favorite abandoned invention was the LED
tennis shoe that I invented in 1978. I was designing disco light
controllers for Tivoli Industries, the company that patented strip
lighting you can see in theaters and amusement parks all over the
world. After designing many famous lighted dance floors I came to the
conclusion that the lights could go into shoes too. It eventually led
to the LED apparel craze that resulted in LED's in tee shirts and
other apparel. After introducing the disco shoe with flashing lights
in the heels that was sold all over the U.S. during the disco era, I
was approached by a tennis shoe manufacturer at a shoe show in Dallas
to design a lighted jogging shoe. The original intent was to provide a
safe shoe for night jogging. Just a couple years after the shoes were
released the market died and I lost interest in keeping up my
maintenance fees on the patent thinking that no one would ever do LEDs
in shoes again!

Every time I see kids wearing LED flashing shoes I reflect back on my
brilliant decision to let the patent go. It was my first realization
that fads do come back for an encore now and then!

I gladly pay all my patent maintenance fees now in advance.

The thing that stands out in my alleged mind is the story under either
"dumb criminals" or "the Darwin effect" where some kid wearing LED
sneakers ripped somebody off and tried to escape by running into the
woods.

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Stefan Heinzmann]

Yes; Lilienfeld has 3 patents on the transistor in Jan 1930, Sep 1932
and Mar 1933.
Seems that whats his name and Bardeen copied some of the wording and
took all the credit they could squeeze out.

I thought Julius Edgar Lilienfeld had invented the MOSFET and not the
bipolar transistor. That's a large difference, how could Bardeen have
gained anything by copying the wording?

 

[Tim Shoppa]

Strange that you single out the inventiveness of the Wien bridge
oscillator with the bulb over the development of the transistor. Both
were developments that relied on previous work. That's not to belittle
their achievement, but Hewlett's thesis for example contains a reference
to a paper by Meacham that described the usage of a lamp in a crystal
oscillator. (I got this from Jim William's book).

The Meacham bridge is phenomenally clever. The lamp for output
regulation is clever enough, but the way that the bridge is used to
multiply the Q of an already high-Q resonator is mind-blowing. A
good ovenized Meacham bridge oscillator has stability not too far different
from the early atomic clocks. (Of course there are other differences...
having the second redefined in terms of an atomic transition makes the
crystal at best a secondary reference).

The whole bridge concept (esp Wheatstone bridge) is a fundamental change
in thinking (maybe "wrapping your mind around a problem" is a better
phrase!), and new uses (esp in active or feedback circuits) are
still being developed a century and a half later.

Tim.

 

[Ken Smith]

So the challenge, then, apparently, is to find a way to bring all this
virtual crap into real reality, right?

In optics virtual a focus really matters. In electronics, a virtual
ground matters. In OOP virtual methods matter. I guess in many ways the
virtual is real.

The field of real numbers contains many that will never be realized so in
some ways they are virtual.

 

[Ken Smith]

Memory <> Machines.

Yes but:

Memory is required for much of a machine.