Leica Glow ? whats that?

[Roger Hicks]

I would have had a great time going on a double date with a HAL-9000. HAL has a twin sister machine, SAL, in the book 2010. That computer has one great sense of humor. Do computers dream when they are asleep? I suspect so.

The HAL-9000 assembly language could not be anymore difficult than the FPS-120b. The programmer was responsible for pushing data through the various pipeline stages for the adder, multiplier, and memory fetch units. It was very fast for doing FFT's and image processing. Those were fun days.

Dear Brian,

Never mind all this new-fangled nonsense. A friend of mine, who has been in computers for a VERY long time, once had a problem that was not solved until they pulled up the floorboards. One of the mercury delay lines (under the floor, for security and convenience) had sprung a leak...

Cheers,

R.

 

[Roger Hicks]

I seem to recall an old saying about a million monkeys banging away on a million keyboards...

This may be an aspiration for some internet users. Sometimes it seems that the signal to noise ration is even worse.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Dear Brian,

Never mind all this new-fangled nonsense. A friend of mine, who has been in computers for a VERY long time, once had a problem that was not solved until they pulled up the floorboards. One of the mercury delay lines (under the floor, for security and convenience) had sprung a leak...

Cheers,

R.

Most people would not remember what a Mercury Delay line was! Univac I. Our first computer used Selectron tubes, but was retired before I started working at NRL in 1979. I rewrote FORTRAN programs from the IBM 704 for the then-new vector supercomputers.

EDIT: Just in case the computer geeks want to know how Mercury Delay Lines are used to store Data:

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_15/4.html

They do not seem to teach this anymore.

I still have a Wang 360K calculator that uses core memory and transistors. No IC's.

 

[Sparrow]

Of course. It's a mediaeval fake computer case. They had to fake it because computers hadn't been invented yet.

Seriously, I sometimes wonder about the Turing test: the idea that you could converse with a computer without knowing it's a computer. The internet sometimes seems to me to offer a sort of reverse Turing test: correspondence with an alleged human being who might as well be a computer, because they have all the social graces, wit, education and charm of an early Psion with a broken shift key.

Cheers,

R.

Yes; I have my doubts about Dave too ...

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Dave. My mind Dave. It's going.

But not before showing off the launch of an idea for a new thread "Cameras and Computer Manuals".

This is probably the 16th copy of 258 produced for the IBM Mark I.

How many modern books encourage copying! (so Mods, we are on firm ground here by reproducing this manual at RFF)

The Individuals are listed in order of Programming the Mark I. CAPT Grace Hopper told me so.

The IBM Mark I project started at about the time that this Leica IIIa was new.

So, computers got smaller and cameras got boring. That's Progress.

The Mark III used Selectron Tubes. Each Bit was copied in three tubes, and it used 2-of-3 voting for computations. A bell on top of the computer sounded out when there was an error, a Parity Alarm.

http://home.att.net/~thercaselectron/index1.html

Selectron Tubes Glow.

 

[FS Vontz]

It's what you see when you've been on RFF for too long

 

[kermaier]

Seems to me the flower here exhibits that glow:

Elmar 50mm/2.8, Epson R-D1

 

[deepwhite]

What a surprise to see my photo linked here... I was wondering why I had more than 100 views in this image today.

Same here. I'm the one that took the color photo of a "glowing ipod", the one next to your beautiful b/w shot.

Actually I don't know what glow is. But when I saw this photo I said to myself: "maybe we have something here...".

Regards.

André

Same here. To me the "glow" is simply something that happens when I set the aperture to f1.4 on the Summilux 35 preA. Sometimes I like it; sometimes I don't and have to set the lens to f2 to avoid it.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Sometimes effects from the lens,

sometimes effects from the lighting,

and Sometimes it has Unearthly Explanations.

1955 KMZ J-3 on the Contax II. And Ghosts.

 

[thetooth]

here is one from a summar , the aperture is a hexagon and renders the flare that way .

 

[kermaier]

Most people would not remember what a Mercury Delay line was! Univac I. Our first computer used Selectron tubes, but was retired before I started working at NRL in 1979. I rewrote FORTRAN programs from the IBM 704 for the then-new vector supercomputers.

No, they don't teach about mercury delay lines anymore; the furthest back they talk about in CS courses is punch card decks.

I worked a couple of summers at NRL in the late 1980s -- Space Sciences division, Atmospheric Effects branch. That's where I learned FORTRAN, as well as some arcane data charting language called IDL. At that time, NRL still used big magnetic tape reels for data storage, which we mounted for access on VAX 11/780 computers.

My salient memory from then is when a typo in one of my FORTRAN programs accidentally caused the allocation of a multi-megabyte array, closing out my department's memory allocation on the VAX, and causing the machine to crash. The sysadmin upstairs was terrible in her wrath.

::Ari

 

[Sonnar Brian]

That seals it. Cameras and Computer manuals Thread. I have the VAX11/780 Brochure, and a 1978 Nikon F2A will look good sitting on it.

I used that very machine in Building 209 to process 7-track Mag tape from one of the First Infrared Digital Imagers. The VAX replaced a CDC 6400.The custom data acquisition system had errors in it, and left spurious bits in the Inter-Record Gap. I found that running the tape to the end and reading it backwards got past the error. All in FORTRAN of course. I also used the "Scanning Densitometer" to digitize negatives in 1979, took up a whole lab in that building. It used a PDP-8 Minicomputer to run it.

I had my own VAX 11/750 and 11/730. I crashed them a lot.

And that Mid-Wave/Long=Wave IR Sensor definitely recorded Glow.

 

[kermaier]

Hah! I'll bet it did record glow....
That's a very creative solution to the tape read errors!

I was transforming VLF radio signal propagation data recorded at points all over the world, for use in submarine communications research. Of course the raw data arrived on little tape cassettes, which had no networked reader, so I had to transmit the data to the VAX system using a 1200 baud modem. (Does anyone remember the term "baud" anymore? )

Let's see, what other obsolete computer systems have I worked on?
In college we had a SAGE IV in the CS lab, which was quite temperamental. I remember discovering a bug in its PASCAL compiler that caused a coredump if your code did 0 mod anything.
When I worked in political polling, we had an Alpha Micro minicomputer, that was an absolute PITA to program on using "AlphaBasic" <sigh>. It also use 7-track tapes, the data on which was recorded in EBCDIC, IIRC.

<shudder> Glad those days are behind me.....

::Ari

 

[Sonnar Brian]

After being a Section Head for over ten years, I am happy to have those days of assembler and FORTRAN in front of me again. Even C. After adding over 100 macros to it to make it FORTRAN again. A good FORTRAN programmer programs in FORTRAN no matter what language they use.

I'll dig out the 1957 Digital Electronics book that I have at work.

Humorous note- the modern equivalent of the Mercury Delay Line is the Fiber Optic Delay Line. I've made those at work when requiring a short delay of an optical pulse train.

And they glow.

 

[Bingley]

I know what "Leica Glow" is. According to another thread, it's this special dust that engineers at Solms sprinkle into lenses as they leave the factory. I read that here, so it MUST be true. But if you get a lens w/ too much of the glow-dust, you get something that looks a little overexposed:

 

[gb hill]

I know what "Leica Glow" is. According to another thread, it's this special dust that engineers at Solms sprinkle into lenses as they leave the factory. I read that here, so it MUST be true. But if you get a lens w/ too much of the glow-dust, you get something that looks a little overexposed:

Ha! Ha! & to think everyone thinks it's flare

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

This has been a really interesting thread, thanks, you guys! Even (especially?) the early computing history.

Most older lenses have it, but if a computer was used to formulate the optics it is lost.

Modern lenses "just don't have what it takes".

Nokton 50/1.1?