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Danger - 20000 Ohms?

Posted by $ jbrenner 5 years, 9 months ago to Humor
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A good friend and former business partner of mine and I sold our former biofuels company (our form of shrugging) right after reading Atlas Shrugged in 2008. His shrug job is ownership of a used computer and electronics shop. Imagine Sanford & Son for electronics.

On the outside of the building is the linked sign.
SOURCE URL: http://my.fit.edu/~jbrenner/galt/danger20000ohms.jpg


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  • Posted by John403 5 years, 9 months ago
    Here is a story to show what another electrical term, “conductor” is.

    There was a StreetCar Conductor in San Francisco. One day, a vagrant tried to sneak a ride and the conductor stopped him. A fight ensued and unfortunately, the vagrant struck his head and died. The DA filed charges and the Conductor was found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

    On execution night, the Conductor requested a dozen bananas for his last meal. The conductor ate them and then willingly sat down in the electric and was strapped in. The warden pulled the switch and 20,000VAC ran through the Conductor as he sat there and laughed. Because of California law, you only have one chance at executing a prisoner, so the conductor was unstrapped and allowed to leave. While walking out, the warden said “what does eating all of those bananas have to do with the fact that we couldn’t electrocute you.” With a big smile the conductor said “the bananas don’t have anything to do with it. I’m just a bad Conductor.”
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  • Posted by NealS 5 years, 9 months ago
    In the 50's as a teen I worked for IFA Electronics, a specialty retail outlet in S. Cal. In out retail parts area we had a huge capacitor about 6" x 18" x 2 feet tall, with a sign on it labeling it as an "Inverted Thermothrocal". Had a lot of laughs about it, but mostly for the gullibility of talking people into believing it.
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  • Posted by Solver 5 years, 9 months ago
    Used computers? Are they rarities like an Altair 8800, a SOL-20 or even a TI-99/8?
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    • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 5 years, 9 months ago
      Sounds like you and I grew up in the same era. Very familiar with those machines. I cut my teeth as a high school student learning machine language programming on a DEC PDP-8e in the mid-1970s.
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      • Posted by Solver 5 years, 9 months ago
        They had a PDP-8 in my high school. I learned to program BASIC using a teletype that was hooked up to it. The TI-99/8 was never made for production. The prototypes are are even rarer than an Apple 1. Still have one.
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        • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 5 years, 9 months ago
          I had the development platform for the TI 9900, which was a pretty slick microprocessor in its day. The PDP-8 I “grew up” on was located at a University in the state I grew up in. We had an ASR-33 teletype (!), paper tape (!!), and a modem with and acoustic coupler. A whopping 110 Baud! When I went to that University I became one of the system administrators and was blown away by the Hazeltine CRTs that could achieve a mind-blowing 300 Baud. Those were the days.
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    • Posted by NealS 5 years, 9 months ago
      Ahh, brings back memories of my Commodore 64, I even bought a tape drive, then a high speed disk drive. It was so fast it could load (forgot the name of it) the word processor program into memory in about 10 minutes.
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  • Posted by BCRinFremont 5 years, 9 months ago
    My college comp sci lab had a bank of TRS-80 terminals (fondly named Trash 80s) that would reboot whenever a student first touched them due to the static discharge built up from the carpeting. This lab also had an old double hung window that was often open due to the heat of the computers. The window was directly above a coal train, and the dust certainly reduced the life of the poor PDP-11 housed in that room. I clearly remember a student in charge of the massive disk drive manually moving the read head in an attempt to reboot the system. Definitely a hands on system. We did have a high speed printer; all the better to print results of infinite lprint loops. I saw stacks of paper 4 feet high with nothing but the letter A printed on each page.
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    • Posted by $ 5 years, 9 months ago
      The Trash 80 was my first computer. I soon upgraded to an Apple IIe back in the days when "64K ought to be enough for anybody".
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      • Posted by freedomforall 5 years, 9 months ago
        You two were a few years ahead of me. I didn't buy a computer until I started my consulting business in '85 and needed one. It was a Compaq transportable (and it still worked the last time I booted it 10+ years ago.) I recall being complimented by ladies on commercial flights for the sewing machine I was taking to my mother or girlfriend. I upgraded it with a 286 card to get 6Mhz whiz-bang performance ;^)
        It was an amazing machine compared to the 10,000 sf mainframe (the first computer I used in person) which had 48k available memory for programs.
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        • Posted by $ 5 years, 9 months ago
          I started computing in '84 and '85, getting onto the Internet at the whopping baud rate of 300 bps.
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          • Posted by freedomforall 5 years, 9 months ago
            Again you were a few years ahead, JB. I didn't get on the "internet" until the early 90's when I was consulting for Emory University. (I didn't know what an IP address was until then.) I did use bulletin boards and access customer mainframes at 300 baud in the 80s even before I bought my first computer. I went through rolls of thermal paper on my beach vacations fixing client's "emergencies."
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 5 years, 9 months ago
    So what is an Ohm? Some measurement of electriciy, like a watt?
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    • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 5 years, 9 months ago
      Ohm's law is one of the first things electrical engineering (EE) students are taught. It is:

      Voltage = Current * Resistance

      Voltage is expressed in Volts (named after Alessandro Volta); Current is expressed in Amperes (named after André-Marie Ampère), and Resistance is expressed in Ohms (named after Georg Ohm).

      Ohm's law is the basis of much of the EE curriculum. Most EEs use it daily in their work.
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