Author: administración

In 1979, a Sony engineer named Nobutoshi Kihara built the first Walkman prototype in four days because his boss Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera on long flights, and the team launched it with no advertising budget, no headphone jack standard, and an internal forecast of 5,000 units a month that the device beat in its first fortnight.

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In February 1979, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka walked into the office of audio engineer Nobutoshi Kihara carrying a bulky TC-D5 cassette recorder and a complaint. He was about to fly to the United States, the trip was long, and he wanted to listen to opera on the plane without lugging a machine the size of a hardback book. Kihara, the engineer Ibuka liked to call godlike for his habit of turning a hallway conversation into a working prototype almost overnight, pulled apart a Pressman, Sony’s portable recorder for reporters, stripped out the speaker and the recording head, wired in a…

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NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.

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The popular version of the story sounds almost too perfect: NASA is still flying the Voyager spacecraft with code written in a 1970s-era programming language that barely anyone understands anymore, kept alive by a few elderly engineers who remember how it all works. Like many great space stories, the truth is a little messier — and in some ways even more impressive. The twin Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, built for a mission that was originally meant to study Jupiter and Saturn. Nearly five decades later, they are still operating. NASA describes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 as the only…

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Is Wage Garnishment Ever Cheaper Than Student Loan Repayment?

Passive Income

Is wage garnishment ever better than repayment for federal student loans?This question is about wage garnishment for student loan debt. Short answer: no. For nearly every federal student loan borrower, wage garnishment and the rest of the default collections process will cost more than the lowest-payment repayment plan they qualify for. There is one structurally interesting exception, but even that one comes with consequences that ruin any savings.Still, the question gets asked — usually by borrowers who feel cornered, see a $0 IBR payment as suspicious, or assume default is “free” until collectors find them. Here is how the math…

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The computer that landed Apollo 11 stored its code in “rope memory” that was physically woven by hand by a workforce of women in a Massachusetts factory, a wire through a magnetic ring meaning one and around it meaning zero, so the program that carried humans to the Moon was literally knitted into being.

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The lede above is true, and it is one of the stranger facts about the Apollo programme. The software that ran on the Apollo Guidance Computer, the small machine on board both the command module and the lunar module, was not written to a disc, a tape, or any other storage medium that could be edited. It was woven. By hand. Into wire. The storage technology was called core rope memory. The principle was simple. A magnetic ring was either threaded by a sense wire or not. Through the ring meant one. Around the ring meant zero. To store a…

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