Honda hydrogen car??

[patrick_g]

ccsial, Jovial? Oh yeah, and Algol the father of Pascal (sorry Nicklaus Wirth). Chasing the BSCS and MS Software Engineering degrees I wrote papers comparing and contrasting the major languages so there aren't too many mainstream languages I didn't have to touch on at least. I can blame the Navy for getting me soiled with CMS2Y targeting the AN/YUC 20 with its 16K of ferite beads for memory. Actually I never wrote CMS or compiled it, just replaced it with Ada code for the SSIXS (Satellite Submarine Information eXchange Subsystem of the Navy UHF SatComms on DEC VAX platforms) If I recall correctly, as this was 20 yrs ago, the box I bought for Pascal and then Ada development was a DEC VAX 11-785 which was s--t hot at the time. Removable disk packs the size of 5 size large pizzas stacked on top of one another with huge memory capacity of 20Meg or a tiny fraction of a CD.

Of course those things go obsolete quickly like the first Tecktronix color inkjet printer I bought which you fed one sheet of clay-sized-on-one-side paper at a time and it was wrapped around a vacuum cylinder and spun while a lead screw drew the ink jets across it. I recall this slow inkjet did a fair job and it only cost a tad over $6000. I guess you could buy better faster cheaper units now for $100 and you don't have to buy special big bucks paper.


Anyone out there ever here of Project Technology of Berkely (Beserkly) CA (Sally Schlaer and Stephen Mellor) and their Object Oriented methodologies?

Pat

 

[mjncad]

Patrick_G

Thanks for the correction on COBOL's name. I never messed with it, as I didn't have a need to. I just remember a 60 Minutes story on Admiral Hopper and COBOL seemed to be a part of it.

I've been reading subsequent posts and seeing names like ADA, ALGOL, etc sure bring back memories of when the computer racket was new to me and these were the presumed up and coming technologies. Again, where I worked we never had a need for ADA & ALGOL; but I do remember reading want ads for companies looking for people skilled in these languages. I never heard of JOVIAL; but that doesn't mean anything.

The first operating system I learned bits and pieces of as a CADD Dweeb was Sperry-Univac's VORTEX, which powered our Sperry mini-computers (think 2 to 3 refrigerators side by side). I don't recall what VORTEX stood for. Those mini computers had a number of Hawk disk packs, which we swapped out between shifts so the next shift would have enough disk space to work on that day's assignments. When we got Eagle disk packs, we were in hog heaven with 300 MB in a package the size of a washing machine.

I snagged a few of the box fans from the old Sperry's before they went away. I have one connected to my pile of junk Dell to provide cooling after a couple of Chinese made fans puked. Those fans are rebuildable and were made in the USA.

 

[patrick_g]

mjncad, Hey thanks a lot for the link to the pix with the nose art. I wrongly assumed the nose art was on a plane till I saw the JD. Max cool dude!!! Maybe it will start a trend. Maybe I can con an artist into "doing" my little Kubota.

There was a lot of resistance to adoption of Ada because for one thing everyone is resistant to change but Ada tried to enforce (I like to think support) a small dose of properly structured software engineering. That had the spaghetti coders both angered and scared. You know the good ole boys whose code was totally inpenetratable to anyone else in the entire world. The stuff I refered to as write only code. They write it and no one can read it, even the author after it gets cold. It was a mark of pride for these misdirected morons that no one had a clue what the code did or how it did it. They were satisfied that it performed the task. If no one else could underestand it then fine, that gave them job security. If they got hit by a truck an entire economic structure could tumble.

Of course for the enterprise as a whole the best economics lay with writing code that everyone could read, understand, and modify if needed. This led to reuse and great savings in not having to do every bit of every program from scratch. Ada was a very good language for supporting the more enlightened approach.

I got a change of jobs and a decent promotion as much for knowing Ada as any other single reason. It wasn't even really all my own doing. Ada was THE language we used in Grad school getting the MS in software engineering. A sister activity a couple hundred yds across the parking lot was mandated to redevelop the AN/YUK-20 based CMS-2Y coded satellite to submarine communications software in Ada on DEC-VAX computers. They couldn't spell Ada and had no clue about the DEC-VAX. I was then designing and helping code a courseware authoring system for Navy instructors to use. It was in Ada to run on a VAX. I was in the right place at the right time with the right acronyms and became the guy in charge of the satellite to sub comms software with annual deliveries to Yokusaka Japan, Naples Italy, Pearl Harbor Hawaii, and Norfolk, Virginia, and London England (we sold a verson to the British Royal Navy) I didn't have to make all the trips as the folks I had working for me on my team were not too resistant to foreign travel. Funny how the annual London trip coincided with Wimbleton.

I never really got into CAD or CAM myself beyond a few circuit cards but there was a lot of it going on around me. A smart guy would have invested in AutoCad (I didn't.) They must have made a mint with all the versions and cost per seat and such.

Pat

 

[gemini5362]

It was said by someone in this thread already but bears repeating. Hydrogen is only a energy storage device. A battery if you will. It is not a fuel in the traditional sence.


Would you please explain this to me a bit better. I have read the thread up to where you made this statement. I understand that people feel like it takes energy to seperate hydrogen from water. It is my understanding that gasoline does not flow out of the ground it takes energy to make it out of oil.
In the 70's billings energy corporation developed a new kind of storage medium for hydrogetn it was tested and is as safe as the gas tank on an automobile or if anything it is safer. The U.S. Postal Service had and may still have a fleet of postal delivery vehicles that run on hydrogen. They use a normal combustion engine with a carburator that works with a gas. I believe it is the exact same one that is used on propane tanks. The main problem with hydrogen in an internal combustion engine is the size of the molecules. To achieve any kind of power you have to compress the fuel then ignite it. To do that with Hydrogen you have to use large quatities of the gas to get enough to compress. The Postal Vehicles were filled with tanks and had a very decreased load capacity yet they only had a range of 90 miles.

 

[gemini5362]

.


Hard core computer geeks can program in Assembler, which is about as close to doing everything in binary as one can get.

I thought hard core compuer geeks program in micros. If my old brain remembers the term correctly that is the program that you write for the hardware to actually perform an assembly language instruction ( open tri-state device, read bus, close tri-state device, index adder etc etc

 

[gemini5362]

Pat I was a field engineer for Sperry Corporation which was the parent company for UNIVAC. I have seen a lot of YUK 20s I have a bit of ancient knowledge about how it was used in the surface fleet. I do not know what replaces it now.

 

[mjncad]

mjncad, Hey thanks a lot for the link to the pix with the nose art. I wrongly assumed the nose art was on a plane till I saw the JD. Max cool dude!!! Maybe it will start a trend. Maybe I can con an artist into "doing" my little Kubota.
Pat

Pat:

No need to con an artist into doing nose art for you. Just go to Bumper Stickers and PSP Tubes at Sticker Chick and find the stickers you like. That's where I got mine. I also picked up a few smaller ones for my welding helmet. I did the BAMBI & THUMPER labels in Paint Shop Pro 11, and had CafePress.com : Create, Buy and Sell Unique Gifts, Custom T-Shirts and More print them up for me. I probably spent all of $20 for the stickers from both places, maybe $25 total with shipping. If you come up with nose art for your Kubota, I hope you post it.

A good friend of mine is a successful realtor and he told me of a party he was at that had a bunch of Deere's big shots for Colorado in attendance. He told them of the BAMBI stickers and he said they got a chuckle out of it. But what really got them to bust a gut laughing was when he told them what I tell people when I'm out on the tractor, "Time for me to mount and ride Bambi."

I know what you mean about the spaghetti code and LISP is prone to that. I can't tell you how many times I had to re-figure out what I did months before, even when time permitted me to comment my code. What a nuisance if I didn't comment my code, and I hated trying to figure out other programmers' coding. I enjoyed writing the programs; but I never would have made a good programmer in a large project requiring numerous programmers to complete a project.

I remember seeing AutoCAD 1.x and it was a pile of junk. Silly me should have seen the potential and invested in the company. But being young and stupid and use to using Auto-Trol's CAD system on the Sperry kept me from investing in Autodesk. I just give them money to keep my Autodesk products current. BTW, Auto-Trol is still around; but I have no idea what they do now since AutoCAD ran them out of the CADD software market.

 

[mjncad]

I thought hard core compuer geeks program in micros. If my old brain remembers the term correctly that is the program that you write for the hardware to actually perform an assembly language instruction ( open tri-state device, read bus, close tri-state device, index adder etc etc

Do you mean macros? I just recall the guy who taught me FORTRAN showed me some ASSEMBLER, and it was gibberish to me because it was so abbreviated and primitive.

 

[patrick_g]

NOw who wold call this terse ====> mv a,b

It is simple... move the contents in the "a" register to the "b" register where contents is a byte of of bits.

Assembler is way higher level (to me) than directly writing binary but it is like arguing whether an inch or two inches is small when compared to parsecs. Good optimizing compilers can usually compile a nice easy to read and understand high level language and end up with a tighter executable than most coders slinging assembler. In any appreciable sized project, especially if done by more than 1 or 2 people or if it is expected to be maintained and modified by others later on down the way the high level language will win any reasonable comparison.

Micros and macros. Micro instructioins were the precursor to assembler language. Macros are named groups of intstructions envoked by name instead of having to write the same lines of code over and over.

If you have several lines of code to do a job you can give it a name and instead of having to write all those lines of code every time you just call it by name. When running the assembler or compiler the actual lines of code are inserted in place of the name. Sounds simple and is but it was the begining of someting quite grand, STRUCTURED programing.

Pat

 

[patrick_g]

It was said by someone in this thread already but bears repeating. Hydrogen is only a energy storage device. A battery if you will. It is not a fuel in the traditional sence.


Would you please explain this to me a bit better.

You can argue this several ways. If you want you can think of gasoline or diesel fuel oil as an energy storage mechanism. That was probably not the "take" the author of the comment had. Since hydrogen, when consumed produces water which can be taken apart into hydrogen and oxygen again by any number of fairly straight forward processes, you can consider hydrogen consumption and recovery to be like a battery or electrical capacitor both of which are reservoirs or storage media for energy.

This is an easy assumption to be led to in the case of hydrogen whereas with diesel fuel of gasoline it is not so simple and straight forward to take the exhaust and convert it back to gas or diesel.

This simplicity of combining oxygen and hydrogen and releasing energy and then using energy to separate the result into the original components makes this a legitimate energy storage mechanism that is easy to visualize and understnad, at least on the surface. Unfortunately nothing is for free and it takes way more energy to convert the water (hydrogen vehicle's exhaust) into oxygen and hydrogen than you get when recombining the oxygen and hydrogen.

If you consider the process on the atomic level it all works and there are no losses. In our atmosphere oxygen atoms are usually bound to each other in pairs called O2 (molecules), Free atmospheric hydrogen is typically H2 (molecules.) So, if you combine 2 H2 molecules and one O2 molecule you get 2 molecules of water H2O. The energy released in this process is precisely equal to the energy it takes to take two water molecules apart into their constituent components of 4 atoms of hydrogen and 2 of oxygen.

Unfurtunately the requirements for using hydrogen as a motor fuel requires lots of hydrogen and no commercially viable process even comes close to the process described above with its 100% efficiency and reversability when making commercailly significant quantities of hydrogen.

Aye, there's the rub! There is a wide and deep chasm between the theoretical and the state of the practice in producing hydrogen. It has been getting better, evolving if you will toward an economically viable process but I have a lot of company in my camp when I say the evolution isn't there yet, isn't getting there fast enough, and needs to be replaced with REVOLUTIONARY approaches. Giant leaps are needed not stepwise refinement of flawed processes.

I favor hydrogen as a motor fuel. I also favor cold fusion as a power source. Right now from a practical standpoint without Government tilting of the playing field hydrogen is not all that far ahead of cold fusion. I wish hydrogen all the best and hope it can be make viable. I also wish cold fusion all the best and hope it becomes viable. Cold fusion would provide enought decentralized cheap energy to drive the "not yet prime time" hydrogen generation methods.

What do you do, light a single candle or curse the darkness? I drive a Prius.

Pat