You have to be in the right location for xyzzy to work, otherwise nothing happens. Some might venture that the location is the state of Mind and you get there when you're feeling adventurous.
Yes indeed, and I'd guess that its computing power wasn't all that much greater than the Bowmar Brain, an early four function hand calculator. Despite its reputation for slowness, compared with these, the HS10's CPU is a real powerhouse. The computer in your photo looks a lot like my college's local admin. computer in size and floor space, which I thought was an IBM 360/20, but from photos I've been looking at, it must have been an IBM 360/30, the smallest, slowest 'real' 360. It's CPU box was about 1/3 to 1/4 the size of the one in your photo, but there was a second large box (both standard IBM blue) that held secondary core memory. The photo (see below) looks somewhat like what I recall, but instead of the two disk packs, it had a bank of 9 of them, stacked two high. Only 8 could be online at a time, and the system op. had to replace disk packs as called for by whatever the school's admin. programs needed. One of my little pocket size external USB hard drives holds 4,000 times as much data as all of these disk packs stored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/296940-28-tergra-eniac
Nah, yours was British beige and mine was too IBM blue and not quite as large unless all of the separate pieces are added in. The photo I included looked quite a bit like the one that I spent a lot of time near but never operated, although I sometimes put a new punched paper tape control loop on the system printer when the old one broke or wore out, or changed bulbs (like little 12v automotive bulbs used in tail lights) in the mag. tape units.
It wasn't their primary computer, but a nearby high school had an ancient computer whose main memory was stored on a rotating drum, and from what I was told, programmers weren't free to write programs too distant from the metal. The bits of code had to be interleaved around the drum, spaced so that the next instructions read from memory (on the drum) were just approaching the read heads as they were needed to be fetched. If the code was poorly positioned on the drum, the programs would still work, but they'd run much more slowly. Talk about program loops!
When I was at Uni the computer science department had a UNIVAC that we accessed via punch cards. Over a 2 year period, I was allowed into the clean room to see the actual mainframe just once. It turned out that this computer used drum storage as well. Each drum storage unit was in a big cabinet. Basically the technology was similar to a hard drive in that it was magnetic storage over a rotating surface.
Yeah, drums were used for early data storage. But the computer I'm talking about didn't use that kind of drum. I'm not even sure if it had any real data stores. The drums were used for code, almost like firmware. When I was briefly in the army, our "class" was shown part of our branch's data center. Some racks had very large plug-in cards that were used to supply the "program" instructions and other racks had banks of glowing nixie tubes. This was circa 1963/64 and I don't know if the equipment using the nixie tubes was operational, but the boards with the cords were. The programming was done by plugging in many cables, the kind switchboard phone operators used to use, but the wiring was much denser. My mom did this long before Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine learned the 'ropes', and when I was very young I recall seeing similar (but much larger) consoles operated by company receptionists.
I tested the high ISOs indoor and it shows more noise than the F20-31 series but also less melting of detail - it's obvious that the NR algorithm is less advanced than the F30/31 at 800 but at least it shows detail instead of blanket blurring everything like other cams ..
Its interesting that the DR is so good. One definitely gets the feeling that advances in cameras tend to be two steps forwards and one step backwards. The lower NR also sounds like a big plus to me. I am not a RAW user but Fuji don't seem to have ever gotten a good grip on their RAW processing, so many complaints for so long.
You'll be able to get this camera very soon. It's called the X100, and you wouldn't believe how short the zoom ratio is. The best part is that zooming is instantaneous, no slow, 'fly by wire' zooming here.
