Change in computers as a hobbiest... 2864

Alex

But I don't have to do it myself, I can pay someone to do it for me. Now if my hobby was tinkering with my engine, I would ignore the quick-change oil emporiums and do it myself. But surely you would feel the same way about modern engines as you do about modern computers. Technology has removed some of the fun.

Computer hardware was easier to tinker with when it was made of discrete logic gates. One day my Apple died after being transported to the local computer club. So I got out my square wave signal generator, set the frequency and duty cycle to only allow about a dozen instructions to execute, attached the output to the Reset pin and slowly lowered the frequency while tracking the end of individual instructions on an oscilloscope. The address lines went fuzzy on the first subroutine return instruction. Aha! Return addresses were stored in RAM, so the cause was memory failure. From there it was simple to track the cause to a single NAND gate that generated the RAM write strobe.

You can't have that kind of fun today with all the circuitry embedded in single chips.

But that's not the issue I was trying to address. I'm saying that just because the novelty of computer hardware has faded and they are now basically appliances doesn't mean they have to diminish as a hobby. Now I take the hardware for granted and use it as a tool to work on my real hobby: The Collatz Conjecture.

Instead of watching address lines on an oscilloscope, I watch Python functions make calculations with operands having 50,000 decimal digits. Instead of designing logic circuits I now write functions like:

j = ((gmpy.invert(xyz1-xyz0,xyz1**(k-1))*(xyz1**(k-1)-prevgen2)) % xyz1**(k-1))-xyz1**(k-2)

That's something I could never do on an Apple .

You too. Try not to feel so down about the old days, let your hobbies evolve like everything else.