How long would it take to play Crisis?
I'll get my coat. =-)p
Vintage hardware enthusiast Ken Shirriff has shown that a model 1401 mainframe, which IBM announced in 1959, can mine Bitcoin. If, that is, your definition of mining includes “chugging away at the problem until pretty close to the heat-death of the universe.” Ken Shirriff used the Model 1401 housed at California's Computer …
Whilst waiting 24 hours to get the dreaded "COMMA EXPECTED IN DO" after passing my meager stack of 12x80 cards to the nasties on the other side of the counter.
My idea was more along the lines of "how would it work if a lot of random monkeys punched these cards and submitted them thousands of time an hour?"
I'd probably be filthy if not rich by now thanks to those monkeys.
Not sure what that has to do with artificial coinage, but I'm expecting my payoff will be better than yours.
You do things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard" to quote JFK. Millennials can be satisfied with Angry Birds, and that's sad.
I cut my programming teeth on a 1401. Our programming class was allowed to run programs overnight on the School Board's machine. A friend and I wrote a program to calculate pi to 1000 decimal places by filling in a 1000 character word (Autocoder, the 1401's assembly language had variable length words). It ran for 14 hours before we were kicked off with no result. A damn slow but still magnificent machine.
"not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
Oh my, get carried away by sound bites much? Doing things because they are hard is of zero interest to people who have no burning desire to prove anything to anyone. As much as I admire the actual achievement, I can't help but wonder whether said gentleman would have been equally eager to conquer space if the "commies" weren't dead set to get there first...
::eyeroll::
I am not a millennial and yet I am still a lazy arse. Kudos to this guy for taking his hobby to the extreme, but let's not pretend that laziness (or lack of interest in certain arcane achievements - I happen to think this one is cool... climbing Mt Everest these days, meh) is a feature of any one generation.
No, no, no... you can't do that with the antikythera mechanism, but it will tell you when high tide will be and how soon to plant your wheat on the day the 1401 finishes*.
* Warning: results may be inaccurate if the optional "Sun explosion and Heat Death of the Universe" module has not been installed.