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Abie

"The piece demonstrates the possibility to make a computer from scratch through long-established alternative materials and skills. Through its mere existence, it evokes one of the many imaginable alternative histories of computing technology and stories of plausible alternatives to our present daily lives."
En plus c'est beau...

Picture of the whole, with a hand howering over it
WIP picture : someone is embroidering a portion of cloth with gold thingies on their lap.
Standing sewing box, opened to show both common and unconventional materials: scissors, gold threads on bobbins, voltmeter...
1 April at 19:34 | Open on octodon.social
9 comments
Abie

That last image made me want to buy a vintage sewing table.
Very badly.
I don't actually sew.
etsy.com/fr/listing/1701525433

1 April at 20:02 | Open on octodon.social
Clersev

@temptoetiam il y en a plein sur le bon coin 😀 jdcjdr

1 April at 20:09 | Open on mastodon.underworld.fr
Abie

there is, of course, nothing new under the sun:
"Many Navajo women were recruited to work at the Fairchild Semiconductor plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, which was located on Navajo land. (...) Many of the women spoke Navajo as their first language and had little formal education, but they were highly skilled in the traditional Navajo craft of weaving. The weaving skills they had honed over many years translated well to the delicate work of assembling and testing integrated circuits."

Weaving was also a useful skill for those building core-memory :
"women who worked on weaving the memory cores were highly skilled and meticulous, as the accuracy of the weaving was critical to the performance of the memory system."

sparkfun.com/news/6411

(see also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic )

there is, of course, nothing new under the sun:
"Many Navajo women were recruited to work at the Fairchild Semiconductor plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, which was located on Navajo land. (...) Many of the women spoke Navajo as their first language and had little formal education, but they were highly skilled in the traditional Navajo craft of weaving. The weaving skills they had honed over many years translated well to the delicate work of assembling and testing integrated circuits."

core memory macro photograph, with very fine needle and thread dwarfing the magnetic rings.
1 April at 20:43 | Open on octodon.social
raganwald 🍓

@temptoetiam When I was a small boy, my mother was a Systems Analyst. One day, she brought some core memory home. It was a defective memory board that had been replaced, but she could show me how it worked and I could see the little ferromagnetic cores wrapped around the intersections between vertical and horizontal wires in a square frame.

It was exceedingly interesting and obviously contagious.

2 May at 17:13 | Open on social.bau-ha.us
pir

@temptoetiam Il y a des cours de couture quelque part vers la rue Damesme ;)

1 April at 21:09 | Open on piaille.fr
Abie

@pir Le problème n'est pas vraiment que je ne *sais* pas coudre...

1 April at 21:24 | Open on octodon.social
pir

@temptoetiam ^^
J'imaginais qu'avec quelques techniques supplémentaires dans la poche, et le champs des possibles qui s'ouvre à toi, tu aurais moins de scrupules à avoir toute une table de couture.
Au pire, il y a de la place pour ta broderie, et LPG pourrait y ranger des stylos plumes hein :P

Ma mère avait une boîte similaire, mais malheureusement pas sur pieds. Je me demande bien où elle est tiens.

2 April at 8:39 | Open on piaille.fr
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