Assuming the computer talks over a standard protocol like serial or parallel, I don't see how it wouldn't be fairly straightforward to move it to a newer machine. Might even be able to run it on a virtual machine for better compatibility.
> Realistically how long would it take to modernize the software while keeping the old hardware?
What value would that provide (than make-work for a couple of software engineers)?
Probably the most bang-for-the-buck effort would be get their existing software running on an emulator, and get that integrated with the hole-punch machine. An even then, I think the main value there would be to have a backup in hand if they have trouble maintaining that old computer hardware.
But nowadays, it would probably be an agile disaster with two or three layers of managers and sales people, maybe even on different firms, if done by best practice, between you and the customer. Forget talking to the operators.
KISS is a beauty of the past.
There is no way the simple and straightforward text based solution would be made. It is more likely it would be a bloated mess with clouds or what not.
> This sounds like indoctrination to me. I generally have a different worldview that it would provide a lot of value.
That's a weird way of putting it, but I honestly think the "modernize" all the things crowd are probably the ones that "sound indoctrinated."
So, if your "different worldview" says reflexively redeveloping the software would provide "a lot of value," then name the value it would provide. They've got a process that's worked for them for 40+ years, what exactly is the value in re-doing software that's only a minor part of that process? Does that "value" justify the cost?
Honestly, what they've got can probably be understood more as an appliance than as an IT system, and anything developed today would almost certainly take the form of an IT system, with all the recurring cost and complexity that entails.
I think characterizing it just as "make-work for software engineers" is too harsh. Just from a business continuity perspective there is a real benefit to being on a well-supported platform for which it is cheap and easy to source new parts. I don't know offhand how many punch card reader manufacturers still exist, but the competition is going to be a lot less than it is in (say) USB stick manufacturing.
It's a difficult thing to quantify, but access to stable supply lines is surely worth more than zero.
The punch cards will be directly controlling the loom, it looks like it is read electro-mechanically. Maintaining the card reader is presumably a minor part of maintenance for the whole loom. One person probably has the skills to maintain the weaving part and the reading part.
If you replaced the input with USB or similar, you now also need someone with IT skills if that part goes wrong.
> What value would that provide (than make-work for a couple of software engineers)?
In the lingo, business continuity and risk management. When, not if but when, the current system fails, there is high chance of it being unrecoverable. Even if it were technically recoverable, can they find someone to do that work? How long will the factory stand still while the system is being recovered or replaced? In general it is more cost-effective to replace things before they fail rather than after the fact. Doubly so in these sort of cases where using the old system (in working state!) as a reference would most likely be beneficial.
Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years?
The only thing I can think of that would make their current setup more robust would be having the program burned into ROM and not on tape.
> Can you think of any modern platform that would have the longevity, stability and lack of maintenance burden of that Sharp computer over another 40 years?
I mean, probably any UNIX program written in C? Bill Joy vi can run on modern computers. What makes this software substantially different than a text editor?
According to Wikipedia that was a problem ... 20 years ago. That version compiles today. It's called "Traditional vi" and the Sourceforge site where it's hosted doesn't have a valid certificate so I didn't visit it.
20 years ago was 2003, four years after C99. First x86-64 CPUs were released 20 years ago. Compiling 20 year old C codebase should not be an issue at all if it was half-decent to begin with.
Compiling pre-ANSI-C and pre-POSIX codebases might have challenges, but standardization has really gotten us lot of stability here.
I'd expect conservatively written C99/POSIX code to be usable certainly for another 20 years, there is just so much inertia there
You could probably find an old timer who could bridge the gap fairly easily and lead a team of a couple of engineers to do it in a reasonable amount of time. I'm guessing that program is written in basic or assembly which wasn't too hard to learn on those old machines.
Just to paraphrase a meme "Not a Cell Phone in Sight, Just people living in the moment" : "Not a single SaaS in sight, Just people producing value"
I was quick to pick SaaS as a target, please suggest any better alternatives. I'm trying to convey the idea that technology is not the objective, it's a tool to achieve the goal. So if cassette tapes are getting you there you don't need a fancy software and newest hardware.
Their comment is reflecting upon the posted video and nothing else. Yes, Japan seems to have a rather vapid corporate culture in some areas (so do most countries), but Japan is also famous for manufacturing very high-quality goods using old and repurposed machines and passed down techniques, as seen in this video.
You'd be surprised to see how much old industrial machinery is still being used around the world, even in other developed countries. Machines like these are a huge investment, so as long as they are still working flawlessly (and I imagine that the Japanese take maintenance seriously, so the machines will be working flawlessly), it's hard to justify replacing them. So they use punch cards for the patterns, what's the problem? And I imagine the computer system is only needed when new punch cards have to be produced, which won't happen that often - for existing patterns, they can use the existing punch cards.
> Machines like these are a huge investment, so as long as they are still working flawlessly
I worked at a Colgate manufacturing facility. They had an NJ plant that had mechanical production lines. They've been running for 40 years so by the time i was there they were running flawlessly day in and day out and no matter what went wrong the maintenance crew knew how to fix it right away.
To save costs they shut down that plant and opened up a new one in SC with fancy brand new electronic machines that were supposed to have much better throughput. It took them years to get all the machines working and even still the old machines produced more in 8 hours than the new ones made in 12 hours. And whenever the was a problem with the machine it was always some wonky issue with the relays, sensors, and timing and we'd have sometimes days of downtime and would need OEMs to come in and fix it.
They wasted millions on that move which was supposed to save money and be more efficient. Many were fired/demoted from that.
I know you probably meant that in jest, but it makes sense as we have a sea change between the pre-digital and post-digital generations. And this isn't just a "back in my day, we knew when to get off the lawn"-type of observation; the post-digital cohort is used to copying and pasting bits where the new instance is a perfect reproduction of the old. Naturally, they think that you can copy a NJ factory and paste it in SC, sprinkle in some enhancements, and voila! You get a better version. But the world of atoms is much messier than the world of bits, and in the former even something like getting the floor of the factory to be level is a nontrivial task.
Maybe this just shows that I have some experience under my belt... but I understand that most things take longer and cost more than planned.
So the thought of scrapping a working factory with decades of fine-tuning already done... pains me.
I worked with one project manager who was straight out of school. I couldn't believe that the direction and management of multiple teams of engineers was coming from someone who was going to make all their rookie mistakes on our project... and all the people who hired him already left for new jobs, so no consequences for them.
Did they fire/demote the brain geniuses who kicked this off? Because the corporate stories I know like this generally involve the responsible parties getting promotions for their bravery and forward thinking, while the pain falls on the people they forced to work on it and who unaccountably failed to implement their perfect visions.
> You'd be surprised to see how much old industrial machinery is still being used around the world, even in other developed countries. Machines like these are a huge investment, so as long as they are still working flawlessly (and I imagine that the Japanese take maintenance seriously, so the machines will be working flawlessly), it's hard to justify replacing them.
Case in point: when Russia started it's invasion of Ukraine, one of the first things they did was to pillage the industrial areas of the regions they controlled to take away industrial equipment, including farm vehicles.
Although contrary to the popular believe, a lot of equipment in Ukraine is of the latest generation. For example, a lot of farmers use the latest John Deere tractors.
The same is for metallurgy - it was consistently upgraded through the years and not outdated in any way.
Ukraine is piss poor compared to Russia. For years Russia provided Ukraine with underpriced gas while Ukraine’s export prices increased rapidly, but due to the dysfunctional governments they had, they never were able to take advantage of that. Ukraine historically was an agrarian economy that was industrialized with the usual Soviet brutality, accompanied by agriculture collectivization and the usual mass repression. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it inherited a relatively good infrastructure and capital stocks, especially in energy, but it mostly failed to maintain that. Add to that the fact that since 1992, there was only one year when Ukraine had a balanced budget. There was a lot of growth in the aughts due to the high price of metallurgical during this decade, but Ukraine was mostly taking advantage of their existing industrial infrastructure inherited from the Soviets and failed to diversify and sophisticate their economy.
Besides, if the idea is to invade the country to incorporate some separatist regions, it doesn't make sense to destroy its economic basis and end up with a huge refugee problem and a completely deserted land you just conquered.
This is basically propaganda for gullible Americans that never traveled to Eastern Europe.
I fail to see the relevance of that. Sounds like cheap propaganda.
My point was clear: when Russia started it's invasion of Ukraine, one of the first things they did was to pillage the industrial areas of the regions they controlled to take away industrial equipment, including farm vehicles.
HN had a discussion on how John Deere kill switches were rendering Russia's pillaging useless as the stolen tractors were being remotely disabled once they were moved into Russia.
Industrial equipment, even old one, is often used extensively in spite of existing latest and greatest offers.
Yes comrade, Russia is bigger and has a lot of oligarchs so off course there's much more money there, but average citizens are piss poor. Russian elites has been robbing Ukraine for three decades with their Kremlin buddy oligarchs like Medvedchuk, and not just Ukrainian oligarchs a lot of Russian ones were quite cozy there even after 2014. They robbed eastern part of Ukraine after ceasing control over the territory. It proved to be difficult to rob whole of Ukraine with just the dirty oligarchs, so they proceeded with full scale invasion in 2022.
It amazes me how people are incapable of multi-dimensional thinking: you can pick a side without claiming that one of them is pure good and the other is pure evil. But we are also probably talking about the kind of people whose only cultural references are superhero movies and Harry Potter.
Well I guess I'm a gullible Kiwi living in the UK that never travelled to Eastern Europe. And never will, because of the volatility and the general stance towards gay people (mostly that we should be dead).
As OP followed up, doesn't change the facts that Russian soldiers pillaged the crap out of Ukraine as soon as they got there; Russia may be resource wealthy but corruption means that only the boys at the top get the cream, seems like everyone outside of Moscow gets the shit end of the stick.
Regardless, no amount of success excuses the slaughtering of innocents, slava ukraini.
Those are a psuedo SaaS (Google -Angular, Facebook - React) since the framework is funded, evangelized, and pays speakers to give talks at conferences. They usually kill the project if they can't make enough money off of the market of dependencies they created.
It has been working for 40+ years, it does the job, everybody using the system is familiar with it, it's robust (no network required), it's exceptionally easy to service and maintain (all through-hole technology on a single, comfortably large board), and the entire unit (computer, monitor, cassette drive) is rated at just 45 W (so it's probably using less than that.) Also, it's a beautiful machine adding a bit of joy to the work life. – Why should you want to change this?
But surely this needs to be upgraded to run on a cloud hosted Kubernetes instance? With Karpenter to dynamically scale up an down resources as needed? Supported by a ten people Infosec/SRE team
I've been a full-stack web developer for over a decade across multiple companies and this is the first time I've seen the phrase "discriminated unions".
And the wikipedia article is horrendous. It starts with the following sentence and gets worse from there.
> In computer science, a tagged union, also called a variant, variant record, choice type, discriminated union, disjoint union, sum type or coproduct, is a data structure used to hold a value that could take on several different, but fixed, types.
It uses lots and lots of words to explain something that's very simple. If you don't already know what it is, you can't figure out which words are important.
Then after all of the theory, it dives into a binary tree example which has to be the worst possible way to explain it. If you haven't implemented a binary tree before, you don't know any idea what you're looking at. It didn't help that I implemented a linked list in college.
Also, the choice of language ensures you have no idea what the types are. I completely missed the first example was self-referential.
It's like parody of a function programmer writing an explanation for anyone who isn't a functional programmer.
"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it." -- Djikstra.
I've been programming in some form or another since the late-80s. I've been paid to write code for other people for over twenty years. I haven't gone to university.
Maybe it's because I started back in BASIC, assembler, and later C that I know what that term is and have encountered it in various languages and forms several times since?
The problem with wikipedia definitions is that they have to be the definition. Some one like me would expect a link to the definition and not a tutorial. They're not written to take into account that you've been a professional programmer and have never been exposed to a computer science curriculum nor are they written for laypersons who don't know anything about programming.
It's a similar problem for functional programmers trying to explain functors, monoids, and monads: these are not terribly complicated abstractions but catering your explanation to the various audiences out there is incredibly difficult. The definitions sounds like gibberish... but with effort and education it is possible to understand and appreciate it.
Care the elaborate? I'm not challenging you I'd just like to learn more. I recently transitioned from writing C++ to Typescript and probably haven't fully grokked the TS way.
> Don't forget rewriting the code in Rust because it's faster and type safe!
I also enjoy piling on Rust fanboys,but those of us who had to go through late night troubleshooting sessions to track issues that were ultimately caused by use-after-free issues do tend to be vulnerable to Rust's memory safety siren's song
Typescript is one of the few additional layers of complexity that I truly feel is usually worth it. The exceptions being: a) if you have a complete or near-complete system that functions as intended with no major changes planned for the foreseeable future. And b) the system you’re writing is small, fairly self-contained, and the team isn’t already familiar with Typescript.
In any other situation I firmly believe the benefits Typescript brings very quickly outweigh the small amount of added complexity.
It's so frustrating to talk to Kubernetes enthusiasts.
enthusiast: if you'll migrate service X from a small sets of VMs to K8s cluster (which will take N man-moths because of reasons) it will auto-scale
Old grumpy man: but the the load is low and predictable we don't need autoscale and if load will grow we will just create two more VMs
enthusiast: auto-scaling will save time in the distant and unlikely future and CTO agrees that K8s is the best way to run software so you have to migrate anyway
We are running a busy self service ERP for growing 400k employees, on a single database instance for 7 years now. Currently at 256gb ram, 8tb database, 32 P9 cores. I got 99 problems but the single database server ain't one of them!
Parent was probably talking about the application server, which is the typical example of K8s usage, whereas most databases don't fit well there and are usually separate from the K8s cluster.
Yeah. They must be. I’ve had several k8s enthusiast dissuade from putting a db in k8s for performance reasons. This may change overtime but I believe there is a performance bottleneck in disk I/o (or at least that’s how it was explained to me)
That really depends on your k8s environment. If you're running on bare metal and use host bind mounts for storage, you won't have a problem. But as soon as you introduce shared storage it gets messy...
We've just migrated our ERP from a regular deployment on VMs into Kubernetes. We have a very bursty self-service component, so being able to scale up easily for the week we need it is quite nice. We've taken advantage of this ability multiple times and seen great success each time.
Used to run Tivoli Storage Manager, now Commvault. Backup can be used for certain type of issues that are isolated to the database.
For DR, Entire stack is being continually synced with a set of hot server in separate datacentre. We run a fully DR exercise yearly and it works well. It's a fairly proprietary AIX / DB2 method though so not sure you'd find value unless you're using the exact same technology stack :-/
> Old grumpy man: but the the load is low and predictable we don't need autoscale and if load will grow we will just create two more VMs
That's perfectly ok, if your deployment costs are irrelevant and/or your company gladly pays up your infrastructure costs without a second thought.
This is not the case in some organizations, and toggling a setting to auto scale a deployment can automatically save you thousands of dollars per month.
Would you still be so casual about infrastructure costs if you had to bankroll the extra capacity you need to add to your baseline to support peaks?
The decision process involved in managing your single-box deployment is not the same that goes in managing global deployments with dozens of instances per region. Cloud providers charge a premium, and that premium is a lot.
It's like the thermostat in your office. If you're just running an AC in a single room then you can just set it to full blast to keep it day and night at a certain temperature. Once there's a decision to cut costs then you start to talk about the best time to turn off/turn on a AC unit.
VM deployment has a drawback though. If the machine runs out of memory, it will lock up (at least that's my experience with EC2). And then you need to set up some sort of health checks and auto scaling (!) for EC2 based on those health checks. This is much more cumbersome and fragile than just containerising the app and setting it up in a k8s cluster which will automatically take care of this scenario.
Also, deploying a new build on VMs is extremely manual compared to k8s, unless again you set up some sort of home brew rube Goldberg machine to auto deploy. It's just way better to use k8s in tandem with a simple GA workflow.
I think grumpy old man knows about the drawbacks with VMs, but grumpy old man also knows that for his particular service k8s has drawbacks. Grumpy old man is thinking that if his particular service goes down, some users just tell him it's not working and it's not a huge problem like people are losing $10 million per hour because of it. And in the event that happens sometime in the next 23 months (if it happens at all) he'll just do that little manual process for a couple more VMs, and that's all the time he'll spend on it. Contrast that with the time it would take to get it ready for k8s and keep someone around who understands k8s well enough to take care of it, even though their need for it might be so low.
And grumpy old man also knows that compared to the 5-year overhead costs of some overcomplicated k8s system, it's quite reasonable to overprovision the bejesus at the colo bare metal>hypervisor layer as cheap insurance.
Every time I read something like this I think that there has to be a tipping point were a well-written (i.e. compiled, not interpreted) solution running on a beefy server has to more cost efficient than running the same thing spread over several containers.
Definitely not an expert, but I get the impression that this point is a lot higher that most people assume it is.
Spoiler alert: a well written application on a beefy server almost always beat the k8s rube Goldberg machines on cost. I still don't get why people refuse to think for themselves and just jump on the latest hype train.
K8s makes little sense unless you run on bare-metal. Once you jump to vms you are injecting another abstraction layer and take on a herculean level of ops without understanding what you're getting into.
VMs are nice when you can't fill a machine with a single task (plus whatever redundancy). Once you get to a single machine, you want to scale up that one machine; you can go a long way where scaling up is cheaper than scaling out. But at some point, scaling out gets cheaper.
I'm not sure where the check points are now, but typical points where cost jumps are desktop -> server socket, single socket -> two sockets, two sockets -> four sockets, four -> eight sockets. AFAIK, AMD EPYC isn't offered at more than two sockets, and going to four sockets used to be possible off the shelf but very expensive, and eight sockets was very expensive if off the shelf or very expensive because custom engineering. Sometimes ram costs go way up for the highest density too.
Quote them some Henry David Thoreau[1]: "Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence."
The irony is the last time I fell for this "SRE/K8s/Platform Engineering" crap, they promised auto-scaling and used it as a motivation for the tech. Yet when the time came, and services inevitably needed to scale due to load, they had to manually log in to increase some random config to let it grow.
Organizations tend to invest in their operations if there are significant improvements to be made. This includes things like dealing with problems such as the availability of cassetes, if the legacy system becomes too old to maintain in a cost effective way, if it's still possible to source parts, etc.
Digital systems are widespread because they are widespread and dirt cheap, and thus the tradeoff of increasing the complexity does add value.
> Digital systems are widespread because they are widespread and dirt cheap
They also churn, and finding people who can (and will) work on legacy systems isn't easy either. Get rid of something that worked for 40 years because everyone uses this other thing (but will use something else 10 years from now that we can't predict) is dumb unless there is a very valid reason.
Pretty sure they're only using it because, like buying an _old_ laser cutter off Ebay which will probably be running a Windows ME board or something, their patterning equipment is designed to work with that machine + punch cards. It's not worth the time & money for them to integrate a modern computer with that old equipment.
They're still using modern computers, the simulation of what the actual fabric would look like was amazing and I'm sure when that old computer was new, they would've killed for something like that.
Unlike the fetishists of HN, I doubt that they romanticise their use of the old computer; it's simply the only one that works with their older equipment. You say it's "easy to maintain" but they'd still need a specialist to diagnose & fix, you can't take it to any computer repair shop. And getting certain parts would be an absolute nightmare as well. You say "everyone using the system is familiar with it" well duh...the sky is also blue, of course people that use it are familiar with it, but for an industry that is on the decline, trying to get fresh faces in to revitalise won't be helped by a computer that those fresh faces would never have even seen before. Power usage doesn't matter when the looms probably pulls tens of kilowatts or more anyway. But yeah, it is cool. Impractical, but cool and that rings true for everything that they're doing, small & bespoke manufacturing of traditional wear.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of boutique industries like this are dying in Japan at the moment.
"These are highly specialized weaving machines that were build decades ago around using punched cards, and whatever benefit by speedup in process we would get from replacing their ancient control system with a modern one, would be dwarfed by the cost of modifying them to use that control system."
Or to say this with slightly less words:
Replacing software and a couple of computers is cheap, compared to replacing room-sized industrial machinery.
Furthermore, it’s very common for factories to run older equipment because the cost of upgrading is higher, riskier, and shutting the factory down to do the upgrades comes with its own losses as well.
It’s also worth noting that there was also modern computers in that video too. The system they used to “digitally preview” what the weave would look like. But that is a separate system from the ones that interface with the weaving machines and thus very easy and cheap to upgrade.
> (...) would be dwarfed by the cost of modifying them to use that control system."
This should be the top comment. Cost is a critical factor. I would also stop riding the bus and drive a Ferrari to work if that option costs as much as a bus ticket. As it doesn't then I'm going to stick with the bus, but this does not make it a superior choice.
The problem that will occur, and will prevent producing things, is that at some point finding parts and people able to repair those will be hard or impossible.
I'm not saying that having latest or newest stuff is any better, just that using old stuff can bring some problems too.
But then even if you have a small time electrical repair peep come in and pop a chip from a socket and drop in a replacement, what do you do if it still doesn't work anymore?
In that scenario you need to find someone completely familiar with the old model of computer to break out the multimeter and oscilloscope. That's gonna be a huge pain.
And in the meantime none of their stuff works, though I suppose they can rest on the existing library of punch cards they most certainly have. Or do it manually again.
Even in the worst of cases, these were popular machines and you can buy one at ebay.jp about anytime. It probably becomes much more of a problem with hardware closer in time. E.g., it's a 486 machine, the network is probably ARCNET, because industrial, where do you get any hardware that fits in? (Contrary to its 486 siblings, the 8-bit machines are still around, because they were cultural significant, and there are folks playing around with them and preserving the knowledge of keeping them running. Finding the maintenance manual for a late 1970s machine is easy as compared to finding one for a, let's say, 2001 run-off-the-mill computer.) Also, you'll be re-entering any data there is, things will probably get lost, because the project stalls. Meanwhile, while you are re-planning, selecting the new hardware, comissioning an external team to furnish the new software, eventually test it and roll it out, any production connected to this is on halt…
This isn't the only place using such equipment, and as long as there is a profit to be made someone will supply the parts. The only components that can't sit forever on a shelf as NOS are (off the top of my head) capacitors and production of those isn't going anywhere.
For non-electronic parts: that's why you have a machine shop.
I used to freelance HW/Firmware development for a small company that retrofitted old machine tools with modern motion controllers. There is a surprisingly large industry out there ready to repair or retrofit whatever old controls are on your old machines.
Put it this way, I've replaced maybe a dozen "bad caps" in equipment in 35 years of repairing high-end musical kit, six of which were in one 1970s synthesizer made from very cheap parts.
But, I've done very well out of the fashion for "re-capping" equipment because I charge 300 quid before I even start to consider clearing a spot on the bench for stuff that's been "re-capped" before they bring it to me to fix.
Recapping is mostly nonsense, there are however some devices out there with electrolytic caps that are known to leak. Some old Amiga and Macs have these issues for example.
From there it seems to have spread out into a "recap everything" craze that is just silly.
Yeah, exactly, and because it's so popular it's become the "go-to" for any fault - "oh it must be bad caps!" - and then you end up with perfectly good equipment getting ripped apart and cheap shitty Aliexpress electrolytics dropped in to replace perfectly good ones, with lots and lots of really poor soldering, dry joints and lifted pads everywhere. Oh and heaven help any ECOs made to the board, "oh someone had circuit-bent it and added all this blue wire to the back of the board so I took all that off", gawd help us.
The real fault is an 0.1μF disc ceramic, one of those little brown ones, that's gone leaky and now thinks it's a 1k resistor. Not that you'd know, with all the other iatrogenic faults the damn thing now has.
Awful. Just awful. The "it was circuitbent so I tidied it all up" thing was a Prophet 600 that I had to write off, it was so badly damaged.
> at some point finding parts and people able to repair those will be hard or impossible.
Maybe, maybe not. If the machine uses the right "legacy" parts (a Z80 is a great example, but so is anything belt- or gear-driven, etc.), then it's a very good bet those parts and the people who are familiar with them will remain available for much longer than you or I will be alive.
yes! Sometimes I cry "technology just get out my way already", if it isn't going to enable what I want to do, I don't care what other stuff it has to offer. I'm on a specific endeavor and must build the thing if it doesn't already exist. To quote this Microsoft engineer whose name escapes me at the moment, nothing is implemented by default.
Edit, regarding the video: It should be mentioned that the parts found in late 1970s and early 1980s computers were usually of quite good quality (things like capacitors were also more expensive then) and modern parts are not necessarily better or more reliable. "Shotgunning" all capacitors doesn't necessarily improve things. E.g., mine works perfectly fine without changing a single part. This particular machine, shown in the video, was in a bit of a rough state, though.
AFAIK, punch cards were used in the textile industry long before computers came to town. It’s just very convenient to map patterns.
If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it:)
> [deleted]: If anyone (white hat) can hack this place - upload some really beautiful patterns that certain [cosplay/furry/pokemon/whatever] types would love then have those communities purchase these patterns and keep this going.
I live by a different Japanese small town famous for its textile industry and there's at least one place still similarly using punch cards and tape. They exhibited some of it and a contemporary art piece made using it during the annual Fuji Textile Week last year.
Separately I also met an artist who's doing binary-hacked glitch embroidery and knitting with older machines in the area. I think they have stuff for sale from time to time and would be open for commissions. There's some pokemon/otaku/tech-related stuff if you dig through their insta.
Japan has one of the most legacy tech as they probably automated them first and an ageing population probably is resistant to change. They still use fax and telegrams quite a lot
This doesn't seem like a technological issue at all, unlike Fax machines. Unless I'm missing something, this is basically like the old-fashioned "singing telegrams" in the US, except without the singing part: you're just hiring a person to deliver a message in-person and read it aloud. The message isn't being transmitted over actual telegraph wires.
That's an interesting take. I always thought in Japan they have this sentiment of "it's good enough" for machines because in comparison it seems like a lot of old tech like this is still around over there. And I really love that, a lot of modern (software) engineering seems like an economic scam to me that really isn't necessary. Also, I bet the system shown here (once loaded) is super responsive. I keep crying over weird and sluggish web/Elektron interfaces I have to deal with every day
Laziness is the mother of all inventions, as the old saying goes.
Japanese are not lazy, they are one of the most capable people on the planet, but that also means they don't innovate or see the value of new inventions.
A great example is that in the west, we have specific kitchen tools for everything. An apple peeler, for example. Specifically to peel and only peel apples and only apples. Why? Because everyone's a lazy bastard.
But in Japan? One kitchen knife for everything. Yes, one single kitchen knife. For everything. Why? Because everyone is skilled with the kitchen knife to do anything and everything with it, so they don't need to innovate and invent apple peelers.
Or another great example: Japan started using telephones and then mobile phones and that was good enough for them. The west wanted even more convenience and invented smartphones.
As you put it, doing it the old fashioned way is "good enough" for Japan because they aren't lazy. They are both among the most advanced and regressive people on the planet.
I started to have an interest in Japanese kitchen/cooking lately and every cookbook I have lists more than one type of knife as an essential.
Also this article mentions that the chef of the restaurant in the Japan House in London: “Akira has used many different types of knives in the past, but these days he finds that one sturdy knife and one small petit knife are enough to prepare almost any Japanese dish.”
So I’m not sure where you information is coming from but sounds more like myth than fact.
> Also, I bet the system shown here (once loaded) is super responsive. I keep crying over weird and sluggish web/Elektron interfaces I have to deal with every day
You're probably right, but the actual software in only a small part of the process here. People have to go and manually cut the punch cards once produced for example, so it turns into an extremely slow and inefficient process overall.
That said, would they benefit from a years-long, 10 times over budget and bug riddled software renewal? Probably not.
Fax machines are still popular because you still need to put your hanko on everything in Japan and digital signing services are only just recently catching up to giving people the capability to sign with a stamp.
Give it another decade or two and fax machines will be gone.
Imagine how much manual work this used to be, back in the Edo period where the garment was invented.
I wouldn't change a thing, except the stuffing - it's a winter garment, so I would stuff it with wool instead of cotton, though that was of course not an option in the Edo period and still hardly is, in Japan.
Yes, though the high quality cotton used in Japan can be quite expensive (we had a lot of cotton from old futons at our home, we had to throw a lot away to make room. That stuff was very expensive when those futons were (hand-)made).
The thing about wool is that it insulates even when it's damp, while cotton simply collapses as far as insulation is concerned unless it's completely dry.
Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of wool (mostly because no other material will do when I'm camping in middle of the wilderness). But the cost of it makes it difficult for a lot of people to afford.
In any case, my point really is that the right material to use in production depends on what your target market is. If you're aiming to sell at a more affluent crowd, then wool all the way! But you might also be aiming to sell at a larger, less affluent group that makes wool the wrong material due to its cost.
There's no absolute right or wrong here, only what's right or wrong for the market you're trying to address.
It's been a while, but if I recall correctly, they mentioned that sheep farmers in New Zealand were having trouble making money and finding uses of wool. (I might be misremembering, as I'd have to go back and re-listen.) And if anything on Clarkson's Farm is to be taken as an accurate portrayal of farming trends, sheep farming was portrayed as a very difficult and unprofitable business. So I am completely guessing here, but maybe sheep farming is just not popular like it was?
Sheep farming being on the decline, at least in the U.S., seems to be at least corroborated by the following after a quick search:
According to this article though, Japan is the third biggest importer of wool but only had 20,000 sheep, as of the article's date of 2014: https://www.fragmentsmag.com/en/2014/06/ami-tsumuli-4/. So maybe in Japan, it's both an expensive enterprise to farm sheep and a lot of competition with imports. But that really doesn't answer why it wouldn't be used, which doesn't seem accurate if they're one of the world's top importers of wool, only behind the U.S. and China.
Then you see that rotating machine that is made by Suzuki (machine that rotates threads, I'm no expert so no idea).
And then you realize that every Japanese major industrial company produces literally everything
I seem to recall reading in The Economist years and years ago that this was largely a result of countless mergers and acquisitions and a strong cultural distaste for whittling away units not part of what was defined as the business' core du jour. (Good on them, I say)
Anyway, the result was that Japan's biggest supplier of tomato soup was...
According to Wikipedia [1], the Mitsubishi Pencil Company is not related to the Mitsubishi rocket company (aka Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) and Mitsubishi Group.
Wow, I've been using Mitsubishi Hi-Unis as my go-to pencils for decades now, and always assumed they were part of The(tm) Mitsubishi group.
IMHO they outrank anything as all-round pencils - I mostly use mine in H grade for writing, occasionally bringing out a set of various grades for some drawing, but still - Hi-Unis are unbreakable, consistent, takes kindly to erasing mistakes and... Wow, beating Tombows, Blackwings, Lumographs, the works. IMHO, at least. YMMV. Terms&Conditions apply.
These companies are informally known as Zaibatsu[1] - massive vertically integrated conglomerates. They produce literally everything they need to sustain themselves, so you'll find them running (say) an outsourced IT services business that services all their business units (from Car manufacturing, Aerospace to Restaurant chains) as they often avoid doing business with each other if possible.
>as they often avoid doing business with each other if possible.
That culture is actually starting to change, because that domestic rivalry/hostility has been the chief reason Japan lost the competition against American, South Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese manufacturers in recent decades.
Can't fight on the world stage if you're busy fighting each other on home turf, y'know?
I wasn’t sure it was the same Suzuki (it’s a common family name), but sure enough according to Wikipedia [1]:
> In 1909, Michio Suzuki (1887–1982) founded the Suzuki Loom Works in the small seacoast village of Hamamatsu, Japan. Business boomed as Suzuki built weaving looms for Japan's giant silk industry. In 1929, Michio Suzuki invented a new type of weaving machine, which was exported overseas. The company's first 30 years focused on the development and production of these machines.
Not only is it the same company, but it started out as a loom company!
That being said, Suzuki Motor Corporation is actually a fairly small company (market cap ~$18.5B) that mainly sticks to building automobiles. Not to be confused with something like the Mitsubishi Group that provides a wide range of different products and services (automobiles, banking, home appliances, etc) under the same brand logo [2].
Tape cassettes, as it happens, are actually hip again. They make cassette players now for a modern tech stack, with bluetooth etc. Bandcamp is full of artists selling tape, and sales of audio cassette tapes have been up year-on-year every year lately. More and more manufacturers are starting to spin up production again [1]
Is this a trick question? I would listen to digital audio on a computer, which I’ve had access to for my entire life. I’m 30 years old, and I’ve never not had a computer in the house.
Also, most people purchasing cassettes nowadays most likely also own and use a smartphone.
I am trying to understand your perspective, but I just don’t, I’m sorry.
In 2023, is there a scientific consensus on landfill vs incineration? It seems like many, highly advanced countries are using incineration now, including plastics. Hell, Sweden even imports garbage from other European countries to burn as a service.
Deeper question: Are there any removable storage mediums that are easy to recycle? Vinyl records? Minidisc? CDs/DVDs/Blurays? Computer tapes?
FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons unrelated to the actual physical properties of the material. -- e.g. "Great Pacific garbage patch", but that's just because plastic floats and someone didn't take the trouble to recycle stuff before dumping it, not because it's impossible to do that kind of recycling; Or "Microplastics" which are nasty because of their form factor, not necessarily because of the material; Or because of applications where there are paper-based alternatives and paper has a leg up due to being a renewable material.
For example, according to a very entertaining little book I have [1] that debunks greenness-myths, you need to use a cotton tote bag 130 times before you reach a break even in terms of economical footprint with using plastic shopping bags. Ironically, people's homes are filling up with cotton bags now, because you keep getting them as advertising gifts by every brand that's trying to brand itself as green, and you're often forced to buy them when you're at the supermarket and forgot to bring yours, and they've run out of paper bags and are not offering plastic for fear of perceptions of un-green-ness.
Are there any plastic recycling success stories? For example, the PET in plastic bottles can't be recycled into new bottles. The best case is that it can be used in carpet, and probably not very nice carpet that the first world would buy.
I've used my reusable grocery bags for over ten years. They have gotten well over 130 uses.
According to [1], about 15% of recycled PET bottles were used to make new bottles, and those aren't necessarily food/drink bottles.
I suspect the quality of collected bottles is a significant factor. Here in Denmark bottles collected as part of the deposit scheme can be recycled into new food containers, but other waste generally cannot.
I have plastic bags that weren't ever advertised as "reusable", from over 2 decades ago, but are indeed very reusable. They made them thicker and stronger back then, but unfortunately that was wasted by so many choosing not to reuse them.
> FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons unrelated to the actual physical properties of the material
That’s what big oil managed to dupe policy makers with in the first place, the promise of recyclability. By now it should be apperant for anybody that it was just a big lie [1,2]
Well, the PBS article, first of all, is extremely poorly written. How can you write that plastic is "indestructible" and that it "breaks down" into microplastics that enter our bodies, in the same sentence, and not spot the contradiction.
Also, it actually says "All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive." Later down in the article: "Recycling plastic is 'costly,' it [the report] says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is 'infeasible.'"
So, it does sound to me like there's an important distinction here where recycling plastics (or, at least, disposing of it responsibly even when that's costly) is possible, it's just not happening.
Now, my own perspective: I live in Austria and Germany, where governments have been doing collections of plastic trash separately from residual household waste since the 90s, and are asking households to pay steep prices for disposing of residual waste, but not for disposing of plastic. When I lived in Bavaria, disposal of plastics worked through recycling centers, where people had to separate their plastic waste into half a dozen containers for different kinds of plastics under the watchful eyes of employees educating consumers on what goes where, and doing that kind of separation was the only way you could dispose of plastic at all, without paying the very steep price (effectively a fine), for disposing of it through residual household waste. -- There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria, usually no more than 10 minutes' drive from where you live, even if you live in a rural area. And they are packed on a Saturday. Nobody can tell me that people aren't using them.
I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill. They'd have to make sure to keep it a secret, because people would rightly be angry if they knew this, and they'd have to pay for it through back channels of sorts. This kind of scandal, while it seems possible, hasn't actually broken yet, to the best of my knowledge, over the course of the several decades that this practice has been ongoing an in any of the governments that have been doing this, which are many.
So, my working assumption until this particular scandal actually breaks, is that alarmism coming from environmentalists in the U.S. is really about poor waste-disposal habits on the part of the American consumer, and not some kind of conspiracy by big oil that governments are in on, to make us believe that plastic is anything other than the devil.
> Well, the PBS article, first of all, is extremely poorly written. How can you write that plastic is "indestructible" and that it "breaks down" into microplastics that enter our bodies, in the same sentence, and not spot the contradiction.
Where is the contradiction? It's breaks down in smaller parts of plastic, but still remains being plastic. It won't transform into something else, like oil, coal, or food for plants. It's still the same, just a bit smaller.
> There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria
Collected plastics in Germany are usually not recycled, they are burned or shipped to other countries, often under the pretext of recycling.
> I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill.
Governments demand much bullshit to pamper the citizen. And often it's not even the fault of the government's original idea, it's just that things evolve somehow in a poor way along the way. The corrupt forces break down any attempt until it becomes twisted enough to not be useful anymore in the original aim.
> Collected plastics in Germany are usually not recycled, [...]
...well, I use the term "recycle" very loosely. If it's disposed of responsibly, then fair enough. That presumably includes burning, as long as you do it in a way where you don't just blow the toxines into the atmosphere, and, presumably, wherever you generate heat, you can at least get some electricity out of it.
It just seems to me like the PBS article is strawmaning the pro-plastic argument by making it look like the only way you can have plastic at all, is if you're cool with it ending up in landfill.
The logic seems to be this: Plastic is extremely cheap to manufacture from primary resources, therefore recycled plastic could never compete in the marketplace with newly-made plastic, therefore there's no demand for used plastic as a resource in making recycled plastic, therefore used plastic will end up in landfill. Compare that to textile which has a much larger economic footprint and costs more to produce while being more durable. The previous argument about the primary market crippling the secondary market doesn't hold for textile. After all, second-hand clothing stores are a thing, and probably are a force for good.
But people mistakenly take away the message "textiles are good, plastics are bad". The economy is starting to reflect that consumer sentiment, and you're seeing plastics replaced by textiles in lots of scenarios to reach the "green consumer". Is that a net-positive, environmentally speaking? Probably not. If the break even is at 130 uses of a cotton tote bag, and assuming one shopping trip per week, we'd have to, on average, see nearly 3-year-old tote bags being used for them to make sense. I don't think that's what I'm seeing around me, I'm seeing mostly brand-new tote bags and/or people sporting a different one every day of the week because they have dozens at home.
What I'm also seeing: "Green" consumers are mostly just "rich folk", and their greenness doesn't stop them from engaging in their "rich folk" behaviours. They are buying more stuff, and replacing it more frequently, plus they are paying higher prices to have the stuff they buy be made from more durable materials, because durability gives a material an environmentally-friendly image while low cost gives materials a "damaging for the environment" image.
There is a very simple solution to this dilemma: Dispose of plastic responsibly despite the cost. It's not like nothing could ever get done in the world if free market incentives didn't force them to get done. Covid shutdowns got done. Some things are just a matter of principle. Make this a matter of principle. Pay for what it truly costs to dispose of this stuff out of your own pocket. If that means that plastic is still more economical for you to use for certain applications than alternatives, then by all means keep using plastic.
61% of the plastic waste collected for recycling in Germany is incinerated.
A lot is also exported to Asian countries where we pretend they are recycling it but they are probably not. This was in the news all over Europe back in 2019 when China stopped allowing imports of waste and all the "recycling" programs went into crisis mode. Germany now exports its waste to Malaysia instead.
Okay, that's an interesting data point that I genuinely didn't know about; thanks for posting.
But my original argument still debunks PBS's claim that sorting and free market economics is somehow the problem.
I still feel like I'm not personally at fault in my role as a consumer if I use plastic and take it to the recycling center assuming them to deal in good faith.
I had to look up the numbers for Germany but they're around the same around the world, sometimes worse.
I live in Japan which also boasts a very high high recycling rate, but the vast majority of the plastic just gets incinerated. Here whenever it comes up in the news, they claim that since different types of waste needs to be burnt at different temperatures, it's still worth it since it makes the incineration (which is used to generate heat or electricity) more efficient.
And funnily enough, I see people shopping with reusable poly bags more often than cotton totes. There's one manufacturer that supplies Whole Foods and a lot of other grocery stores, and they're pretty solid.
I quite honestly don't understand why. Even if its sound quality was subpar to modern media, vinyl at least had a distinct advantage with its XL-sized cover art that made it easier to display the albums that you loved.
The advantages that initially motivated cassettes over vinyl back when cassettes were invented are basically still valid, for example that you can't have a vinyl-based "walkman", and that they're economical to record onto, while pressing short runs of vinyl is not economical.
Indie acts have often gravitated towards CD-R rather than vinyl, because they can burn them at home in small quantities. But for mobile use, a walkman actually beats a discman, in my opinion, due to its smaller size. And, not being digital, cassettes have a kind of built-in "soft" DRM feature, in that reproduction is possible but goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. The mixtape / pirating / bootlegging scene helps spread the message about an act, and, if someone truly likes the music, they might go back to the original artist and buy an "official" prerecorded cassette where they get better sound quality, and a reasonable level of expectation that the money actually reaches the artist to support them.
With Spotify, for example, I have no idea, as a consumer, if I listen to a lot of small acts, how much of the money I pay every month to Spotify actually gets into the pockets of those acts, or whether they're just on there because they got arm-twisted into being on the platform because of platform power.
There's a lot that's good about the medium, and that goodness comes in the form of simplicity in engineering, which is a virtue in its own right.
> With Spotify, for example, I have no idea, as a consumer, if I listen to a lot of small acts, how much of the money I pay every month to Spotify actually gets into the pockets of those acts
You can assume it is pretty much a rounding error what they get.
Yep. This is part of why I don't use streaming services. I prefer to buy the music directly from the musicians when I can, or go through something like Bandcamp if that's what the musician wants to do.
I end up with the music, the musician ends up with most of the money, everybody wins.
The number of people who enjoy music is and always has been lower than the number of people who find it useful to use music as a pretext for socializing. Tape is easier to carry and lend to friends than vinyl. Tape can be recorded by home users and vinyl cannot which means that making a mix tape and sharing it with people is possible with tape but not vinyl.
The physical properties of tape make it much better for socializing than digital files or streaming services because it forces in-person interaction. That's what people were actually enjoying throughout the 20th century, we all just lived in a collective fantasy that it was music that people were after when it wasn't quite that after all.
I recognize, in hindsight only, that every woman I'd dated seriously has received a mix tape from me. Well, in the old days it was a mix tape. These days it's more likely to be a CD or a thumb drive. But it's the same thing in the end.
I think it's a way of revealing a more intimate part of myself. Kind of "you should know who I am, and here is an important part of that" kind of thing.
One other feature not mentioned in other comments yet is that when you stop the tape, you can move it to another device and playback will continue from the same point
Post-modernismn and nostalgia are large factors. Overall I think the idea largely is that instead of considering the media just an imperfect vessel to carry the artwork, it is instead made into part of the artwork itself.
In visual arts I think there is longer tradition of playing with the imperfections of the media instead of trying to hide them.
But ultimately, trying to reason about art has its limits, not everything can be understood (or at least enjoyed) rationally.
I released my last album on tape cassette.
It's easy, fast and super cheap to produce, so you can sell it at gigs for few euros or even give them for free.
Fans are likely to buy some merchandising to support the artists they like and they don't really want to spend 15€ for a vinyl when they already paid for an entrance.
Cassette tape also have that crispy, muffed but hot and softly saturated sound.
I also like sometimes to record my synthesizers direct to tape with a Yamaha MX4T (a 4-track cassette recorder).
It's the physicality of the medium. It's the rattle of the cassette in the case, the sound of putting it in the player, the feel of pushing the play button. Some people really enjoy the lowfi-ness of it all, the hiss of the tape, the limited number of songs, the fact you can hand it or trade it to someone else.
While I don't miss cassettes I do miss the rituals surrounding physical media. Being able to pick a thing, listen to it, and not being sold on other items.
Cassette manufacturers are restarting, but not _player_ manufacturers. Newly manufactured cassette players sound like absolute shit. The factories making high quality tape machines have long since shut down. Techmoan has an entire series on this on YouTube.
I wonder if at the time this was a bleeding-edge factory that was adopting these state-of-the-art practices and it has stayed that way since? Or did it only just get the tape cassette in 2003? :)
Interesting. I wonder if non-tape- based things are any more efficient, or is the z80 based system peak-tech for weaving.
Probably what you said in your first sentence. At the time of manufacture, Z-80 CPU was the standard for controllers like that. In 2023, your first design pass would probably be an STM32 for real time control and possibly a PC as a UI, or a tablet if the UI needed to be portable.
STM32 for real time control and a Linux SoM for GUI/database is a pretty common pattern used for industrial control these days.
I had a browse of the videos on that channel and was disappointed to find that there was a strong emphasis on unhealthy street/fast food. Ramen and fried rice and hot dogs and artificially coloured candy and such. Disappointing when Japan has so much healthy food and yet I couldn't see a single video showing a kitchen that produces that higher quality food (which I would certainly like to view).
In case anyone was unaware, textiles were the original domain of punch cards [0]. (And the mechanical loom was an antecedent of and inspiration for the first general-purpose computer; and not coincidentally Babbage's concept, in the 1830's (!!), was to input machine code via punch card [1]. "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves" –Ada Lovelace (What a lovely metaphor!))
> The Oxford English dictionary defines the word antecedent as a thing that existed before or precedes another. Precedent, on the other hand, is defined as an earlier event or action which serves as an example or guide.
(Sorry if this is too far off-topic or trite, but I had the fun idea that cloth going through a loom is also a type of sequential-access tape storage. If woven from conductive threads, a read-head is nothing more than testing "does this thread form a closed circuit?", and a write-head is the loom operation of "mechanically transpose these two threads". If you can scroll cloth non-destructively forwards and backwards, that's the core of an electromechanical Turing machine).
Well, yeah. It would essentially be punch cards in fabric form, in a way. I'm sure someone's tried it before.
If you're not familiar with core memory, then look it up (it's cool). The industry borrowed a lot of women from the textiles industries to thread the tiny wires through the iron rings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
also loom fault detection was the first successful business of toyota, before they started automobiles. specifically Toyota invented a mechanism which would stop the loom if a single thread would rip anywhere.
and the intuition that halting production if a fault is detected in car manufacturing goes back to that experience.
and the offspring of that, the "Toyota production system" inspired lean. which inspired agile. and Kanban also is core of the TPS...
It's never wrong to use a Sharp MZ-80K – what a beautiful machine! (BTW, there had been an actual 80-column punched card reader available for this.)
It may be worth mentioning that the tape storage of the Sharp MZ family of computers is exceptionally fast. E.g., transferring MP3 encoded media files won't do. This is also, why floppy disks were never a big thing on that platform, as tape was deemed good enough.
The Sharp MZ-80K (as indicated by its name powered by a Z80 microprocessor) was originally sold as a kit computer, but, unlike the more common variety, it came in larger pre-assemblies, like the entire monitor assembly, etc. (No soldering required.) Outside of Japan, it was usually sold fully assembled, often with RAM already populated to the full complement of 48KB.
I rather liked the MZ-80K, having spent a bit of time with it as a kid in the early 80s. I was attending a prep boarding school, for kids from 8 through 13 (can't imagine anyone sending their kids to boarding school aged 8 any more! How times have changed) and one of the pupils had this machine. We spent quite some time playing Towering Inferno on it...
I seem to remember the MZ-80A having a better keyboard. I don't know if I ever used one, or just saw pictures in computer magazines of the time.
Yes, there was also a later version of the MZ-80, the MZ-80C, which featured a more conventional keyboard. But, I think, the original one is quite beautiful (while, admittedly, not that usable) and it reminds of a time, when it wasn't all that clear that consumer computers should have typing keyboards. (Mind that not everybody was trained in touch typing, and this was pretty much a new beginning.)
BTW, I see that the machine in the video has kanji legends on the keyboard, which isn't found on the models that were sold in Europe. The latter feature upper and lower-case characters, which is switched by a special "SML/CAP" key (not the SHIFT key, which is for graphics characters!), a key that shows kanji markings on the domestic model. (So, I guess, the original, domestic model was Latin upper-case/kanji without lower-case?) Does anyone know more about this?
Is this the keyboard we're discussing? What I see is ortholinear, and with a spacebar that's a more reasonable size. If anything, we've largely regressed. Only keyboard enthusiasts have keyboards like this nowadays. Anything off the shelf has the same crap layout more or less now. Laptop and UMPC manufacturers don't care to innovate with the keyboard. (Except for the MNT Pocket Reform)
The keys can be a bit "squeaky", though, and, at times, I find the cursor keys annoying (which is due to training and muscle memory from other keyboards). I once wanted to quickly edit a Christmas themed image, using all those fancy graphics characters, and kept failing over the cursor keys all the time… :-)
But, yes, it could have been a fresh start all over. There were even a few alphabetically ordered ortholinear keyboards (especially on the pocket computer variety, since you wouldn't touch type on those anyway), as manufacturers thought this may be more accessible and mechanical constraints didn't apply anymore.
Also, worth a visit, the entire article at oldcomputr.com, showing the assembly with all the various components: https://www.oldcomputr.com/sharp-mz-80k-1978/ ! (This also mentions, "It’s a bit hard to get used to the keyboard." :-) )
Had an Sharp MZ-731 back in the days. I was able to exchange data with an Sharp MZ-80K from a friend by changing the baud rate of the recording. IIRC Sharp MZ 700 was faster, you could actually hear the different pitch on an audio cassette player.
318 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadMaybe they should replace the computer and cassettes before they run of out them.
What value would that provide (than make-work for a couple of software engineers)?
Probably the most bang-for-the-buck effort would be get their existing software running on an emulator, and get that integrated with the hole-punch machine. An even then, I think the main value there would be to have a backup in hand if they have trouble maintaining that old computer hardware.
But nowadays, it would probably be an agile disaster with two or three layers of managers and sales people, maybe even on different firms, if done by best practice, between you and the customer. Forget talking to the operators.
KISS is a beauty of the past.
There is no way the simple and straightforward text based solution would be made. It is more likely it would be a bloated mess with clouds or what not.
That's a weird way of putting it, but I honestly think the "modernize" all the things crowd are probably the ones that "sound indoctrinated."
So, if your "different worldview" says reflexively redeveloping the software would provide "a lot of value," then name the value it would provide. They've got a process that's worked for them for 40+ years, what exactly is the value in re-doing software that's only a minor part of that process? Does that "value" justify the cost?
Honestly, what they've got can probably be understood more as an appliance than as an IT system, and anything developed today would almost certainly take the form of an IT system, with all the recurring cost and complexity that entails.
It's a difficult thing to quantify, but access to stable supply lines is surely worth more than zero.
If you replaced the input with USB or similar, you now also need someone with IT skills if that part goes wrong.
In the lingo, business continuity and risk management. When, not if but when, the current system fails, there is high chance of it being unrecoverable. Even if it were technically recoverable, can they find someone to do that work? How long will the factory stand still while the system is being recovered or replaced? In general it is more cost-effective to replace things before they fail rather than after the fact. Doubly so in these sort of cases where using the old system (in working state!) as a reference would most likely be beneficial.
The only thing I can think of that would make their current setup more robust would be having the program burned into ROM and not on tape.
I mean, probably any UNIX program written in C? Bill Joy vi can run on modern computers. What makes this software substantially different than a text editor?
Compiling pre-ANSI-C and pre-POSIX codebases might have challenges, but standardization has really gotten us lot of stability here.
I'd expect conservatively written C99/POSIX code to be usable certainly for another 20 years, there is just so much inertia there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I was quick to pick SaaS as a target, please suggest any better alternatives. I'm trying to convey the idea that technology is not the objective, it's a tool to achieve the goal. So if cassette tapes are getting you there you don't need a fancy software and newest hardware.
You aren't very familiar with Japanese corporate culture.
I worked at a Colgate manufacturing facility. They had an NJ plant that had mechanical production lines. They've been running for 40 years so by the time i was there they were running flawlessly day in and day out and no matter what went wrong the maintenance crew knew how to fix it right away.
To save costs they shut down that plant and opened up a new one in SC with fancy brand new electronic machines that were supposed to have much better throughput. It took them years to get all the machines working and even still the old machines produced more in 8 hours than the new ones made in 12 hours. And whenever the was a problem with the machine it was always some wonky issue with the relays, sensors, and timing and we'd have sometimes days of downtime and would need OEMs to come in and fix it.
They wasted millions on that move which was supposed to save money and be more efficient. Many were fired/demoted from that.
So the thought of scrapping a working factory with decades of fine-tuning already done... pains me.
I worked with one project manager who was straight out of school. I couldn't believe that the direction and management of multiple teams of engineers was coming from someone who was going to make all their rookie mistakes on our project... and all the people who hired him already left for new jobs, so no consequences for them.
Did they fire/demote the brain geniuses who kicked this off? Because the corporate stories I know like this generally involve the responsible parties getting promotions for their bravery and forward thinking, while the pain falls on the people they forced to work on it and who unaccountably failed to implement their perfect visions.
Case in point: when Russia started it's invasion of Ukraine, one of the first things they did was to pillage the industrial areas of the regions they controlled to take away industrial equipment, including farm vehicles.
The same is for metallurgy - it was consistently upgraded through the years and not outdated in any way.
Besides, if the idea is to invade the country to incorporate some separatist regions, it doesn't make sense to destroy its economic basis and end up with a huge refugee problem and a completely deserted land you just conquered.
This is basically propaganda for gullible Americans that never traveled to Eastern Europe.
I fail to see the relevance of that. Sounds like cheap propaganda.
My point was clear: when Russia started it's invasion of Ukraine, one of the first things they did was to pillage the industrial areas of the regions they controlled to take away industrial equipment, including farm vehicles.
HN had a discussion on how John Deere kill switches were rendering Russia's pillaging useless as the stolen tractors were being remotely disabled once they were moved into Russia.
Industrial equipment, even old one, is often used extensively in spite of existing latest and greatest offers.
If this is true for all of Russia why do they keep stealing toilets?.
Yes comrade, Russia is bigger and has a lot of oligarchs so off course there's much more money there, but average citizens are piss poor. Russian elites has been robbing Ukraine for three decades with their Kremlin buddy oligarchs like Medvedchuk, and not just Ukrainian oligarchs a lot of Russian ones were quite cozy there even after 2014. They robbed eastern part of Ukraine after ceasing control over the territory. It proved to be difficult to rob whole of Ukraine with just the dirty oligarchs, so they proceeded with full scale invasion in 2022.
As OP followed up, doesn't change the facts that Russian soldiers pillaged the crap out of Ukraine as soon as they got there; Russia may be resource wealthy but corruption means that only the boys at the top get the cream, seems like everyone outside of Moscow gets the shit end of the stick.
Regardless, no amount of success excuses the slaughtering of innocents, slava ukraini.
JavaScript frameworks would be a candidate.
I've been a full-stack web developer for over a decade across multiple companies and this is the first time I've seen the phrase "discriminated unions".
And the wikipedia article is horrendous. It starts with the following sentence and gets worse from there.
> In computer science, a tagged union, also called a variant, variant record, choice type, discriminated union, disjoint union, sum type or coproduct, is a data structure used to hold a value that could take on several different, but fixed, types.
It uses lots and lots of words to explain something that's very simple. If you don't already know what it is, you can't figure out which words are important.
Then after all of the theory, it dives into a binary tree example which has to be the worst possible way to explain it. If you haven't implemented a binary tree before, you don't know any idea what you're looking at. It didn't help that I implemented a linked list in college.
Also, the choice of language ensures you have no idea what the types are. I completely missed the first example was self-referential.
It's like parody of a function programmer writing an explanation for anyone who isn't a functional programmer.
I've been programming in some form or another since the late-80s. I've been paid to write code for other people for over twenty years. I haven't gone to university.
Maybe it's because I started back in BASIC, assembler, and later C that I know what that term is and have encountered it in various languages and forms several times since?
The problem with wikipedia definitions is that they have to be the definition. Some one like me would expect a link to the definition and not a tutorial. They're not written to take into account that you've been a professional programmer and have never been exposed to a computer science curriculum nor are they written for laypersons who don't know anything about programming.
It's a similar problem for functional programmers trying to explain functors, monoids, and monads: these are not terribly complicated abstractions but catering your explanation to the various audiences out there is incredibly difficult. The definitions sounds like gibberish... but with effort and education it is possible to understand and appreciate it.
https://basarat.gitbook.io/typescript/type-system/discrimina...
I'm sincerely sorry for confusing you! Discriminated unions are nice but above I was exaggerating excessively to make a point :)
I also enjoy piling on Rust fanboys,but those of us who had to go through late night troubleshooting sessions to track issues that were ultimately caused by use-after-free issues do tend to be vulnerable to Rust's memory safety siren's song
In any other situation I firmly believe the benefits Typescript brings very quickly outweigh the small amount of added complexity.
enthusiast: if you'll migrate service X from a small sets of VMs to K8s cluster (which will take N man-moths because of reasons) it will auto-scale
Old grumpy man: but the the load is low and predictable we don't need autoscale and if load will grow we will just create two more VMs
enthusiast: auto-scaling will save time in the distant and unlikely future and CTO agrees that K8s is the best way to run software so you have to migrate anyway
Because then it won't scale.
And the moment you do you run into other bottlenecks.
We're not running the DB in Kubernetes though.
For DR, Entire stack is being continually synced with a set of hot server in separate datacentre. We run a fully DR exercise yearly and it works well. It's a fairly proprietary AIX / DB2 method though so not sure you'd find value unless you're using the exact same technology stack :-/
That's perfectly ok, if your deployment costs are irrelevant and/or your company gladly pays up your infrastructure costs without a second thought.
This is not the case in some organizations, and toggling a setting to auto scale a deployment can automatically save you thousands of dollars per month.
Would you still be so casual about infrastructure costs if you had to bankroll the extra capacity you need to add to your baseline to support peaks?
The decision process involved in managing your single-box deployment is not the same that goes in managing global deployments with dozens of instances per region. Cloud providers charge a premium, and that premium is a lot.
It's like the thermostat in your office. If you're just running an AC in a single room then you can just set it to full blast to keep it day and night at a certain temperature. Once there's a decision to cut costs then you start to talk about the best time to turn off/turn on a AC unit.
Also, deploying a new build on VMs is extremely manual compared to k8s, unless again you set up some sort of home brew rube Goldberg machine to auto deploy. It's just way better to use k8s in tandem with a simple GA workflow.
Definitely not an expert, but I get the impression that this point is a lot higher that most people assume it is.
K8s makes little sense unless you run on bare-metal. Once you jump to vms you are injecting another abstraction layer and take on a herculean level of ops without understanding what you're getting into.
I'm not sure where the check points are now, but typical points where cost jumps are desktop -> server socket, single socket -> two sockets, two sockets -> four sockets, four -> eight sockets. AFAIK, AMD EPYC isn't offered at more than two sockets, and going to four sockets used to be possible off the shelf but very expensive, and eight sockets was very expensive if off the shelf or very expensive because custom engineering. Sometimes ram costs go way up for the highest density too.
[1] From Walden: read at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm
Organizations tend to invest in their operations if there are significant improvements to be made. This includes things like dealing with problems such as the availability of cassetes, if the legacy system becomes too old to maintain in a cost effective way, if it's still possible to source parts, etc.
Digital systems are widespread because they are widespread and dirt cheap, and thus the tradeoff of increasing the complexity does add value.
They also churn, and finding people who can (and will) work on legacy systems isn't easy either. Get rid of something that worked for 40 years because everyone uses this other thing (but will use something else 10 years from now that we can't predict) is dumb unless there is a very valid reason.
They're still using modern computers, the simulation of what the actual fabric would look like was amazing and I'm sure when that old computer was new, they would've killed for something like that.
Unlike the fetishists of HN, I doubt that they romanticise their use of the old computer; it's simply the only one that works with their older equipment. You say it's "easy to maintain" but they'd still need a specialist to diagnose & fix, you can't take it to any computer repair shop. And getting certain parts would be an absolute nightmare as well. You say "everyone using the system is familiar with it" well duh...the sky is also blue, of course people that use it are familiar with it, but for an industry that is on the decline, trying to get fresh faces in to revitalise won't be helped by a computer that those fresh faces would never have even seen before. Power usage doesn't matter when the looms probably pulls tens of kilowatts or more anyway. But yeah, it is cool. Impractical, but cool and that rings true for everything that they're doing, small & bespoke manufacturing of traditional wear.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of boutique industries like this are dying in Japan at the moment.
"don't use new tech if you don't have to"
and more a case of
"These are highly specialized weaving machines that were build decades ago around using punched cards, and whatever benefit by speedup in process we would get from replacing their ancient control system with a modern one, would be dwarfed by the cost of modifying them to use that control system."
Or to say this with slightly less words:
Replacing software and a couple of computers is cheap, compared to replacing room-sized industrial machinery.
Furthermore, it’s very common for factories to run older equipment because the cost of upgrading is higher, riskier, and shutting the factory down to do the upgrades comes with its own losses as well.
It’s also worth noting that there was also modern computers in that video too. The system they used to “digitally preview” what the weave would look like. But that is a separate system from the ones that interface with the weaving machines and thus very easy and cheap to upgrade.
This should be the top comment. Cost is a critical factor. I would also stop riding the bus and drive a Ferrari to work if that option costs as much as a bus ticket. As it doesn't then I'm going to stick with the bus, but this does not make it a superior choice.
I'm not saying that having latest or newest stuff is any better, just that using old stuff can bring some problems too.
In that scenario you need to find someone completely familiar with the old model of computer to break out the multimeter and oscilloscope. That's gonna be a huge pain.
And in the meantime none of their stuff works, though I suppose they can rest on the existing library of punch cards they most certainly have. Or do it manually again.
For non-electronic parts: that's why you have a machine shop.
The electrolyte isn't milk. It doesn't go off.
Put it this way, I've replaced maybe a dozen "bad caps" in equipment in 35 years of repairing high-end musical kit, six of which were in one 1970s synthesizer made from very cheap parts.
But, I've done very well out of the fashion for "re-capping" equipment because I charge 300 quid before I even start to consider clearing a spot on the bench for stuff that's been "re-capped" before they bring it to me to fix.
> The only components that can't sit forever on a shelf
From there it seems to have spread out into a "recap everything" craze that is just silly.
The real fault is an 0.1μF disc ceramic, one of those little brown ones, that's gone leaky and now thinks it's a 1k resistor. Not that you'd know, with all the other iatrogenic faults the damn thing now has.
Awful. Just awful. The "it was circuitbent so I tidied it all up" thing was a Prophet 600 that I had to write off, it was so badly damaged.
Maybe, maybe not. If the machine uses the right "legacy" parts (a Z80 is a great example, but so is anything belt- or gear-driven, etc.), then it's a very good bet those parts and the people who are familiar with them will remain available for much longer than you or I will be alive.
Just kidding, couldn't agree more with your observation. Not a Phone in sight.
This channel (Byte Attic) have a restoration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiAL5LCQ7Ds
https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=174
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_MZ
Edit, regarding the video: It should be mentioned that the parts found in late 1970s and early 1980s computers were usually of quite good quality (things like capacitors were also more expensive then) and modern parts are not necessarily better or more reliable. "Shotgunning" all capacitors doesn't necessarily improve things. E.g., mine works perfectly fine without changing a single part. This particular machine, shown in the video, was in a bit of a rough state, though.
I live by a different Japanese small town famous for its textile industry and there's at least one place still similarly using punch cards and tape. They exhibited some of it and a contemporary art piece made using it during the annual Fuji Textile Week last year.
Separately I also met an artist who's doing binary-hacked glitch embroidery and knitting with older machines in the area. I think they have stuff for sale from time to time and would be open for commissions. There's some pokemon/otaku/tech-related stuff if you dig through their insta.
https://nukeme.nu/tagged/Glitch%20Embroidery
https://glitchknit.jp/
Telegrams? Is this some kind of joke? I've never seen anything resembling a telegram here.
Faxes are still used between businesses, which is much the same as the US where they're ubiquitous in the real estate and legal industries.
They're used for special occasions, you can even get them printed on pretty paper and put in pretty envelopes.
https://www.denpoppo.com/
https://www.ntt-east.co.jp/dmail/
Wedding and funeral ceremonies often include a segment where someone reads aloud messages that have been delivered by telegram.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-japan-...
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13373419
Japanese are not lazy, they are one of the most capable people on the planet, but that also means they don't innovate or see the value of new inventions.
A great example is that in the west, we have specific kitchen tools for everything. An apple peeler, for example. Specifically to peel and only peel apples and only apples. Why? Because everyone's a lazy bastard.
But in Japan? One kitchen knife for everything. Yes, one single kitchen knife. For everything. Why? Because everyone is skilled with the kitchen knife to do anything and everything with it, so they don't need to innovate and invent apple peelers.
Or another great example: Japan started using telephones and then mobile phones and that was good enough for them. The west wanted even more convenience and invented smartphones.
As you put it, doing it the old fashioned way is "good enough" for Japan because they aren't lazy. They are both among the most advanced and regressive people on the planet.
Also this article mentions that the chef of the restaurant in the Japan House in London: “Akira has used many different types of knives in the past, but these days he finds that one sturdy knife and one small petit knife are enough to prepare almost any Japanese dish.”
So I’m not sure where you information is coming from but sounds more like myth than fact.
Article: https://www.japanhouselondon.uk/discover/japanese-knives-par...
You're probably right, but the actual software in only a small part of the process here. People have to go and manually cut the punch cards once produced for example, so it turns into an extremely slow and inefficient process overall.
That said, would they benefit from a years-long, 10 times over budget and bug riddled software renewal? Probably not.
Give it another decade or two and fax machines will be gone.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YmfFHz2-uC8
Also, I have always felt that people who design industrial automation machines are mad geniuses. They just seem so complex but work!
I wouldn't change a thing, except the stuffing - it's a winter garment, so I would stuff it with wool instead of cotton, though that was of course not an option in the Edo period and still hardly is, in Japan.
It also depends on the price point you want to hit. Cotton is much less expensive than wool.
The thing about wool is that it insulates even when it's damp, while cotton simply collapses as far as insulation is concerned unless it's completely dry.
In any case, my point really is that the right material to use in production depends on what your target market is. If you're aiming to sell at a more affluent crowd, then wool all the way! But you might also be aiming to sell at a larger, less affluent group that makes wool the wrong material due to its cost.
There's no absolute right or wrong here, only what's right or wrong for the market you're trying to address.
It's been a while, but if I recall correctly, they mentioned that sheep farmers in New Zealand were having trouble making money and finding uses of wool. (I might be misremembering, as I'd have to go back and re-listen.) And if anything on Clarkson's Farm is to be taken as an accurate portrayal of farming trends, sheep farming was portrayed as a very difficult and unprofitable business. So I am completely guessing here, but maybe sheep farming is just not popular like it was?
Sheep farming being on the decline, at least in the U.S., seems to be at least corroborated by the following after a quick search:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/sheep-lamb-m...
https://www.kunc.org/business/2013-10-09/the-long-slow-decli...
According to this article though, Japan is the third biggest importer of wool but only had 20,000 sheep, as of the article's date of 2014: https://www.fragmentsmag.com/en/2014/06/ami-tsumuli-4/. So maybe in Japan, it's both an expensive enterprise to farm sheep and a lot of competition with imports. But that really doesn't answer why it wouldn't be used, which doesn't seem accurate if they're one of the world's top importers of wool, only behind the U.S. and China.
Except Yamaha. Yamaha is just weird.
Anyway, the result was that Japan's biggest supplier of tomato soup was...
Sony.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni-ball
IMHO they outrank anything as all-round pencils - I mostly use mine in H grade for writing, occasionally bringing out a set of various grades for some drawing, but still - Hi-Unis are unbreakable, consistent, takes kindly to erasing mistakes and... Wow, beating Tombows, Blackwings, Lumographs, the works. IMHO, at least. YMMV. Terms&Conditions apply.
"Yamaha CEO Pleased With Current Production Of Jet Skis, Alto Saxophones, Snowmobiles, Power Generators, Scooters, Golf Carts"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu
That culture is actually starting to change, because that domestic rivalry/hostility has been the chief reason Japan lost the competition against American, South Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese manufacturers in recent decades.
Can't fight on the world stage if you're busy fighting each other on home turf, y'know?
> In 1909, Michio Suzuki (1887–1982) founded the Suzuki Loom Works in the small seacoast village of Hamamatsu, Japan. Business boomed as Suzuki built weaving looms for Japan's giant silk industry. In 1929, Michio Suzuki invented a new type of weaving machine, which was exported overseas. The company's first 30 years focused on the development and production of these machines.
Not only is it the same company, but it started out as a loom company!
That being said, Suzuki Motor Corporation is actually a fairly small company (market cap ~$18.5B) that mainly sticks to building automobiles. Not to be confused with something like the Mitsubishi Group that provides a wide range of different products and services (automobiles, banking, home appliances, etc) under the same brand logo [2].
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Group
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#21st_century
Hint: It’s the latter.
I have cassettes that are 40 years old.
Also, most people purchasing cassettes nowadays most likely also own and use a smartphone.
I am trying to understand your perspective, but I just don’t, I’m sorry.
Deeper question: Are there any removable storage mediums that are easy to recycle? Vinyl records? Minidisc? CDs/DVDs/Blurays? Computer tapes?
For example, according to a very entertaining little book I have [1] that debunks greenness-myths, you need to use a cotton tote bag 130 times before you reach a break even in terms of economical footprint with using plastic shopping bags. Ironically, people's homes are filling up with cotton bags now, because you keep getting them as advertising gifts by every brand that's trying to brand itself as green, and you're often forced to buy them when you're at the supermarket and forgot to bring yours, and they've run out of paper bags and are not offering plastic for fear of perceptions of un-green-ness.
[1] "Is it really green?" by Melissa Hemsley
I've used my reusable grocery bags for over ten years. They have gotten well over 130 uses.
I suspect the quality of collected bottles is a significant factor. Here in Denmark bottles collected as part of the deposit scheme can be recycled into new food containers, but other waste generally cannot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
That’s what big oil managed to dupe policy makers with in the first place, the promise of recyclability. By now it should be apperant for anybody that it was just a big lie [1,2]
1: https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/
2: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Also, it actually says "All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive." Later down in the article: "Recycling plastic is 'costly,' it [the report] says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is 'infeasible.'"
So, it does sound to me like there's an important distinction here where recycling plastics (or, at least, disposing of it responsibly even when that's costly) is possible, it's just not happening.
Now, my own perspective: I live in Austria and Germany, where governments have been doing collections of plastic trash separately from residual household waste since the 90s, and are asking households to pay steep prices for disposing of residual waste, but not for disposing of plastic. When I lived in Bavaria, disposal of plastics worked through recycling centers, where people had to separate their plastic waste into half a dozen containers for different kinds of plastics under the watchful eyes of employees educating consumers on what goes where, and doing that kind of separation was the only way you could dispose of plastic at all, without paying the very steep price (effectively a fine), for disposing of it through residual household waste. -- There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria, usually no more than 10 minutes' drive from where you live, even if you live in a rural area. And they are packed on a Saturday. Nobody can tell me that people aren't using them.
I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill. They'd have to make sure to keep it a secret, because people would rightly be angry if they knew this, and they'd have to pay for it through back channels of sorts. This kind of scandal, while it seems possible, hasn't actually broken yet, to the best of my knowledge, over the course of the several decades that this practice has been ongoing an in any of the governments that have been doing this, which are many.
So, my working assumption until this particular scandal actually breaks, is that alarmism coming from environmentalists in the U.S. is really about poor waste-disposal habits on the part of the American consumer, and not some kind of conspiracy by big oil that governments are in on, to make us believe that plastic is anything other than the devil.
Where is the contradiction? It's breaks down in smaller parts of plastic, but still remains being plastic. It won't transform into something else, like oil, coal, or food for plants. It's still the same, just a bit smaller.
> There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria
Collected plastics in Germany are usually not recycled, they are burned or shipped to other countries, often under the pretext of recycling.
> I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill.
Governments demand much bullshit to pamper the citizen. And often it's not even the fault of the government's original idea, it's just that things evolve somehow in a poor way along the way. The corrupt forces break down any attempt until it becomes twisted enough to not be useful anymore in the original aim.
...well, I use the term "recycle" very loosely. If it's disposed of responsibly, then fair enough. That presumably includes burning, as long as you do it in a way where you don't just blow the toxines into the atmosphere, and, presumably, wherever you generate heat, you can at least get some electricity out of it.
It just seems to me like the PBS article is strawmaning the pro-plastic argument by making it look like the only way you can have plastic at all, is if you're cool with it ending up in landfill.
The logic seems to be this: Plastic is extremely cheap to manufacture from primary resources, therefore recycled plastic could never compete in the marketplace with newly-made plastic, therefore there's no demand for used plastic as a resource in making recycled plastic, therefore used plastic will end up in landfill. Compare that to textile which has a much larger economic footprint and costs more to produce while being more durable. The previous argument about the primary market crippling the secondary market doesn't hold for textile. After all, second-hand clothing stores are a thing, and probably are a force for good.
But people mistakenly take away the message "textiles are good, plastics are bad". The economy is starting to reflect that consumer sentiment, and you're seeing plastics replaced by textiles in lots of scenarios to reach the "green consumer". Is that a net-positive, environmentally speaking? Probably not. If the break even is at 130 uses of a cotton tote bag, and assuming one shopping trip per week, we'd have to, on average, see nearly 3-year-old tote bags being used for them to make sense. I don't think that's what I'm seeing around me, I'm seeing mostly brand-new tote bags and/or people sporting a different one every day of the week because they have dozens at home.
What I'm also seeing: "Green" consumers are mostly just "rich folk", and their greenness doesn't stop them from engaging in their "rich folk" behaviours. They are buying more stuff, and replacing it more frequently, plus they are paying higher prices to have the stuff they buy be made from more durable materials, because durability gives a material an environmentally-friendly image while low cost gives materials a "damaging for the environment" image.
There is a very simple solution to this dilemma: Dispose of plastic responsibly despite the cost. It's not like nothing could ever get done in the world if free market incentives didn't force them to get done. Covid shutdowns got done. Some things are just a matter of principle. Make this a matter of principle. Pay for what it truly costs to dispose of this stuff out of your own pocket. If that means that plastic is still more economical for you to use for certain applications than alternatives, then by all means keep using plastic.
61% of the plastic waste collected for recycling in Germany is incinerated.
A lot is also exported to Asian countries where we pretend they are recycling it but they are probably not. This was in the news all over Europe back in 2019 when China stopped allowing imports of waste and all the "recycling" programs went into crisis mode. Germany now exports its waste to Malaysia instead.
But my original argument still debunks PBS's claim that sorting and free market economics is somehow the problem.
I still feel like I'm not personally at fault in my role as a consumer if I use plastic and take it to the recycling center assuming them to deal in good faith.
I live in Japan which also boasts a very high high recycling rate, but the vast majority of the plastic just gets incinerated. Here whenever it comes up in the news, they claim that since different types of waste needs to be burnt at different temperatures, it's still worth it since it makes the incineration (which is used to generate heat or electricity) more efficient.
To put this into perspective and link it back to the original article: the Japanese also have very highly organised waste sorting.
(As an aside, what does "burn it properly" entail? Gasifying before combustion? Even that is not exactly "clean".)
And funnily enough, I see people shopping with reusable poly bags more often than cotton totes. There's one manufacturer that supplies Whole Foods and a lot of other grocery stores, and they're pretty solid.
Vinyl and tape are also enjoyably tactile.
Indie acts have often gravitated towards CD-R rather than vinyl, because they can burn them at home in small quantities. But for mobile use, a walkman actually beats a discman, in my opinion, due to its smaller size. And, not being digital, cassettes have a kind of built-in "soft" DRM feature, in that reproduction is possible but goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. The mixtape / pirating / bootlegging scene helps spread the message about an act, and, if someone truly likes the music, they might go back to the original artist and buy an "official" prerecorded cassette where they get better sound quality, and a reasonable level of expectation that the money actually reaches the artist to support them.
With Spotify, for example, I have no idea, as a consumer, if I listen to a lot of small acts, how much of the money I pay every month to Spotify actually gets into the pockets of those acts, or whether they're just on there because they got arm-twisted into being on the platform because of platform power.
There's a lot that's good about the medium, and that goodness comes in the form of simplicity in engineering, which is a virtue in its own right.
You can assume it is pretty much a rounding error what they get.
I end up with the music, the musician ends up with most of the money, everybody wins.
Not just reproduction. Even just listening to them a bunch goes hand-in-hand with a loss in quality. Unplanned obsolescence?
The physical properties of tape make it much better for socializing than digital files or streaming services because it forces in-person interaction. That's what people were actually enjoying throughout the 20th century, we all just lived in a collective fantasy that it was music that people were after when it wasn't quite that after all.
I remember watching TV shows in the 90s and discussing each episode with friends. It was great.
Or you could rent a video movie and watch it with friends (amortising the cost).
Mix tapes were also great gifts.
I dunno, the tech was technically inferior but it just worked out nice somehow.
At school, me and my bestie at the time would quiz each other on the previous night's episode of Star Trek. How lame we were :]
I recognize, in hindsight only, that every woman I'd dated seriously has received a mix tape from me. Well, in the old days it was a mix tape. These days it's more likely to be a CD or a thumb drive. But it's the same thing in the end.
I think it's a way of revealing a more intimate part of myself. Kind of "you should know who I am, and here is an important part of that" kind of thing.
In visual arts I think there is longer tradition of playing with the imperfections of the media instead of trying to hide them.
But ultimately, trying to reason about art has its limits, not everything can be understood (or at least enjoyed) rationally.
Cassette tape also have that crispy, muffed but hot and softly saturated sound. I also like sometimes to record my synthesizers direct to tape with a Yamaha MX4T (a 4-track cassette recorder).
For some genres that's the point. Most modern black metal is released on cassette tape, to achieve the desired black metal sound.
While I don't miss cassettes I do miss the rituals surrounding physical media. Being able to pick a thing, listen to it, and not being sold on other items.
Oh, but wait, don't tell me; they actually go outside. LOL!
Interesting. I wonder if non-tape- based things are any more efficient, or is the z80 based system peak-tech for weaving.
STM32 for real time control and a Linux SoM for GUI/database is a pretty common pattern used for industrial control these days.
https://youtu.be/PC2rAUdpGXM
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine
> The Oxford English dictionary defines the word antecedent as a thing that existed before or precedes another. Precedent, on the other hand, is defined as an earlier event or action which serves as an example or guide.
If you're not familiar with core memory, then look it up (it's cool). The industry borrowed a lot of women from the textiles industries to thread the tiny wires through the iron rings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
Here's a video of a multi-story Jacquard loom. You can see the punch cards being fed up to the story above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB9pRRr_MvY
You can see the products that they make here:
https://nishimura-orimono.jp
and the intuition that halting production if a fault is detected in car manufacturing goes back to that experience.
and the offspring of that, the "Toyota production system" inspired lean. which inspired agile. and Kanban also is core of the TPS...
It may be worth mentioning that the tape storage of the Sharp MZ family of computers is exceptionally fast. E.g., transferring MP3 encoded media files won't do. This is also, why floppy disks were never a big thing on that platform, as tape was deemed good enough.
The Sharp MZ-80K (as indicated by its name powered by a Z80 microprocessor) was originally sold as a kit computer, but, unlike the more common variety, it came in larger pre-assemblies, like the entire monitor assembly, etc. (No soldering required.) Outside of Japan, it was usually sold fully assembled, often with RAM already populated to the full complement of 48KB.
I seem to remember the MZ-80A having a better keyboard. I don't know if I ever used one, or just saw pictures in computer magazines of the time.
BTW, I see that the machine in the video has kanji legends on the keyboard, which isn't found on the models that were sold in Europe. The latter feature upper and lower-case characters, which is switched by a special "SML/CAP" key (not the SHIFT key, which is for graphics characters!), a key that shows kanji markings on the domestic model. (So, I guess, the original, domestic model was Latin upper-case/kanji without lower-case?) Does anyone know more about this?
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/53...
Is this the keyboard we're discussing? What I see is ortholinear, and with a spacebar that's a more reasonable size. If anything, we've largely regressed. Only keyboard enthusiasts have keyboards like this nowadays. Anything off the shelf has the same crap layout more or less now. Laptop and UMPC manufacturers don't care to innovate with the keyboard. (Except for the MNT Pocket Reform)
The keys can be a bit "squeaky", though, and, at times, I find the cursor keys annoying (which is due to training and muscle memory from other keyboards). I once wanted to quickly edit a Christmas themed image, using all those fancy graphics characters, and kept failing over the cursor keys all the time… :-)
But, yes, it could have been a fresh start all over. There were even a few alphabetically ordered ortholinear keyboards (especially on the pocket computer variety, since you wouldn't touch type on those anyway), as manufacturers thought this may be more accessible and mechanical constraints didn't apply anymore.
Also, worth a visit, the entire article at oldcomputr.com, showing the assembly with all the various components: https://www.oldcomputr.com/sharp-mz-80k-1978/ ! (This also mentions, "It’s a bit hard to get used to the keyboard." :-) )