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Comment by mepian | Hacker News Reader

>I felt so smart telling him that was impossible because you can't mod software with a soldering iron.

Many old systems stored their software in a diode matrix, which could be modded with a soldering iron: https://www.cca.org/blog/20120222-Diode-Matrix.shtml

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I imagine this is how some sci-fi technology works. Certainly looks like a more low-tech version of some of it: Star Trek has both isolinear chips [0] in Federation technology and isolinear rods [1] in Cardassian technology that can be rearranged to change ship systems and Stargate has control crystals of various designs used similarly [2][3][4].

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Naked_Now_(episode)...

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Isolinear_rod?file=Isol...

[2] https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Control_crystal?file=Contro...

[3] https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Control_crystal?file=Door_c...

[4] https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Control_crystal?file=Contro...

Well damn that's neat. I'm going to pretend you were popping your head out from the kitchen as you wrote this.

Also note that Dave's https://CCA.org deserves perusal.

My favorite page remains the one about his computer:

https://cca.org/dave/tech/machine.html

Awesome! I wonder what his electric bill is like.

Mind blowing; both ways I guess. I’d like a tv show where someone building this gets to interview a time traveller from the 2020s and the latter knows nothing useful about hardware but can provide many unhelpful details about having GBs of storage, or things like DRM, pentalobe screws or electron framework.

Here you go - https://pastebin.com/raw/dGP6W1m1 (story courtesy ChatGPT). Fed your comment into it, and got this story.

I’m pretty sure the GP was thinking of something having qualities such as "funny", "well-written", or "creative".

This is like the least helpful or useful kind of comment ever. Hey I got barfed on by an LLM wanna see?

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