Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

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Your comment reminds me of a couple things. On the topic of RAM, I was recently researching the vintage IBM 650 computer (1953). You could get it with Random Access Memory (RAM), but this RAM was actually a hard disk. I guess IBM considered the disk to be more random access than the rotating drum that provided the 650's main storage. One strange thing is that the disk had three independent read/write arms. Unlike modern disks, the arm could only access one platter at a time and had to physically retract to move to a different platter. Having three independent arms let you overlap reads and seeks.

As far as "fuzzy logic", there's a whole lot of history behind how that ended up in your rice cooker. In the 1990s, fuzzy logic was a big academic research area that was supposed to revolutionize control systems. The basic idea was to extend Boolean logic to support in-between values, and there was a lot of mathematics behind this, with books, journals, conferences, and everything. Fuzzy logic didn't live up to the hype, and mostly disappeared. But fuzzy logic did end up being used in rice cookers, adjusting the temperature based on how cooked the rice was, instead of just being on or off.

[1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/650/22-6270-1_RAM.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic

On the topic of RAM, I was recently researching the vintage IBM 650 computer (1953) ... but this RAM was actually a hard disk.

Actually it was a drum. No moving arms at all, but some tracks had multiple read/write heads to reduce access time.

Knuth's high school science fair project was to write an angular optimizing assembler for the IBM 650, called SOAP III.

Actually, no :-) The 650 had a drum for main storage. The "355 Random Access Memory" was something different, an optional hard drive peripheral, which IBM literally called "RAM" (see the link above). This became the RAMAC system.

Right, you could add a RAMAC disk, but that was a very expensive option. Many universities had IBM 650s, but usually without the RAMAC.

The 650 main memory was a drum; but what IBM called Random Access Memory (and RAM) for this machine was a hard drive. As described in the Manual of Operation linked above. Here are a few quotes:

"Records in the IBM Random Access Memory Unit are stored on the faces of magnetic disks."

"The stored data in the Random Access Memory Unit are read and written by access arms."

"The IBM 355 RAM units provide extemely large storage capacity for data... Up to four RAM units can be attached to the 650 to provide 24,000,000 digits of RAM storage."

The main memory on the other hand: "The 20,000 digits of storage, arranges as 2000 words of memory on the magnetic drum..."

The rice cooker audibly turns the heating element completely on or off with a relay or thermostat or similar. It does have some kind of PWM , but so does a purely electromechanical rice cooker. There are different settings for brown and white rice, as well as different keep-warm levels, so I presume it can electronically modify the set point for the temperature.

I had looked up the history of fuzzy logic, when I originally saw the term. Everything I came across was from the mid 60's during the minicomputers era (e.g. the DEC PDP and IBM System/3). I just did a Google ngram search for it, and it does look like it peaked highest in the mid 90's. (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fuzzy+logic&ye...) It was especially redundant then, because by that point 32-bit floating-point processors were already extremely common. It made sense during the 60's to have two-bit values in ladder logic control systems, because mini computers were prohibitively expensive, but by the 90's control systems were already using personal computer components to emulate old relay logic, while newer control systems were being written in languages that are still common today.

You just sent me down a rabbit hole of mid-90's buzzword ands jargon, and I found something especially great: neuro-fuzzy logic (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44196-024-00709-z)

There's also quantum logic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic) and someone wrote a paper relating it with fuzzy logic: (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-93802-6_...)

Once academia gets involved, you get fractal (https://xkcd.com/1095/) sub-niches of sub-niches, and it goes further off the rails than marketing jargon.

I swear there's a computing buzzword cycle of embedded systems (e.g. fuzzy logic, smart, IoT, etc.), artificial intelegence (e.g. genetic algorthims, machine vision, neural networks, etc.), and quantum (just quantum, it's never been practical enough to have sub-niches). Right now we're on the trailing end of AI and working our way to quantum. There's a tech company called C3 that has changed their name from the original C3 Energy to C3 IoT and now C3 AI. When they change it to C3 Quantum, we'll know were in the next phase of the buzzword cycle.

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