There were two major purposes in designing the Rice machine. The first was to provide a platform on which members of the Rice community could do research that would have been impossibly time-consuming without access to a computer. This was, in fact, the major reason that the project was started: Zevi Salsburg wanted a machine as powerful as Los Alamos's MANIAC II to simulate fluid flow. He did not, however, have any desire to move to Los Alamos, and therefore needed a computer to be built at Rice. The other goal of the machine was to do research into how computers should be built. In the years following John von Neumann's death, the Atomic Energy Commission became quite interested in funding computer research: Salsburg's request came at a time when the AEC's goals could be better met by funding the development of a new system than by offering to build a copy of MANIAC II or to buy a stock IBM computer.
Video Rewrite uses existing footage to create automatically new video of a person mouthing words that she did not speak in the original footage. This technique is useful in movie dubbing, for example, where the movie sequence can be modified to sync the actors’ lip motions to the new soundtrack.
At one end of the tube, a transducer converted the electrical pulses to sound, which propagated through the mercury to the other end. At that point, another transducer converted the sound to electricity and sent it back to the beginning. The conversion to sound, which propagates much slower than electricity, slowed down the digital data a fraction of a second and caused the device to function as storage
Facts and stories about Antique (lonesome) Computers
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In the Beginning was the Command Line