Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | _jholland's commentslogin

Obligatory Tom7 reference: [Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio)

He stores data in ICMP ping packets, but also Tetris board states, among others. If you are not familiar with Tom7, let this be an introduction to a heavyweight whimsical internet nerd


38:37 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZLpbhsE72I&t=2317s in Jay Forrester's "The Design Environment and Innovations of Project Whirlwind" talk ( https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270308... ):

> There was a desperate search for better memory. We seriously considered. at one stage. renting a television microwave link from Boston to Buffalo and back so that one could store something like 3,000 bits in the 3 milliseconds of round-trip transit time.

Though I'm not sure why they wouldn't have just used a delay line for that task: that form of memory was already in use in computers, as discussed by Forrester himself from 11:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZLpbhsE72I&t=675s .


Tom7 is a gem. Anything by Tom7 is worth your time. Always.


Came to comments only to mention/upvote this and add engagement so everyone knows about the GOAT that Tom7 is.


"Tetris is an inventory-management survival-horror game."


Obligatory Tom7 recommendation: [How I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c8i5SABqwU).

In this "expert mode running" video the protagonist, Tom Murphy VII, of computer science comedy YouTube fame, runs 3661 miles across 269 runs in this mammoth 16 year project to run every street in Pittsburgh, thus "completing" it Pac Man style.

If you are not familiar with Tom7 and his whimsy, I cannot recommend enough that you check his videos out.


I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data.

As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures.

Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.

It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.


It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.


Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y Combinator application?


Yes, look up Winshuttle.

A very successful company with some of the happiest customers I’ve ever seen, whose entire product was a SAP hack that allowed people to enter their data using Excel. As someone unfamiliar with SAP, absolutely blew my mind.


Hi, I’m a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs.

Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at johnny at estuary dot dev.


Another great Harder Drive to add to the list: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Tom7 made a similar one in Tetris as part of the above video


I watched that video a few days ago. It was wild. The ping backed memory storage is great .

That man baffles me.

He spent 16 years running every street in Philadelphia, starting and ending from home.


> The ping backed memory storage

It's worth noting that this is a network reincarnation of the old tried-and-true delay-line memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory


Check out the Shut Up and Sit Down review of crokinole: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XMKzeg78peg&t=580s&pp=ygUJY3Jv...


For a comprehensive exposition of the technical aspects of the AGC, look no further than the Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7Lfh5SKUQ

They not only do a brilliant job of exposing this niche system, but it is a foundational lecture for my knowledge of computer architecture in general


This is great! It reminds me of a Tom7 video of a similar ilk: Anagrams, but where you can break apart letters: "Anagraphs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTBAW-Eh0tM.

Similar to this, he produces a standard form for each word, but breaks each letter into letter pieces or 'atoms' which gives much more freedom for moving between words.

Definitely give it a watch. If you are not familiar with Tom7's videos, he has a hilarious whimsical style while also bringing to life completely out there ideas with some brilliant technical skill.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: