Note: This email was originally titled “Media Archeology Lab Newsletter Week 9: Spring Break Hours,” which was in error. However, renaming it would require renaming the rest of the newsletters and adding this notice in each of them, which is work that will perhaps be done in the future.
Hello all, and good luck on midterms!
Good afternoon! We hope any exams you have this week have been going well. We are very much looking forward to spring break. Speaking of which, please be aware that the lab will be closed over spring break. Since the lab is closed, there also won’t be a newsletter that week.
Demo of the Week
The demo of the week this week is SimCity 2000 on the iMac G3 Lime!
Come over to the lab during open hours to have some fun building a city on a period-accurate piece of hardware!
Object of the Week
The object of the week this week is the Comdyna GP-6!
The Comdyna GP-6 is an analog computer from the late 1960s. The first question you might ask after looking at it is “how am I supposed to use this?” After looking up the operator’s manual as well as several YouTube videos, from what I could gather you would use various banana connectors to input information about the different variables involved in an equation, each variable set to a different “channel” of the computer, and the Comdyna GP-6 would compute the result and send it to output. Most applications I’ve found online of this computer seem to be for solving differential equations. To visualize the result of the program, you would often connect an oscilloscope to the computer (shown in this paper by Ray Spiess, the inventor the computer, on page 69).
Looking at it, you may think its relevancy ended after other non-analog computers, such as the Apple Lisa or TRS-80, were produced, but according to Ray Speiss it was in production for at least 36 years after its initial creation (p. 68). The previously linked paper goes into more detail, but essentially it was a very popular machine for teaching control systems to students in universities, as well as for a few other very specialized lines of work (Speiss p.70).
Lab Hours and Room Number
We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are:
Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm
Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm
Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm
Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm
Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week.
Sincerely,
The Media Archeology Lab
The University of Texas at Dallas
