Chromebook death dates
TIL that Chromebooks brick themselves when they hit a hard-coded date: the date when Google stops providing updates: https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/26/colorado-schools-chromebooks-churn-outdat... The article's about Denver Public School District, who are finding a whole lot of their Chromebooks bought during pandemic are running out of life. The environmental and cost impacts are huge. Stewart
On 2023-05-28 21:41, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
TIL that Chromebooks brick themselves when they hit a hard-coded date: the date when Google stops providing updates: https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/26/colorado-schools-chromebooks-churn-outdat...
The article's about Denver Public School District, who are finding a whole lot of their Chromebooks bought during pandemic are running out of life. The environmental and cost impacts are huge.
Do they actually "brick"? Or just not get any more updates? I have never heard of this before. I've run all my Android phones past their best before date and they just keep on going. It's usually the battery that does them in. Why would Chromebooks be any different? I suspect if this was true, it might get the government annoyed. Here are a couple of articles about it: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en#zippy=%2Clenovo https://www.maketecheasier.com/chromebook-expiration-date/
| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | TIL that Chromebooks brick themselves when they hit a hard-coded date: the | date when Google stops providing updates: | https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/26/colorado-schools-chromebooks-churn-outdat... | | The article's about Denver Public School District, who are finding a whole lot | of their Chromebooks bought during pandemic are running out of life. The | environmental and cost impacts are huge. [James' reply has detailed useful information.] All commercial OSes sunset old hardware. Only ChromeBooks declare that date when the systems are first available. (It would be good if support lifetimes were longer). The article is quite confused. I think that this is what it really means - after AUE (Auto Update Expiration) the devices still work but there is no promise of security updates. - the school board seems to have a policy that says devices without security updates must be banned from their network. I think that that is a wise policy but it isn't the same as saying that the devices are bricked. - the school board bought a lot of units at the same time so many are losing support at the same time. - (speculation) perhaps the school board bought older models of ChromeBooks because they were cheaper, even though their AUE was sooner than newer models. I always check the AUE before I buy a ChromeBook ================ [The rest of this is meandering discourse supporting the above. Feel free to ignore.] I certainly have a ChromeBook that no longer gets updates. Annoying. But it still works (last I checked, well after support stopped). I don't use it because: - I bought it to run Linux but I never got it to do so (Giles has the same model and he did get it to run Linux). - I have newer ChromeBooks with much nicer features - (probably) too many web sites require more resources - I don't like browsing with known security problems The actual claim in the article gets narrowed down to: An arsenal of Chromebooks that can’t keep up with new software or that shut students out from the websites they rely on will essentially become obsolete, leading to both significant costs for districts and environmental hazards — issues highlighted in the April report. What software can they not keep up with? ChromeBooks really don't have many applications. Things I can imagine: - school policy that forbids using stale browsers (since they will have known vulnerabilities) - new ciphers or CoDecs that are not supported (probably too soon for that) - new browser features like Web Assembly (WASM). These seem pretty unimportant. - modern Chromebooks support Android apps but old ones don't. But I'm pretty sure that that transition was years before the pandemic so I don't think that it would apply to a fleet of ChromeBooks bought for the pandemic. Much later in the article: “My role is to get as much as we can out of these devices before we’re no longer able to have them on our network,” Dodge said, adding that Chromebooks that can’t receive security updates can pose threats to the district’s network. This certainly sounds as though the ChromeBooks still work but no longer are considered secure by the school board. I actually think that is an appropriate policy. Windows has been pretty good in recent years as far as providing free updates and supporting old hardware. Microsoft is changing this: Win 10 support disappears in October 2025 (if I remember correctly) and Microsoft policy is that old computers are not supported (for a definition of "old" that we need not go into; most of my computers are "old"). I expect that most school Windows systems are old. Oh, and Windows is hard/impossible to keep secure, even with updates (especially in the hands of students). iPads and Android tablets also fall out of support. I don't think either come with a promise of updates until a declared date. So they are inferior to ChromeBooks in this issue. The greatest longevity is a Linux system. I'm pretty sure that the school would not replace ChromeBooks with Linux systems. So: I would think that this is stupid reporting but a useful but partial Public Service Announcement. Certainly the school board should have known the support life when they purchased the ChromeBooks and planned for that life cycle. No other OS provides as clear a statement of support lifetime up front.
Google support page listing AUE dates for every make/model: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366 Surprisingly some of them get updates up until 2032.
On May 29, 2023, at 11:19, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | TIL that Chromebooks brick themselves when they hit a hard-coded date: the | date when Google stops providing updates: | https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/26/colorado-schools-chromebooks-churn-outdat... | | The article's about Denver Public School District, who are finding a whole lot | of their Chromebooks bought during pandemic are running out of life. The | environmental and cost impacts are huge.
[James' reply has detailed useful information.]
All commercial OSes sunset old hardware. Only ChromeBooks declare that date when the systems are first available. (It would be good if support lifetimes were longer).
The article is quite confused. I think that this is what it really means
- after AUE (Auto Update Expiration) the devices still work but there is no promise of security updates.
- the school board seems to have a policy that says devices without security updates must be banned from their network. I think that that is a wise policy but it isn't the same as saying that the devices are bricked.
- the school board bought a lot of units at the same time so many are losing support at the same time.
- (speculation) perhaps the school board bought older models of ChromeBooks because they were cheaper, even though their AUE was sooner than newer models. I always check the AUE before I buy a ChromeBook
================
[The rest of this is meandering discourse supporting the above. Feel free to ignore.]
I certainly have a ChromeBook that no longer gets updates. Annoying. But it still works (last I checked, well after support stopped). I don't use it because:
- I bought it to run Linux but I never got it to do so (Giles has the same model and he did get it to run Linux).
- I have newer ChromeBooks with much nicer features
- (probably) too many web sites require more resources
- I don't like browsing with known security problems
The actual claim in the article gets narrowed down to:
An arsenal of Chromebooks that can’t keep up with new software or that shut students out from the websites they rely on will essentially become obsolete, leading to both significant costs for districts and environmental hazards — issues highlighted in the April report.
What software can they not keep up with? ChromeBooks really don't have many applications. Things I can imagine:
- school policy that forbids using stale browsers (since they will have known vulnerabilities)
- new ciphers or CoDecs that are not supported (probably too soon for that)
- new browser features like Web Assembly (WASM). These seem pretty unimportant.
- modern Chromebooks support Android apps but old ones don't. But I'm pretty sure that that transition was years before the pandemic so I don't think that it would apply to a fleet of ChromeBooks bought for the pandemic.
Much later in the article:
“My role is to get as much as we can out of these devices before we’re no longer able to have them on our network,” Dodge said, adding that Chromebooks that can’t receive security updates can pose threats to the district’s network.
This certainly sounds as though the ChromeBooks still work but no longer are considered secure by the school board. I actually think that is an appropriate policy.
Windows has been pretty good in recent years as far as providing free updates and supporting old hardware. Microsoft is changing this: Win 10 support disappears in October 2025 (if I remember correctly) and Microsoft policy is that old computers are not supported (for a definition of "old" that we need not go into; most of my computers are "old"). I expect that most school Windows systems are old. Oh, and Windows is hard/impossible to keep secure, even with updates (especially in the hands of students).
iPads and Android tablets also fall out of support. I don't think either come with a promise of updates until a declared date. So they are inferior to ChromeBooks in this issue.
The greatest longevity is a Linux system. I'm pretty sure that the school would not replace ChromeBooks with Linux systems.
So: I would think that this is stupid reporting but a useful but partial Public Service Announcement.
Certainly the school board should have known the support life when they purchased the ChromeBooks and planned for that life cycle. No other OS provides as clear a statement of support lifetime up front. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 10:25 PM James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Do they actually "brick"?
On Mon, May 29, 2023 at 11:20 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk < talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
So: I would think that this is stupid reporting but a useful but partial Public Service Announcement.
So I did a bit more digging. In summary, for us, as Linux users, Chromebooks don't hard-"brick", as I suggested they might. But it seems that, in a school exam situation, Chromebooks without the latest security patches cannot access certain required examination sites used in some (many? all?) US states. A Chromebook that can't access these sites may as well be a brick for the school districts that bought them. The source of the article's claims are from a report by the Public Interest Research Group, "Chromebook Churn" (report link: https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PIRG-Chromebook... , intro blurb: https://pirg.org/colorado/foundation/resources/chromebook-churn-report-highl... ). PIRG is deeply involved in the Right to Repair movement. The most direct citation to a "these Chromebooks won't work"-type statement is from “SKSD Needs $2.8 Million in 2026 to Replace Chromebooks,” Kitsap Daily News, January 25, 2023, https://www.kitsapdailynews.com/news/sksd-needs-2-8-million-in-2026-to-repla... ... [director of information technology services] Lyons said the state schools chief office claims that unsupported Chromebooks will not work for tests such as the Smarter Balanced Assessments. That's not the strongest source one could have, but at least one could follow through a paper trail by querying the named parties. The other claim that the report makes ("Chromebooks can no longer access services which require the device to pass a security check") cites a WSJ article --- Nicole Nguyen, “Before You Buy a Chromebook, Check the Expiration Date,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2022, sec. Tech, https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-you-buy-a-chromebook-check-the-expiratio... --- which doesn't seem to support PIRG's assertion. The report also seems to claim that many school boards panicked into buying refurbished Chromebooks when lockdown hit. These devices may already have been 3-4 years old when they were bought in 2020, so might only have a short time left before they AUE. Because they were bought with local tax money, this is a big fighty topic in much of the USA. Another point that the report makes, in line with PIRG's sustainability/right to repair goal, is that many Chromebooks are not designed for repairability, with the basic computing hardware staying much the same but spares changing with every year of release. The thing about networked computing devices in the K12 environment is that you have a huge cohort of (bored) students willing to try security exploits for fun and peer kudos. We* might've thought it pretty cool to get a copy of Drug Wars on our TI-83 calculators from a friend who got it from their older brother, but today's inventive high school student can offer a much larger threat with shared documents of attack/gaming scripts spread internationally. I wouldn't want to be the tech support on the end of that mess. Stewart --- *: I am too old for calculators that could play games. The most competitive thing we could do was racing to 100 against a friend: enter "1 ++" then hit the = key really fast until the display showed 100. The Casio FX-82 was the fastest at this, and a couple of friends had to beg their parents for new ones when they wrecked their calculators through over-zealous racing.
I have an early Samsung from *a while* ago, it started showing "this product won't receive more upgrades" a couple years ago but it still works just fine. ChromeOS hasn't been updated in a while, and it's just plugged in the TV as my Youtube app for a dumb TV. I have a Lenovo too, it's receiving updates but I know their days are ending too. But they still work. What I noticed: my daughter uses both (I use Family Link to control them), and in one I can install apps for her, on the older one I cannot. Same for extensions. Currently there's no way to access Developer tools on either one, and I've read that on other ChromeOS versions it's possible. So maybe that's the case for the school ones: ChromeOS won't support newer tech and sites start demanding that tech. And if those books aren't supporting it, they will be sold at massive discounts. Depending on the model, you could install Linux on it - Crouton, Crostini, Gallium, there are some alternatives. It won't be that fast, because most Chromebooks are pretty limited, but it's useful. Sometimes it's possible to give those books more RAM or more storage. Even if that's not possible, they could be a cheap laptop to, say, keep in the kitchen to follow recipes on Youtube and you won't be much distressed if it fell on the sink. Or hang it on the wall showing a "family calendar" or something. Or a Home Assistant dashboard. "What is my purpose? You access Youtube..." Mauro https://www.maurosouza.com - registered Linux User: 294521 Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God. On Mon, May 29, 2023 at 3:03 PM Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 10:25 PM James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Do they actually "brick"?
On Mon, May 29, 2023 at 11:20 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk < talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
So: I would think that this is stupid reporting but a useful but partial Public Service Announcement.
So I did a bit more digging. In summary, for us, as Linux users, Chromebooks don't hard-"brick", as I suggested they might. But it seems that, in a school exam situation, Chromebooks without the latest security patches cannot access certain required examination sites used in some (many? all?) US states. A Chromebook that can't access these sites may as well be a brick for the school districts that bought them.
The source of the article's claims are from a report by the Public Interest Research Group, "Chromebook Churn" (report link: https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PIRG-Chromebook... , intro blurb: https://pirg.org/colorado/foundation/resources/chromebook-churn-report-highl... ). PIRG is deeply involved in the Right to Repair movement. The most direct citation to a "these Chromebooks won't work"-type statement is from “SKSD Needs $2.8 Million in 2026 to Replace Chromebooks,” Kitsap Daily News, January 25, 2023,
https://www.kitsapdailynews.com/news/sksd-needs-2-8-million-in-2026-to-repla...
... [director of information technology services] Lyons said the state schools chief office claims that unsupported Chromebooks will not work for tests such as the Smarter Balanced Assessments.
That's not the strongest source one could have, but at least one could follow through a paper trail by querying the named parties. The other claim that the report makes ("Chromebooks can no longer access services which require the device to pass a security check") cites a WSJ article --- Nicole Nguyen, “Before You Buy a Chromebook, Check the Expiration Date,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2022, sec. Tech, https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-you-buy-a-chromebook-check-the-expiratio... --- which doesn't seem to support PIRG's assertion.
The report also seems to claim that many school boards panicked into buying refurbished Chromebooks when lockdown hit. These devices may already have been 3-4 years old when they were bought in 2020, so might only have a short time left before they AUE. Because they were bought with local tax money, this is a big fighty topic in much of the USA. Another point that the report makes, in line with PIRG's sustainability/right to repair goal, is that many Chromebooks are not designed for repairability, with the basic computing hardware staying much the same but spares changing with every year of release.
The thing about networked computing devices in the K12 environment is that you have a huge cohort of (bored) students willing to try security exploits for fun and peer kudos. We* might've thought it pretty cool to get a copy of Drug Wars on our TI-83 calculators from a friend who got it from their older brother, but today's inventive high school student can offer a much larger threat with shared documents of attack/gaming scripts spread internationally. I wouldn't want to be the tech support on the end of that mess.
Stewart
--- *: I am too old for calculators that could play games. The most competitive thing we could do was racing to 100 against a friend: enter "1 ++" then hit the = key really fast until the display showed 100. The Casio FX-82 was the fastest at this, and a couple of friends had to beg their parents for new ones when they wrecked their calculators through over-zealous racing.
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
| From: Stewart Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> Thanks for all the legwork! Interesting. | On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 10:25 PM James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | wrote: | In summary, for us, as Linux users, | Chromebooks don't hard-"brick", as I suggested they might. But it seems | that, in a school exam situation, Chromebooks without the latest security | patches cannot access certain required examination sites used in some | (many? all?) US states. A Chromebook that can't access these sites may as | well be a brick for the school districts that bought them. This seems to be self-inflicted, for some definition of self. Perhaps the state (requiring the testing). I bet that these sites would not accept a Linux computer. They might accept Windows 10 (until it expires). Would they require the Windows computer to do some attestation that it wasn't monkeyed with? My impression is that attestation is a theoretical capability that is never used. So Windows is not more secure than Linux (in the testing facility's kind of security). Similarly, they would probably allow a Mac. My sympathies dissipate. | The source of the article's claims are from a report by the Public Interest | Research Group, "Chromebook Churn" (report link: | https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PIRG-Chromebook... | , intro blurb: | https://pirg.org/colorado/foundation/resources/chromebook-churn-report-highl... | ). PIRG is deeply involved in the Right to Repair movement. The most | direct citation to a "these Chromebooks won't work"-type statement is | from “SKSD | Needs $2.8 Million in 2026 to Replace Chromebooks,” Kitsap Daily News, | January 25, 2023, | https://www.kitsapdailynews.com/news/sksd-needs-2-8-million-in-2026-to-repla... | | ... [director of information technology services] Lyons said the state | schools chief office claims that unsupported Chromebooks will not work for | tests such as the Smarter Balanced Assessments. So fix the testing facilities requirements. | That's not the strongest source one could have, but at least one could | follow through a paper trail by querying the named parties. The other claim | that the report makes ("Chromebooks can no longer access services which | require the device to | pass a security check") cites a WSJ article --- Nicole Nguyen, “Before You | Buy a Chromebook, Check the Expiration Date,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, | 2022, sec. Tech, | https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-you-buy-a-chromebook-check-the-expiratio... | --- which doesn't seem to support PIRG's assertion. | | The report also seems to claim that many school boards panicked into buying | refurbished Chromebooks when lockdown hit. These devices may already have | been 3-4 years old when they were bought in 2020, so might only have a | short time left before they AUE. That sounds like a fail. An individual consumer making a bad choice can easily be excused. A school board ought to do due diligence for a significant purchase -- that is surely someones job. | Because they were bought with local tax | money, this is a big fighty topic in much of the USA. Another point that | the report makes, in line with PIRG's sustainability/right to repair goal, | is that many Chromebooks are not designed for repairability, with the basic | computing hardware staying much the same but spares changing with every | year of release. All notebooks these days have diminishing repairability on the hardware side. This is the push to thin and light. Vendors are also reducing things like sockets for RAM. It saves a few cents and a few grams and it pushes the customer to overbuy RAM from the vendor at the vendor's exorbitant price. (I just bought 64 GiB of DDR4 from amazon for something like $160; the Mac Mini M2 costs $400 more when you add 16GiB of RAM (you cannot add more)). ChromeBooks are cheaper because ChromeOS needs fewer resources than general purpose OSes. I've bought ChromeBooks, new, for $150 to $200. A notebook to run Windows well is at least twice that (Macs: twice again). Will it have twice the productive lifetime? I think schools need non-flashy hardware with long support cycles. Like business-class computers (ThinkPad etc.). Those seem to be expensive for some reason. Many ChromeBooks seem to have some of those characteristics. | The thing about networked computing devices in the K12 environment is that | you have a huge cohort of (bored) students willing to try security exploits | for fun and peer kudos. We* might've thought it pretty cool to get a copy | of Drug Wars on our TI-83 calculators from a friend who got it from their | older brother, but today's inventive high school student can offer a much | larger threat with shared documents of attack/gaming scripts spread | internationally. I wouldn't want to be the tech support on the end of that | mess. Yeah. So about this right to repair. Whose right to repair? It is obvious until you actually think about it. In a school setting, the student / the teacher / school / school board / state / testing facility / vendor / OS vendor want control. They cannot all have it. For my own machine, I want the right to repair. And yet I want to use objects with DRM. That's pretty hard to make work. (Attestation is a part of a theoretical solution.) There are a lot of intrusive techniques that are used in gaming to prevent cheating too. I don't know much about this but it is one barrier to running games on Linux. | --- | *: I am too old for calculators that could play games. The most competitive | thing we could do was racing to 100 against a friend: enter "1 ++" then hit | the = key really fast until the display showed 100. The Casio FX-82 was the | fastest at this, and a couple of friends had to beg their parents for new | ones when they wrecked their calculators through over-zealous racing. Computers were not in classrooms until long after my time. A very few school boards had a very few computers near the end. I admired the Curta Calculators advertised in Scientific American -- the only hand held digital calculators at that time. I carried a slide-rule in high school but almost nobody else did. I also carried a fat Swiss Army Knife -- that would get you expelled now. I didn't duel with either. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta> This sentence is chilling: Herzstark, the son of a Catholic mother and Jewish father, was taken into custody in 1943 and eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was encouraged to continue his earlier research:
On 2023-05-29 18:15, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
Computers were not in classrooms until long after my time. A very few school boards had a very few computers near the end. I admired the Curta Calculators advertised in Scientific American -- the only hand held digital calculators at that time. I carried a slide-rule in high school but almost nobody else did. I also carried a fat Swiss Army Knife -- that would get you expelled now. I didn't duel with either.
I took Fortran in Gr. 12. The computer was nowhere near my school. It was in the board office and my teacher would take our pencil mark cards to compile our "programs". I don't know that any program was actually run, only compiled. I also used a slide rule in high school. It was required in some of my classes. I bought one for $2 at Shoppers Drug Mart, when I started Gr. 9. I still have it in my desk drawer and it still works! 😉 I have also long been in the habit of carrying a pocket knife. The only issue I had was when I tried to board a flight, forgetting I had it, and was told I couldn't carry it with me. I was able to mail it home though.
On 29/05/2023 18.15, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
So fix the testing facilities requirements.
Easier said than done. Remember that the entire HS maths curriculum in the US is effectively owned by TI calculators, and their lock-in allows them to sell a 1980s-tech 'approved' calculator for ~$100. Compare this to the $1 scientific calculators you can get in dollar stores (and supermarkets near "back to school" time). These are perfectly adequate, but not "approved". A retired academic friend, ex CalTech, introduced me to these super cheap calculators. He's done a whole suite of accuracy benchmarks on a number of models, and they come out as well as the market leaders.
| ... so might only have a | short time left before they AUE.
That sounds like a fail. An individual consumer making a bad choice can easily be excused. A school board ought to do due diligence for a significant purchase -- that is surely someones job.
Absolutely. But do remember at the beginning of lockdown, every school board in the world was competing to buy Chromebooks. Prices and availability were uncertain, and I'm sure mistakes were made.
... I admired the Curta Calculators advertised in Scientific American -- the only hand held digital calculators at that time.
I've held one, once; they are quite wonderful pieces of machinery. Stewart
| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Easier said than done. Remember that the entire HS maths curriculum in the US | is effectively owned by TI calculators, and their lock-in allows them to sell | a 1980s-tech 'approved' calculator for ~$100. Aren't "moats" great (Warren Buffet's term, I think)! | Compare this to the $1 scientific calculators you can get in dollar stores | (and supermarkets near "back to school" time). These are perfectly adequate, | but not "approved". A retired academic friend, ex CalTech, introduced me to | these super cheap calculators. He's done a whole suite of accuracy benchmarks | on a number of models, and they come out as well as the market leaders. Old geezer mode: I remember in the 1970's attending a couple of talks at U of T by Velvel Kahan about floating point accuracy. Always amazing and hair raising. One was about calculator accuracy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kahan>, a very notable numerical analyst. - a key architect of IEEE floating point - moved to UC Berkeley before I got to U of T. But he still had colleagues there. Notably T. E. Hull who I studied with. - showed that IBM SYSTEM/360 floating point had disastrous loss of accuracy due to base-16 quantization. At his suggestion, IBM fixed this (mostly) by adding a "guard digit". This entailed physically upgrading each machine already in the field! It also halved the performance of some machines because their FP ALUs weren't wide enough for the new requirement. - developed the program "paranoia" to test for bugs in IEEE FP implementations In that talk, he showed that all calculators made bozo errors, many unique to a calculator. As a consultant to Victor, he got their errors fixed. I don't remember whether HP and TI listened to him. This makes me very wary of random-brand calculators. (I've taken at least three Numerical Analysis course. My main take-awy is that getting FP right is really hard. Naive calculations are often wrong with no hints of problems.) ==== I loved calculators but I actually rarely need them. I've stopped buying them. But not before I bought too many. The first calculator I bought was a used Sinclair. You, Stewart, will know of those. Amazing but very cheaply built. It didn't last and I no longer have it. <http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sinclair_scientific.html> The next was a Commodore (later known for the PET, the Commodore-64 and the Amiga). Something like this: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/retrocomputers/30764477974/in/pool-26244609@N00> The weird mushy keys showed up again in the PET keyboard. The most recent (years ago): Dollarama sold nice Sharp D.A.L calculators for $2.99. While I was buying and not using cheap calculators, by cubicle-mate Henry Spencer was buying and open-carrying fancy HP ones. I got a couple of cast-offs and they were wonderful, but still not useful. I got a Sharp calculator out for tax time this year, but it just wasn't what I needed. I used bc(1) and LibeOffice Calc instead. Neither was quite what I wanted but they were good enough. Maybe a Mathematica notebook or something like that wuld be better (I've never used that).
On 2023-06-01 12:22, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I loved calculators but I actually rarely need them. I've stopped buying them. But not before I bought too many.
The first calculator I bought was a used Sinclair. You, Stewart, will know of those. Amazing but very cheaply built. It didn't last and I no longer have it.
My first calculator was a Rapidman 800, which sold for about $100 at Eaton's, IIRC. My next one was a Novus Mathematician, which used RPN and then a couple of Sharp calculators, the first of which used batteries and the 2nd light powered. These days, I use an Android app called RealCalc. BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later! By the time I got to Ryerson, I was using a calculator.
| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | My first calculator was a Rapidman 800, which sold for about $100 at Eaton's, | IIRC. <https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/items/show/28> Interesting vignette: <https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/items/show/28> I remember seeing the initial ad campaign. A big price drop from other calculators. But it only had 4 functions. I had been given a scientific calculator by then, if I remember correctly. Oddity: floating point but no scientific notation -- crazy. | BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high | school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later! | By the time I got to Ryerson, I was using a calculator. <https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1214517> Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules because they were jerky to operate: stiction. Some fancy Pickets were supposedly made from magnesium to avoid this <https://utsic.utoronto.ca/wpm_instrument/pickett-ortho-phase-log-log-slide-rule-model-number-500/> I liked Sun Hemmi slide rules because they were made of bamboo. I still have one somewhere. Or maybe two. <http://www.sliderule.ca/hemmi.htm>
On 2023-06-01 15:05, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I remember seeing the initial ad campaign. A big price drop from other calculators. But it only had 4 functions. I had been given a scientific calculator by then, if I remember correctly. Oddity: floating point but no scientific notation -- crazy.
Yep, it was a 4 banger. Fixed point at 2 digits. It also took a fair effort to press the keys, IIRC. A couple of years later, I bought a couple of their desktop calculators, from a surplus place in the states. SD Sales? Even though they were made in Toronto, I still had to pay duty to bring them across the border.
| BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high | school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later! | By the time I got to Ryerson, I was using a calculator.
<https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1214517>
Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules because they were jerky to operate: stiction.
Well, what do you expect for $2? 😉 Anyway, I was just a kid starting high school at the time. Incidentally, there's a bit of a story about my first day in electricity class, which is what I bought that slide rule for. On the first day of class, the teacher was talking about resistance and how all conductors had it. I then asked "What about superconductors?". He'd never heard of them (this was Sept. 1967, when few people had). I knew about them, because I had read about them in an encyclopedia that I had at home. So, the next day, I brought in that volume to show him. IIRC, superconductivity was discovered by a German physicist in 1914, when he inserted lead wire in liquid helium. My grade 12 electronics teacher had a big, multi-scale slide rule, which could handle reactance (capacitance & inductance) directly.
On Thu, 1 Jun 2023 at 15:05, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules because they were jerky to operate: stiction.
I thought the circular ones were an interesting idea but I only had a cheap plastic straight one. https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/detail.php?product_id=8 The year after I learned "slide rule" in high school, training was dropped because calculators were becoming the norm. -- Scott
| From: Scott Allen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | I thought the circular ones were an interesting idea but I only had a | cheap plastic straight one. | https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/detail.php?product_id=8 Yeah, I had a cheap one from Coles Book Store discount bin. With a regular slide rule, you had to realize when to wrap around: 5 x 5 would go off the right end so you had to go left to 2.5 (and to increment the in your head expoent). With the circular slide rule, the wrapping was automatic but you still had to increment the exponent. One of our classrooms had a very large demo slide rule. 7'? It was yellow so I think that it was a Pickett <https://dannychesnut.com/SlideRule/SlideRule.htm> That should have given 4 digits of accuracy A colleague in the Computing Centre at Waterloo showed me a helical slide rule. It must have been something like this: http://retrocalculators.com/otis-king.htm The result is an extra digit of accuracy without being too large | The year after I learned "slide rule" in high school, training was | dropped because calculators were becoming the norm. Every new techology begets grumbles about what was lost. - analogue leads to elegant, precise, timeless devices - a slide rule forces you to have a feel for the answer. At a minimum, the power of 10. - a 10-digit answer from a calculator makes you think you have the 10 digit answer. Almost nothing you measure (as opposed to count) has that much accuracy. Me? I like discrete problems. Perect for digital computers. I have calculated precise and accurate numbers that are thousands of digits long. Of course some have calculated millions of digits of the decimal representation of Pi. Not with a slide rule.
When I was a motorcycle mechanic I had a circular slide rule, with a permanent mark at the coefficient for computing a catenoid, as I did a lot of 2-stroke exhaust systems. Some hilariously wrong, some which got me a reputation as a wizard. --dave On 6/1/23 18:08, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Scott Allen via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| I thought the circular ones were an interesting idea but I only had a | cheap plastic straight one. | https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/detail.php?product_id=8
Yeah, I had a cheap one from Coles Book Store discount bin.
With a regular slide rule, you had to realize when to wrap around: 5 x 5 would go off the right end so you had to go left to 2.5 (and to increment the in your head expoent). With the circular slide rule, the wrapping was automatic but you still had to increment the exponent.
One of our classrooms had a very large demo slide rule. 7'? It was yellow so I think that it was a Pickett <https://dannychesnut.com/SlideRule/SlideRule.htm> That should have given 4 digits of accuracy
A colleague in the Computing Centre at Waterloo showed me a helical slide rule. It must have been something like this: http://retrocalculators.com/otis-king.htm The result is an extra digit of accuracy without being too large
| The year after I learned "slide rule" in high school, training was | dropped because calculators were becoming the norm.
Every new techology begets grumbles about what was lost.
- analogue leads to elegant, precise, timeless devices
- a slide rule forces you to have a feel for the answer. At a minimum, the power of 10.
- a 10-digit answer from a calculator makes you think you have the 10 digit answer. Almost nothing you measure (as opposed to count) has that much accuracy.
Me? I like discrete problems. Perect for digital computers. I have calculated precise and accurate numbers that are thousands of digits long.
Of course some have calculated millions of digits of the decimal representation of Pi. Not with a slide rule. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com | -- Mark Twain CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE AND DISCLAIMER : This telecommunication, including any and all attachments, contains confidential information intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. Any dissemination, distribution, copying or disclosure is strictly prohibited and is not a waiver of confidentiality. If you have received this telecommunication in error, please notify the sender immediately by return electronic mail and delete the message from your inbox and deleted items folders. This telecommunication does not constitute an express or implied agreement to conduct transactions by electronic means, nor does it constitute a contract offer, a contract amendment or an acceptance of a contract offer. Contract terms contained in this telecommunication are subject to legal review and the completion of formal documentation and are not binding until same is confirmed in writing and has been signed by an authorized signatory.
| From: Dave Collier-Brown via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | When I was a motorcycle mechanic I had a circular slide rule, with a | permanent mark at the coefficient for computing a catenoid, as I did a | lot of 2-stroke exhaust systems. Some hilariously wrong, some which got | me a reputation as a wizard. I know what a catenary curve is. The standard example is of a chain hanging between two posts (that's where the name comes from). Or a hydro wire. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary> I understand that a catenoid is a surface of revolution of a catenary curve: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary> I don't know what the coefficient for computing it would be. I don't even know what the inputs to this computation would be. How is this applied to 2-stroke engine exhaust systems? Is this related to back pressure or resonance? Maybe you are a wizard. [I hate 2-stroke engines because they pollute so much. I'm only exposed to them running lawn maintenance equipment.]
In a racing two-stroke, the exhaust starts out as a simple pipe, bells out at a certain rate, continues as a a much larger pipe, then narrows again to quit a small diameter, somewhat like this illustration [cid:part1.7eRQwO40.k4xp302Y@indexexchange.com] The diffuser cone should actually be a catenoid, with a diameter and length based on the RPM range you're after. I used to make them in three parts, a long shallow cone, a short steeper cone and a quite short cone taking me to the full size of the main "expansion" chamber. I fed the rpm in and calculated the endpoint of the first cone, rolled it out of cardboard and did the rest by eye with a pair of scissors and tape, so as to fit on the bike without burning the rider. I usually had to wiggle the pipes a lot on trail and motocross bikes, so I was always recalculating what RPM I would peak at if I made it a little shorter or longer. There actually were a bunch of calculations, and they were in the front pages of a workbook where I recorded my various experiments and how well they worked. Only one got used constantly, and got scratched into my "calculator". --dave On 6/2/23 10:32, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: | From: Dave Collier-Brown via talk <talk@gtalug.org><mailto:talk@gtalug.org> | When I was a motorcycle mechanic I had a circular slide rule, with a | permanent mark at the coefficient for computing a catenoid, as I did a | lot of 2-stroke exhaust systems. Some hilariously wrong, some which got | me a reputation as a wizard. I know what a catenary curve is. The standard example is of a chain hanging between two posts (that's where the name comes from). Or a hydro wire. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary> I understand that a catenoid is a surface of revolution of a catenary curve: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary> I don't know what the coefficient for computing it would be. I don't even know what the inputs to this computation would be. How is this applied to 2-stroke engine exhaust systems? Is this related to back pressure or resonance? Maybe you are a wizard. [I hate 2-stroke engines because they pollute so much. I'm only exposed to them running lawn maintenance equipment.] --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org<mailto:talk@gtalug.org> Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com<mailto:dave.collier-brown@indexexchange.com> | -- Mark Twain CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE AND DISCLAIMER : This telecommunication, including any and all attachments, contains confidential information intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. Any dissemination, distribution, copying or disclosure is strictly prohibited and is not a waiver of confidentiality. If you have received this telecommunication in error, please notify the sender immediately by return electronic mail and delete the message from your inbox and deleted items folders. This telecommunication does not constitute an express or implied agreement to conduct transactions by electronic means, nor does it constitute a contract offer, a contract amendment or an acceptance of a contract offer. Contract terms contained in this telecommunication are subject to legal review and the completion of formal documentation and are not binding until same is confirmed in writing and has been signed by an authorized signatory.
On 02/06/2023 17.49, Dave Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
The diffuser cone should actually be a catenoid, with a diameter and length based on the RPM range you're after.
There was a lovely little demo two-stroke at the National Engineering Laboratory in Scotland that had its diffuser shaped such that the sonic wave provided enough reflected back pressure that it didn't need valves. It was (of course) single speed and fearsomely inefficient, but it could run (kinda) Stewart
On Thu, 1 Jun 2023 15:24:56 -0400 Scott Allen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jun 2023 at 15:05, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Pickett was a good brand. I really didn't like plastic slide rules because they were jerky to operate: stiction.\
http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n4es/virtual-n4es.html -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On 2023-06-01 12:32, James Knott wrote:
then a couple of Sharp calculators, the first of which used batteries and the 2nd light powered.
I still have the 2nd one. It's a Sharp EL-545, which also still works. I guess it's pushing 25 years old or so and it also still works. It came with a thick instruction book.
On 01/06/2023 12.32, James Knott via talk wrote:
BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my high school days. It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 years later!
No batteries to give out! Even though I've never had to use them for school or work, I have slide rules around the house because they're very pleasing. My dad's Faber-Castell was his first work calculator in the early 1960s. Catherine's late uncle got me his fearsome Post-Hemmi Versalog, complete with leather holster and large manual. I recently picked up a new old stock simple Ricoh bamboo slide rule. This was made in the early 1970s and was still in its sealed plastic bag. Stewart
On 01/06/2023 12.22, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
In that talk, [Kahan] showed that all calculators made bozo errors, many unique to a calculator. As a consultant to Victor, he got their errors fixed. I don't remember whether HP and TI listened to him.
This makes me very wary of random-brand calculators.
I understand that concern. And while I should be all "take nobody's word" about this, my retired friends showed me the verification work he'd done. There's a strong chance that the $1 wonder is a knockoff Casio. You might enjoy this Julia Evans mini-zine on floating point: https://wizardzines.com/comics/floating-point/
While I was buying and not using cheap calculators, by cubicle-mate Henry Spencer was buying and open-carrying fancy HP ones. I got a couple of cast-offs and they were wonderful, but still not useful.
them's fightin' words! At least to this son of an HP dealer they are. ☺ You may have one of my cast-off HP calculators (an HP 49). I too have too many calculators: * a fleet of at least three HP48s, plus Droid48 on my phone. The 48 is just such a good calculator. In RPN mode, no-one will ever borrow them. * my late father's HP11c. In the early 2000s, he quipped that the set of batteries he'd just put in would outlive him. Sadly, he was right: Dad passed last December, and I had to change the batteries last week. * a TI-83+. I got this to put DrugWars on and do some Z80 programming, but the serial link refuses to be useful under Linux * a couple of Casio fx-115 variants. One of them - an fx-115MS - is a great device for simple electronic engineering. It handles SI magnitudes properly and logically. The other fx-115 I have doesn't do this. * a Sharp "Compet" desktop calculator from 1969. It has lovely nixie tubes for the display. While it looks like a basic 4-function unit, it will do square roots somewhat slowly. Stewart
On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 11:34 PM Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 01/06/2023 12.22, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
[...]all calculators made bozo errors. ... This makes me very wary of random-brand calculators.
I understand that concern. And while I should be all "take nobody's word" about this... There's a strong chance that the $1 wonder is a knockoff Casio. [...] I too have too many calculators:
Almost repeated as much in my household as the KISS principle (with silly for the last part) is "Nullius in verba <https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/>" I also have an interest in calculators, my favorite is my trusty 1978 Texas Instruments TI-30, with 9V battery. I think I have the case laying around somewhere. Anyone into slide rules? Daniel Villarreal
participants (10)
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Alex Kink -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Daniel Villarreal -
Dave Collier-Brown -
Howard Gibson -
James Knott -
Mauro Souza -
Scott Allen -
Stewart C. Russell -
Stewart Russell