New forge design

Haven't since he first put his website up, he was a regular on r.k after settting up a website, he got too busy to chat after that. ;) Back then tho the NGs were full of spams and trolls.

Had to go to town where the connection was better, besides needed a "windows machine" to see pictures, I was using an 8808 at the time. :)

Anyway, those pictures were a how-to-make an oxygen-cylinder forge with a square hole on both sides so you could stick the sword all the way through, only needed to heat a short section at a time to forge, I guess. :)

DF's website's been updated since then? ;)

Alvin in AZ

Uh, yeah. ;-) I expect so. Got rid of that 8088 yet? From things you've said, I've been getting the idea that you haven't. There's plenty of "outdated machines" out there for dirt cheap and free that would be light years ahead of that. Issues with Bill Gates? Go Linux and still be light years ahead of DOS. Whatever.

Yeah, Don's got one of the coolest blade sites around IMHO. Has a forum set up for discussions and show and tell. He has a bunch of great tutorials, info and how-to's and a gallery of some of the finest blade work around. Figured you would be familiar with it.

GA

I think you may be missing my point. Hardware cloth is flexible. Once the forge has been fired (rendering the ceramic wool brittle) if the shell of hardware cloth flexes (like, when it's moved or bumped), the brittle ceramic wool will break and shatter.

Maybe some ceramic wool materials don't get brittle like that, but the ones I've worked with do. Maybe the Satanite or ITC-100 coatings will make the material stronger, but it won't make it less brittle.

In short, it makes sense to use a steel shell for a gas forge.

Boy - mixing up the system numbers and first 8bit uP (and the like). I'm giving my 8800-B with an 8080 in it to a friend who is keeping them alive.

The 8088 was the IBM PC type.

The 8008 and 8080 were the INTEL 8 bits. 4004 and 4040 were prior and overlapping. There has been a slew of them from the first 4004 - now systems with 10,240 latest versions are in one system. One of these sit in NASA.

Mart>>>>Mine has a real good looking rubber bottom/stand still, most don't,

As were the 8086 and 8088 - 8 bit that is unless I'm mistaken (always possible). Don't think they went 16 bit till the 80286 Which approximatly coincides with my introduction to computers. Breadboarded a Z80 control unit in school once. Now that you mention it I saw that what Alvin said was "8808". Is that a system name or did you scramble the number (Alvin)?

10,240 latest what? Latest CPUs? In what type of system would that be?

GA

Not at all. Define flexible. I'ts not as tough as a solid steel shell, say

1/8" thick or better but it's not quite flimsy either. If the wool gets really brittle all the way through AND I bang it around a lot, yeah it could shatter. Nothing in my limited experience tells me that the wool is in any danger of getting that brittle any time soon though and as I said, I didn't build it to last a century - I built it for functionality, convenience of assembly and portability and cost.

Definately NOT "Once" under normal use and maybe ONLY if exceeding the design specs of 2400 degrees. I got a buddy with a torch that gets REALLY hot if he wants to and yeah, he has caused limited brittleness in wool in his experimenting.

By that definition it "makes sense" to never move your forge around.

GA

Im pretty sure you are right. 8086 was 8 bit and I think 4 or 6 mhz. DOS was created for it and the reason it took off. The 8088 was 2 speed, so the "old" 8086 software wouldnt crash (they had a turbo button:). IIRC it was 4 and 10 mhz. The old Leading Edge computers sold for around $4000, with a 10 meg Winchester Hard Drive and I think

256k ram. It used to take hours to low-level format those old drives, manually entering in bad spots.

Yeah GA, 8088. :) A 7707 and "88 oh 8" were "hotbox detectors" and I was always getting the numbers mixed up... didn't know I did it in print too. :)

The first 'puter around here was a 10mhz "turbo" XT with 3.1 Dos on it and 20meg seagate hard drive. $1600 and a star printer that was soon replaced by the printer I still use an Epson LQ-500. Got any suggestions where to find a new ribbon? ;)

I have a pretty good pentium now but it's setup to boot up in dos. In daylight... the C:\> is showing as the monitor lights up. :)

0.bat runs windows if I need it for something like running the scanner etc. 5.bat gets me a log-in prompt at panix.com. :)

5W.bat sets up the printer (via PC-PowerTools oncl.com) to print address labels "5 high and wide"... just printed up a couple the other day, one for GA's mesquite.

(desert iron wood)

And my latest ugly HSS knife-

(super glue finish) When I make one that I like the looks of, I say so, ok? :) That one just didn't turn out with lines that I like is all. :/

Anybody else want a couple slabs of mesquite for one unique knife handle? :) For free, ain't "garanteein" a thing about matching or no cracks etc, ok? ;) (fill cracks with non-gel super glue)

Alvin in AZ (instead of XX it should be panix... man it's been cool, -zero- spam ...well except for -one- that got generated from inside panix by a kid messing around :)

The 8088 and the 8086 were identical from a programming standpoint, but the 8088 had an 8-bit data bus, while the 8086 had a 16-bit data bus. Both had 16-bit internal registers.

4.77MHz was the PC standard. Lots of machines had faster modes. How much faster depended on the model.

- ken

The 10k CPU's of latest versions of INTEL Pentium I*dash2 advanced dash 2 - Running Linux and accepted at NASA in the South Bay area - NASA point. It was the fastest for running world simulations and was just bumped by IBM's latest. I seem to recall it was 4+ T Flops and the new IBM is 17+ T Flops.

Martin

I remember applying for a job and then disqualifying the company - writing ASM code for the 8086 but the op code issue - some problems with that chip - deemed that project death. I saw it long before the engineers there trying to bring me in due to my savvy in 8080 code.

Martin

approximatly

;-) yeah! reminiscing about the not-so-good old days. Actually I still think the GUI's are not necessarily an improvement. I kind of lost interest in PC-as-a-toy when Windoze really started to get refined. Subsequently I became a Unix/Linux advocate. 'Course it beats Dos hands down anyway. GUI's are great for entertainment units but I'd rather have terminal for real work.

GA

Gettin long enough ago that I have to think about it a bit when I think about it at all. ;-)

Learned to us a computer on the 8086 and 286's. First one I ever bought was about 2500 dollars 486SX. My wife still remembers me telling her "This thing will do everything we could ever want it to"! I spent the next several years trying to keep hardware that would run the newer softwares. Last one I put together has more video RAM than I ever imagined System RAM back then. Running a Athelon XP at 1.2Ghz for quite a while now and haven't felt the need to upgrade it in something like a year now. I think my values have changed...

Ever play with Linux? You can run multiple sessions without resorting to a GUI.

:-) Cool!

I still think it looks like a great working knife.

Been thinking that everybody lives in an area where some kind of ornamental wood is common. We could start a co-op trading wood around... I can get Black and English Walnut pretty easy and there are lots of fruit trees around here. Been meaning to experiment with some of it to see how it looks. I grabbed a round of Japanese Elm from my moms house a while ago and sliced it up. It was starting to split on the ends but I have a couple of

12 inch or so pieces that are some of the hardest wood I've ever seen. Kind of bland for grain but increadibly hard material.

GA

Quantity 10K CPUs? I ain't calling you a liar but I work on the top end HP computers and those only do 64 linked CPUs in a single cabinet. It's theoretically possible to link several (8?) of these together on these systems but as far as I know, nobody is actually doing more than two cabinets.

GA

Bruce, If the wool lining in a forge/furnace gets to a "brittle" stage it means that it has been heated to a point where it is starting to melt/fuse. If this occurs it effectively renders the insulating properties to that of a hard brick, in other words, useless. This will only occur when the blanket material is OVERHEATED. Blanket comes in different heat ratings. If you are running a forge at say 2000?F using

1800?F rated blanket it will begin to fuse and break down, slowly becoming a useless brittle hard shell. I have glassblowing friends that use 2400? blanket (with a thin coat of Satanite or ITC 100) for the roofs of their glass furnaces. These furnaces are typically run at 2200?

-2400? constantly for MONTHS at a time with virtually no change in the texture of the blanket.

Glen G.

I get email from NASA for many years now. They had announced the acceptance of it and later when I saw a news account from AIP

email or another such like it.

I also know an INTEL senior member that was loaned to a research project of multi-cpu. Then there is the like count done with Apple computers.

Martin

Martin

Serious Computing power! I think the trick is that they use multiple "nodes" that are bound and available under a single operating system. I minor point since this is in essence what is being done by other high end computing platforms. They make a package unit that is linked through controller hardware to other similar packaged units. One of the things I found interesting on one of the new dual-die CPUs is that its functional diagram looks just like the functional diagram of one of the main boards which contains and coordinates multiple CPUs. Same model just packaged on a different scale. Neat stuff.

GA

Google 'Beowulf' and you'll get the general idea on how these systems work.. Keep in mind that designs from folks like Hitachi and IBM are a good deal more sophisticated than an ordinary Beowulf system and they often use a lot of custom chips for functions like memory bus control.

--RC

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. --Friedrich Nietzsche Never get your philosophy from some guy who ended up in the looney bin. -- Wiz Zumwalt