About a dozen visitors today, which means that summer visitors have begun. Normally there are very few visitors on Wednesdays, but in the summer we get a decent number. The first two visitors were an older couple and their grandson from Florida. He specified to his grandfather that at the top of his list of things to do was to come visit our museum. He was a finance major, but had learned to program in the "R programming language". I had never heard of this, but in any case I explained to him how computers worked, and the history of computers. He was fascinated. He stayed about 2 hours and I had him try some BASIC programming. He loved it! There was another visitor who was Bulgarian and recognized the Apple 2 clone that we had in the museum. She actually knew what it was and where it was manufactured and some history. Her son tried out some BASIC programming on it and stayed for over an hour. There were some other visitors who spent about 40 minutes there, but it became hard to help everyone with three groups of highly interested people. There were 3 last minute visitors, but the girl really liked that most of our computers were hands on because many museums don't allow that. She really enjoyed using them. Overall a good day at the museum. ========================================= Jeff Brace Vice President & Board Member Vintage Computer Festival East Show-runner Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity http://www.vcfed.org/ jeffrey@vcfed.org
On 6/23/21 9:08 PM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The first two visitors were an older couple and their grandson from Florida. He specified to his grandfather that at the top of his list of things to do was to come visit our museum. He was a finance major, but had learned to program in the "R programming language". I had never heard of this,
R is an interpreted programming language and large software ecosystem that is targeted primarily at statistical math. However, it's really more of a "mathematical Swiss army knife", for lots of things that have nothing to do with statistics. I use it all the time for things like curve fitting to generate coefficients for sensor response linearization in firmware. It's amazingly powerful and a real pleasure to use. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On 6/23/2021 9:34 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 6/23/21 9:08 PM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The first two visitors were an older couple and their grandson from Florida. He specified to his grandfather that at the top of his list of things to do was to come visit our museum. He was a finance major, but had learned to program in the "R programming language". I had never heard of this, R is an interpreted programming language and large software ecosystem that is targeted primarily at statistical math. However, it's really more of a "mathematical Swiss army knife", for lots of things that have nothing to do with statistics. I use it all the time for things like curve fitting to generate coefficients for sensor response linearization in firmware. It's amazingly powerful and a real pleasure to use.
-Dave You generate "header files" of pre-computed values? A mathematicians AWK? :)
On 6/23/21 11:26 PM, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
R is an interpreted programming language and large software ecosystem that is targeted primarily at statistical math. However, it's really more of a "mathematical Swiss army knife", for lots of things that have nothing to do with statistics. I use it all the time for things like curve fitting to generate coefficients for sensor response linearization in firmware. It's amazingly powerful and a real pleasure to use.
You generate "header files" of pre-computed values? A mathematicians AWK? :)
Yes and no. I generally avoid hard-coded values; most of my designs have NVRAM of some sort to store settings, counters, etc. I usually store such constants in there. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
participants (3)
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Dave McGuire -
Douglas Crawford -
Jeffrey Brace