Sun Microsystems is a Silicon Valley legend. Ten years after it was acquired by Oracle, the company’s past employees still have fond feelings for their former home — and a historic reunion happened two weeks ago at the Hyatt Regency by the San Francisco airport. Over 1,000 former Sun employees reunited for an evening to re-connect and to reminisce.

source: vermaden

It seems like the machine was temperamental. For example, it warns that the DC power should never be turned on without first turning the operation switch to “continuous.”

“Failure to follow this rule causes certain DC fuses to blow, -240 and -415 in particular.”

But the consequences are even worse if you opened the DC fuse cabinet when the D.C. power was turned on. “This not only exposes a person to voltage differences of around 1,500 volts but the person may be burned by flying pieces of molten fuse wire” (if one of the fuse cases suddenly blew). In fact, the ENIAC was actually designed with a door switch shunt that prevented it from operating if one of its panel doors was open, “since removing the doors exposes dangerous voltage.” But this feature could be bypassed by holding the door switch shunt in its closed position.

Last year a team of six researchers in Portugal from three different universities decided to investigate this question, ultimately releasing a paper titled “Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages.” They ran the solutions to 10 programming problems written in 27 different languages, while carefully monitoring how much electricity each one used — as well as its speed and memory usage.

Methodology may have flaws, but interesting topic.

source: HN