Especially since the systems of the time used wide ribbon cables to connect the hard drive & CD-ROM.

I was thinking that for this new generation, "Superscalar" doesn't cover it anymore, except as a generic term for the design technique. "Ultrascalar"? "Superscalar Pro"?

I mean superscalar just is a different name for using wide cores and runtime dependency tracking and out-of-order execution for instruction level parallelism without VLIW.

To my eyes, your message looks kinda like, "The term 'bicycle' doesn't cover it anymore, things have changed so much since they were introduced. We should call them something else, maybe 'bicycle pro'? 'super bicycle'?" No it's just a bike, and no, modern CPUs are just CPUs which look scalar at the ISA level but have ILP

I had heard of MC Frontalot but never listened to any of his raps - But I should have:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVm8oZx9WSM

Also relevant to today's AI concerns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWnV3HVro_0

I regret not having the time to stop by the Connections Museum in Seattle when I was there. They're working on a new museum in Denver.

Their YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

Depends on whether the devs included keyboard accelerator mappings. With the rise of "touch focused apps", it's becoming rare.

Sure but in this case we're the devs. We're in charge of that and would include them if we're making a gui instead of a tui and want keyboard accelerator mappings.

I saw the same thing at Best Buy. They switched from a traditional cash register to a web application on a PC. And all the clerks carefully (and slowly) navigated their mice to click on everything.

What was worse was their mouse platform wasn't level. So every time they let go, it would drift downwards and they'd have to go through the "where's my mouse pointer" wiggle again.

That's pretty shocking.

If you want to visit, here's the location.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/tvGDn6rruL5HKH5LA

You might also want to visit the Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel in SC (about 2 hours away because mountain roads are scenic but not fast). It was started being dug by hand before the Civil War as a railroad tunnel to connect Charleston SC to the Midwest but never completed.

https://visitoconeesc.com/stumphouse-park/

Clemson University used it for a while to age their blue cheese. They have more info about the history of the tunnel on their site:

https://www.clemson.edu/bluecheese/history.html

Never thought I’d see Mountain Rest / Walhalla on Hacker News!

While the rest of the tunnels aren’t quite as interesting or accessible, Stumphouse is part of a series of tunnels, some collapsed, some underwater, and one caged off for a bat colony susceptible to “White Nose Disease.” One can hike the Blue Ridge Mountain Railroad trail in Stumphouse park to see the remnants.

They sound that way to be unique and attention-getting. They have to cut through the background noise of 21st century life.

Here's a (totally unsafe!) demo from the 80's of why sirens sound the way they do. Do not attempt at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsfczwy3KOE

There are different sounds for different situations. I don't know the regulations (presumably they exist) that say when a particular sound should be used.

This fire alarm sounder has 32 possible sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9os5EtDiVC4

The first is the default fire alarm noise in Britain, probably what I've heard most often.

I heard "LF Buzz" (2:32) in a nightclub, where it cut through the music. (I remember it as even more "yucky", maybe there were multiple sounders in the room.)