Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
This puzzle has a special prize, thanks to Nokia. The first person to precisely identify this object by name will win the newest Nokia — a N95 camera phone still in the box (or an alternative prize if you don’t need a new phone).
It looks like a buffer for the edge of a round table. The table is on its side and the base will be the kind that lifts up and down or at least that turns on itself. I say this because the back of this round thing looks like the part that we attach that base to. The motors are to power the buffer and to turn the table. I am sure I am way off but trying to guess is part of the fun!
Otherwise, it looks like something from a physics lab.
I might have even seen this before in a museum there. No, it isn’t for making tires, how they started. But then they got into cables. It isn’t a big cable spinner, so it must have been just as they entered the electronics era. It very well may be "The first electronics device made in-house, a pulse analyzer for use in nuclear power plants, was created in 1962."
hmmm…. I have to think ahead a bit here about how this will work… Normally I would give some warm/cold feedback along the way ….especially if someone is correct, but not precise enough… but since a prize is involved, do you want me to?
P.S. nice sleuthing Ross, quoting from the Nokia history page… 😉
A hint is needed. I really have no idea. It all depends on individual’s personal knowledge. If we were all in the same class and the quiz had to do with the subject, that would be fair. I do always love to play this guessing game though. 🙂
I made my guess just by staring at it–some of the parts remind me of giant versions of the inside of a modern drive. But my attempts at using Google to see if I am right and/or find a more specific answer have been futile. I’ve found pics of the IBM RAMAC prototypes on the web, and it doesn’t look like right. So I’m losing faith in my guess….
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Seen in my recent comments. (?)
Josh, don’t lose the faith. You nailed it, within 10 minutes of my posting, and then you honed in on the exact procduct. Bravo Josh! I am repeatedly amazed at the intuitive blink of the flickr community…
So, do you need a new phone, or do you want to see the wifi camera behind door number two?
On the walk to the kitchen at the IBM Almaden Research Center resides this early prototype of the IBM RAMAC Disc Drive, which became the world’s first disk drive in 1956. It has the industrial look of a Maytag washing machine.
This huge disc stored 100 kilobytes, so the final product stacked 50 of them to provide 5MB of storage in the space of a large refrigerator.
The disk drive has improved more dramatically than the semiconductor (reflected in Moore’s Law). Disk drive areal storage density has improved over 35 million times since 1956.
This graph comes from an IBM Paper:
Well, I knew this round plate turned on itself from the hardware that looks like the kind under a turn-table.
I am so glad the hard drives are smaller now!
Sweet! That phone you linked to sure looks neat. But I’m a camera guy first and foremost, so let’s hear about that WiFi Camera!
🙂
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Seen in my recent comments. (?)
P.S. Howard is doing a live show on http://www.kyte.tv/channels/view.html?uri=channels/113#uri,chann... using his Nokia N95 to upload pictures of the random walk of his life, as it happens… =)
Steve–it looks like the Kodak designers did indeed have in mind the "hold above your head" functionality (perhaps you are too tall to understand!)–from the camera manual:
Thanks again! This may be the ideal tool for my oft discussed but never implemented "SLAC Cafeteria Food Photo Blog."
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