Framing It: 2.18.2020

Nintendo Playstation! Coronavirus Is Making Manufacturing Difficult! Aronofsky-esque! Vinyl is hot!

There are far, far, better things you could do with that money.

The Nintendo Playstation. Image: Heritage Auctions

Yes, a Nintendo Playstation exists. It began as a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony in the early 90s to put games on a CD-ROM. The deal fell through, but not before about 200 prototype units were produced. Only one remains, and it’s on Heritage Auctions right now. I’m not even going to put the price in here, because it’s a lot, and it’s going to change before it’s published.

• The owner of the Nintendo Playstation, Terry Diebold, is a reddit user who was looking through a box of his dad’s old junk, found something weird, and asked the community. Dollar signs appeared in his eyes, all cartoon style and stuff.
• Terry has been talking up the Nintendo Playstation for the last few years, building hype for an eventual auction sale. Ben Heck even did a teardown:

• Needless to say, the Nintendo Playstation is probably going to break a million, maybe even two, before the auction ends next month. To put this in perspective, an Apple I got $471,000 at auction last year.
• There are much better ways to contribute to video game archival and documentation. Go donate to MAME or something. Let this be a lesson to engineers who have access to prototype hardware: save it! Even an original XBOX dev kit regularly goes for $500 on eBay.

Coronavirus hits manufacturing

• The most newsworthy public health threat of the last few months is Coronavirus, or COVID-19. This disease causes respiratory distress not unlike pneumonia, and ends in death for about 2% of those infected. It’s also highly contagious. In other news, not good.
• Coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan City, China, and has since spread across the country despite forced quarantine. It’s now in the US, Western Europe, a cruise ship docked in Japan, and almost every other country that has access to Coronavirus RNA tests.
• But if you’re a slave to the machine, you’re probably wondering what the economic impact of a public health emergency is. What is Coronavirus doing to manufacturing? It’s having a huge effect. Factories in China are shut down, or at least running at reduced capacity. A large PCB manufacturer is only running boards for medical equipment, and some China DHL offices are shut down until further notice.
• That said, the World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins is tracking Coronavirus, and it looks like this is going to be a little bit worse than SARS. Only a few thousand people will die, and there will be no movie about Coronavirus.

I get to use the word, “Aronofsky-esque’!

Mullican’s server rack, filled with tape drives, calculated pi to 50 million places.

• Calculating pi to ever-greater digits of precision is a favorite of sysadmin types. Yes, it’s ultimately useless (for example, Pi to a hundred places will draw a circle around the galaxy with a precision of less than the diameter of a proton), but it is a fantastic way to show off your ‘big data’ cred.
• Thus, the story of Timothy Mullican. He built a ‘supercomputer’ in his house to calculate Pi to 50 Million places. He did it with about $10,000 worth of equipment, and beat the previous record held by Google (who spent $200,000).
• Computing pi, along with converting the number base and writing the final output, took about nine months. During this time, there were several power outages and other errors, but the entire process of computation has ‘check points’, so not everything is lost.
• If you ever wanted to learn about tape drives, this is the project for you. The process required 350 Terabytes of disk space, with 42 Terabytes just for the final output. In an affront to humanity, Mullican doesn’t tell us what the fifty millionth digit of pi is, but that really doesn’t matter; you can calculate the nth digit of pi without calculating the preceding digits. Get to work.
• Anyway, here’s an Arthur C. Clark story.

Who in the hell paints a switch plate? Image: William Gottlieb/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Vinyl records are hot right now

• Vinyl records are outselling CDs. That might sound strange, but think about the last time you set foot in a trendy store: they’re inexplicably selling vinyl. Hot Topic is selling vinyl. Vinyl is big, baby.
• Despite record pressing plant being the business opportunity microbreweries were in 2007, all the raw material (the vinyl) comes from one of two places. One vinyl production plant burnt down this month, throwing the entire industry into chaos.
• Apollo Masters Corp., producer of vinyl masters, caught fire and was destroyed. Everyone is safe, but the supply of vinyl masters is now cut in half.
• The only other producer of vinyl masters, MDC in Japan, had trouble keeping up with orders before the fire. Now the cost of vinyl masters is going to go through the roof, if record companies can even get their hands on the raw material.