About the stylus - a historical inscription for it?


Grench

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OK, I know we're too far in the mold production to be able to do this, but wow would it be appropriate. Just change Rome to Greece?

https://arstechnica.com/science/201...ylus-makes-a-point-about-ancient-roman-humor/

(Adding said inscription to the stylus mold would require -adding- metal (welding) inside the mold - which would be a royal pain to do.)

"I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me,” reads the Latin inscription on the 2,000-year-old iron stylus. “I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able [to give] as generously as the way is long [and] as my purse is empty." The “City" almost certainly refers to Rome, and the souvenir stylus essentially boasts a more flowery version of today’s “I went to Rome, and all I brought you was this pen.” (ARS article linked above)

The pictured stylus in the article looks pretty much like any modern quality stylus. I wish there were something in the picture to give an idea of scale.
 
I wish there were something in the picture to give an idea of scale.
330px-Douris_Man_with_wax_tablet.jpg
330px-Scribe_tomb_relief_Flavia_Solva.jpg

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet.
 
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At first glance, I actually thought the carving was depicting an actual Pyra prototype.
Yes, but look! EvilDragon hasn't got the design right -- we need to go back to the drawing board!

It's not supposed to be just a single clamshell. There are supposed to be five stacked clamshells!

Perhaps there is a keyboard and a screen inside each clamshell, so people can have different keyboard layouts at the same time in the same machine.

However, I suspect that properly the Pyra has one keyboard and nine screens with a clever hinge arrangement so that you can fold and flip to get any one of the nine screens facing you above the keyboard, and any one of other eight screens facing the person opposite you. (That you might have to be playing at "Rubics Magic" for two days to get the screen arrangement you want could no doubt be sold as a "feature"!)
 
Yes, but look! EvilDragon hasn't got the design right -- we need to go back to the drawing board!

It's not supposed to be just a single clamshell. There are supposed to be five stacked clamshells!

Perhaps there is a keyboard and a screen inside each clamshell, so people can have different keyboard layouts at the same time in the same machine.

However, I suspect that properly the Pyra has one keyboard and nine screens with a clever hinge arrangement so that you can fold and flip to get any one of the nine screens facing you above the keyboard, and any one of other eight screens facing the person opposite you. (That you might have to be playing at "Rubics Magic" for two days to get the screen arrangement you want could no doubt be sold as a "feature"!)

Or have each screen/device/tablet have hinge connections (magnetic?) on all four sides - and some sort of data connection (optical?) so they know where they are in relation to each other and expand out the desktop to fit... Oh, and a distributed processing system for the CPU and GPU so the more of them that are connected together the more powerful the net device becomes...
 
huge kudos to the dev who invented this ca. 2500 years ago.
flipping through screens physically is waay cooler than using a window manager.
:cool:

Yup - all things new are old. Except refresh rates. I understand the display refresh rates on wax tablets was variable, but would nominally be measured in tens of minutes per image. Now we get into arguments over how many tens of images per second is "acceptable"...
 
Yup - all things new are old. Except refresh rates. I understand the display refresh rates on wax tablets was variable, but would nominally be measured in tens of minutes per image. Now we get into arguments over how many tens of images per second is "acceptable"...
Only if you see the human as part of the device. But if you consider the tablet as a writing device, the refresh rates are incredibly high - If they were low in this context, you would recognize a delay between writing and seeing the result. But you would need specialized lab equipment to do so.
 
"It's not what you do, it's how you do it... Make sure you do it with style(us)"
 
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Data density starts with pictures on cave walls after all.
so the inscription must be compressed/encoded? Would make a nice idea for the box, just a few scribbles that could be handtyped/ocr'ed and then uudecoded or gunzipped...
 
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