Hasta La Gadget!

Today several bits of a couple of speeches made by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and another Macintosh legend have surfaced via a friendly holder of several VHS recordings of a 1984 meeting of the Apple Pi computer club. These tapes recorded Woz and Apple Employee #6 Randy Wigginton speaking at the Denver Apple Pi computer club back on October 4th 1984, and are being digitized and cleaned for your enjoyment this weekend. Don’t miss the “Pledge of Apple Allegiance”, whatever you do.

These videos were submitted initially to Tuaw where a reader by the name of Vince Patton notes that he’s in the process of making sure all of the tapes are transferred and that watchable video is produced from the source material. These videos are all being displayed at Patton’s YouTube channel where you can enjoy them in kind – we’ll also be embedding each of them in this post, of course.

First you’ll see an epic moment in the history of computing that you’ll be glad you took the time to click. Here Woz leads the club in the Pledge of Apple Allegiance, complete with the following lines:

I pledge allegiance
to the logo
of corporate marketing in Cupertino.
And to the computers
for which it stands:
one notion
under Jobs –
indispensable
hardware and software for all.

Make sure you commit that one to memory, dear readers.

Next you’ve got Woz speaking on pranking a hotel, hacking a Video on Demand box, and re-numbering a telephone. Immediately following that, you’ll find a video about additional pranks and wild times Woz had as a college students, including a choice note about how he’d used a TV jammer more than once.

A bit of a break from Woz for a moment, you’ve got Randy Wigginton speaking about the aversion of a near disaster 6 days before the original launch of Macintosh. He goes through the heart-pounding several days before Macintosh had to be launched as a software package, explaining that at 2 o’clock in the morning on the day they had to send the final build out at 6 o’clock in the morning (four hours later), the situation should very well have given their team all panic attacks: “nothing worked.”

Once again with Woz you’ll find a description of how the Apple II was created. This should enlighten your life even if you never used that magical machine, complete with its massive floppy disk drive and connectivity with the epic Koala Pad. This machine was many users of my generation’s first encounter with an Apple product, as the big A had a rather important link with grade schools at that time.

With one good turn comes another – next you’ll see Woz speak about the creation of the Apple I (which of course was created before the Apple II). Inside you’ll have found a fabulous note about how the Apple I worked with 4k dynamic RAM built-in even though it was more difficult to design for – and how no other system worked with that advanced feature for a year (or even two) after they’d done it. This is an absolutely unthinkable situation today.

Below you’ll see Woz speak on how Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer knowing full well he’d have to lose some money before he made any.

Woz returns with more information about how he was put on probation at the University of Colorado for “Computer Abuse”. Such is the life of a young genius, yes?

Finally, (for now), you’ll see Woz recall the point at which he was forced to quit his job at HP and put his efforts toward Apple full-time. This is an iteration of the story of Apple’s creation that we’ve never seen before today, spoken by none other than one of the two men who founded the company. Consider that for a moment, won’t you?

We’d like to thank Patton for his work in translating this all to digital video this week and look forward to the rest of the media without a doubt. Let us know if you hear any other hidden treasures in your viewing of these clips, too!

Weekend Watch list: rediscovered VHS tapes of Woz speaking at 1984 Apple Pi club is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

There’ve been some very cool PC games of launched over the last several months. One of the games that is the most demanding of computer hardware is the recently released Crysis 3. If you want to play that game with all the visual bells and whistles turned on, you need a seriously powerful computer. This is where the Digital Storm Hailstorm II gaming PC steps in.

Digital Storm has recently announced this beast and its specs are incredibly impressive. There are a number of hardware options available and the machine uses liquid cooling and looks really cool to boot. The basic configuration of the system, the Level 1, will set you back $2762(USD). For that much loot you get a Core i7 3770K processor, 16 GB of 1600MHz RAM, a single Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics card with 2GB memory, a 120GB SSD, a 1 TB hard drive, and a Blu-ray drive.

The most expensive configuration is called the Level 4. This beast will drain $8085 from your bank account, It features a smoking-fast 3.5GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 3970X processor, 16 GB of  1866 MHz RAM, and three insanely powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan SLI graphics cards with 6GB memory each. The machine also has a 240 GB SSD along with a 1 TB hard drive, a liquid cooling system, and a Blu-ray player. I bet that Level 4 machine can run Crysis maxed out on a 30-inch monitor without cracking a sweat.

This week at NVIDIA’s own GPU Technology Conference 2013, we’ve been introduced to no less than the company’s first end-to-end system: NVIDIA GRID VCA. The VCA part of the name stands for “Visual Computing Appliance”, and it’s part of the greater NVIDIA GRID family we were re-introduced to at CES 2013 earlier this year. This VCA is NVIDIA’s way of addressing those users – and SMBs (small-to-medium businesses) – out there that want a single web-accessible database without a massive rack of servers.

What is the NVIDIA GRID VCA?

The NVIDIA GRID VCA is a Visual Computing Appliance. In it’s current state, you’ll be working with a massive amount of graphics computing power no matter where you are, accessing this remote system over the web. As NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted on-stage at GTC 2013, “It’s as if you have your own personal PC under your desk” – but you’re in a completely different room.

You’re wireless, you’re in a completely different state – NVIDIA GRID VCA is basically whatever you need it to be. The first iteration of the NVIDIA GRID VCA will be packed as follows:

• 4U high.
• Sized to fit inside your standard server rack (if you wish).
• 2x highest-performance Xeon processors.
• 8x GRID GPU.
• 2x Kepler GPU.
• Support for 16 virtual machines.

You’ll be able to work with the NVIDIA GRID VCA system with basically any kind of computer, be it a Mac, a PC, mobile devices with Android, ARM or x86-toting machines, anything. With the NVIDIA GRID VCA, your remotely-hosted workspace shows up wherever you need it to. Each device you’ve got simply needs to download and run a single client going by the name “GRID client.” Imagine that.

If you’ve got a company using NVIDIA’s GRID, you’ll have access to mega-powerful computing on whatever machine you’ve got connected to it. One of the use-cases spoken about at GTC 2013 was some advanced video editing on-the-go.

Use Case 1: Autocad 3D and remote Video Editing

On-stage with NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang spoke James Fox, CEO of the group Dawnrunner. As a film and video production company (based in San Francisco, if you’d like to know), workers at Dawnrunner use Adobe software and Autodesk. As Fox notes, “Earth Shattering is what gets talked about in the office.”

Fox and his compatriots use their own GRID configuration to process video, head out to a remote spot and show a customer, and change the video on the spot if the customer does so wish it. While processing video of the monster sizes Dawnrunner works with, still needs relatively large computing power – “Hollywood big” we could call it – NVIDIA’s GRID can make it happen inside the NVIDIA GRID VCA.

With the processing going on inside the VCA and shown on a remote workstation environment (basically a real-time window into the GRID), you could potentially show real-time Hollywood movie-sized video editing from your Android phone. In that one image of a situation you’ve got the power of this new ecosystem.

Use Case 2: Hollywood Rendering with Octane Render

Of course no big claim with the word “Hollywood” in it is complete without some big-name movie examples to go with it. At GTC 2013, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang brought both Josh Trank and Jules Urbach onstage. The former is the director of the upcoming re-boot (2015) movie The Fantastic Four (yes, that Fantastic Four), and the latter is the founder and CEO of the company known as Otoy.

Both men speak of the power of GPUs, Trank speaking first about how people like he, the movie director, use CGI from the beginning of the creation of a film with pre-visualization to bid it out to studios, getting funding before there is any cash to be had. Meanwhile Urbach spoke of how CGI like this can be rendered 40-100 times faster with GPUs than CPUs – and with that speed you’ve got a lot less energy spent and far fewer hours used for a final product.

With that, Urbach showed Otoy’s Octane Render (not brand new as of today, but made ultra-powerful with NVIDIA GRID backing it up). This system exists on your computer as a tiny app and connects your computer to a remote workstation – that’s where NVIDIA’s GRID comes in – and you’ll be able to work with massive amounts of power wherever you go.

Octane Render allows you to use “hundreds or thousands” of GPUs to be used by renderers in the cloud. Shown on-stage was a pre-visualization of a scene from the original Transformers movies (which Otoy helped create), streamed in real time over the web from Los Angeles to the location of the conference: San Jose.

What they showed, it was made clear, is that the power of GPUs in this context cannot be denied. With the power of 112 GPUs at once, it was shown that a high-powered Hollywood-big scene could be rendered in a second where in the past it would have taken several hours. And here, once again, it can all be controlled remotely.

Cost

There are two main configurations at the moment for NVIDIA’s GRID VCA, the first working with 8 GPU units, 32GB of GPU Memory, 192 GB System Memory, 16 thread CPU, and up to 8 concurrent users. The second is as follows – and this is the beast:

GPU: 16 GPUs
GPU Memory: 64 GB
System Memory: 384 GB
CPU: 32 thread CPU
Number of users: up to 16 concurrent

If you’re aiming for the big beast of a model, you’re going to be paying $39,900 USD with a $4,800-a-year software license. If you’re all about the smaller of the two, you’ll be paying $24,900 USD with a $2400-a-year software license.

Sound like the pocket-change salvation you’ve been waiting for? Let us know if your SMB will be busting out with the NVIDIA GRID VCA immediately if not soon, and be sure to let us know how it goes, too!

SlashGear 101: Remote Computing with NVIDIA GRID VCA is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week as we roll through NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference and hear of the latest innovations in graphics processing prowess, we’ve heard a thunder strike – the Digital Storm Hailstorm II, a massive monster of a gaming PC. This beast has four distinct levels of excellence, ranging from a single GeForce GTX 680 all the way up to three – count them – three NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN GPUs for face-blasting graphics processing excellence. This set of builds is bordering on absolutely insane as the home gaming universe ramps up to a place where you’d have to be no less than tattooed with dedication to having the most powerful set of specifications – here you’ll go wild!

With the Hailstorm II you’ll have space for four radiators, four GPU units, and two CPUs. That’s one massive amount of space on its own – then you consider how it’ll all be blasting forth with the components Digital Storm is quoting here as out-of-box builds, you’ll find your fingers sweating. With the Hailstorm II, you’ve got the first appearance of the Corsair Obsidian Series 900D, a monstrous black tower with a big window on the side so you can view this futuristic wallet-crushing collection for yourself.

Inside you’ve got a liquid cooling system with three front intake fans and a lovely large rear exhaust fan to keep the air running through. If you’d like, this build allows you to ad an absurd 15 fans in total – so much freaking airflow you’ll have to wear a jacket.

Up front you’ll find a lovely brushed aluminum front panel that’ll open up to show you a vast number of expansion slots – ten expansion slots in all, with room for up to nine hard drives or SSD with three hot-swappable mounts, four 5.25-inch optical drive bays, and more! You’ll have two USB 3.0 ports for super quick transfer, four USB 2.0 ports for all your peripherals, and, just incase you’re an over-the-top expander, the ability to work with two power supplies on the back.

If that weren’t enough, you’ll find that each unit has gone through a 72-hour stress-test by Digital Storm, this including industry standard testing of the hardware and software as well as a proprietary testing process in place to detect any and all components that show the potential to fail in the future – you’ll be set!

The system builds you’ll be working with are as you see above, each of the prices reflective of the beastly innards they contain. You’ll find that each of these systems uses fabulous Intel CPU power with the Core i7 across the board as well as NVIDIA GPUs. As noted, this is one of the first systems to work with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN GPU, and you’ll be able to knock it up to 3x SLI NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN at 6GB – intense!

Digital Storm Hailstorm II gaming PC brings torrential TITAN downpour is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Here live at GTC 2013 Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA took the stage for the opening keynote, and quickly got things started off by jumping right in with the GTX Titan. Obviously NVIDIA is extremely proud of the brand new single-GPU powerhouse, and we’re expecting plenty of details to quickly follow.

NVIDIA’s CEO already is talking about what we can expect to see this year at GTC, and the opening keynote will have 5 main things you can all look forward too. One, we’ll hear plenty about the breakthrough in “supercomputing” we’ve never seen before. As well as all the breakthrough’s this year has already given us.

We’ll get a broad update on GPU computing as a whole, how it’s progressing, and where it’s headed. Then what I’m sure many of you are waiting for is the NVIDIA Roadmap. Then last but not least NVIDIA will have a new product announcement. That will be last, so stay tuned for all the details.

While on stage Jen-Hsun Huang stated they didn’t know what to call their new GTX GeForce graphics card that you see above. After realizing it was more than just a GPU, but a GPU that truly brings supercomputing to our homes, they settled on the GTX Titan — and we think that’s fitting. Stay tuned folks.

NVIDIA: GTX Titan is a supercomputer in your home is written by Cory Gunther & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.