Early Risers.

[monkeysarefun]

1 minute ago, PupCam said:

 

I vaguely remember Hunt the Wumpus.      Once we'd thrashed the old PETs to death we upgraded to some "serious computers"  like HP9835s before moving onto HP workstations and HPUX.    

 

We also started to make use of the HP flatbed plotters (HP7225A), programming them in the native HPGL.    There were a number of plotter demo's built in I seem to recall.  One of them drew a very strange chart but it played Jingle Bells while doing it

 

Takes you back doesn't it!

 

I used HP plotters at an oil company back in the '80's and '90's. Then we " upgraded" to some kind if giant inkjet plotter that used 4 litre containers of ink and was always breaking down. To the point that the guy who used to come and repair it had a regular spot at our Friday section morning tea and was included in our end of year team photo for the  company magazine. 

 

It cost us over $100K to buy and 4 years later when we got bought out, asset stripped and closed down we had to pay $4000 for a company to come and take it away. Should have spent it on  Sydney real estate instead, we'd have all been laughing 

[J. S. Bach]

2 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

One of the labs at University had "Colossal Cave / Adventure" on 8" floppy discs for, if memory serves, some kind of DEC PDP machine. The disc drive housings were removed and you could see the head search (along with the "barp, barp", clunk and groan) to come up with the single line: "You a in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", the whole process taking several seconds.

 

A Winchester hard drive for the lab was purchased and the game loaded on the drive - with instant responsiveness! I believe I have a hand-drawn cave map somewhere, rolled up in a tube. "A hollow voice says 'PLUGH'."

I have an NOS 8" floppy drive and controller card; the darn drive is as big as a modern laptop!.

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by J. S. Bach
To correct a typing error.

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Farcebook is still doing some weird things since it shut down, such as only letting you scroll down to the bottom of the first post. Not much good when you want to see the posts since you last were on Farcebook.

[Ozexpatriate]

2 minutes ago, J. S. Bach said:

... the darn drive is as big as a modern laptop!.

By definition - assuming the laptop is about 9" in one dimension as mine is. The paper packet for the 8" disc was at least 8" square. The drive case would be taller than a laptop.

[polybear]

2 hours ago, PupCam said:

I had to get a GP appointment to discuss changes to my medication this morning.  Unfortunately Puppers' Patented 'Pointment Procuring Procedure let me down - the landline phone's dial/pick-up button seems to have died due to excessive use over the last 18 months.   Had to resort to dial, engaged, cancel, re-dial on the mobile.   

I note from my phone that it took One Hundred and Twenty Six attempts to get through this morning!    Lucky I'm not ill ...

 

 

 

Jeez....Bear's GP must be "By Royal Appointment" material compared to the shower Puppers' has to endure.  I may well (often) get into multiples of ten's - but no-where near those numbers.  And assuming I call around doors open-ish then I'm usually guaranteed a call back from the Doc as required on the same day.

[J. S. Bach]

1 hour ago, JohnDMJ said:

Remember them well! About 180kB of storage compared to the 360kB of a 5 1/4" floppy!

I can imagine what capacity they would have had if they had survived into the 1.44mb formulation, and mechanicals used on the 3½ floppies.

[PupCam]

4 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

By definition - assuming the laptop is about 9" in one dimension as mine is. The paper packet for the 8" disc was at least 8" square. The drive case would be taller than a laptop.

 

I do remember the graceful roll of  8" floppies as they traversed the office at high speed having been launched boomerang style .....

 

3 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Jeez....Bear's GP must be "By Royal Appointment" material compared to the shower Puppers' has to endure.  I may well (often) get into multiples of ten's - but no-where near those numbers.  And assuming I call around doors open-ish then I'm usually guaranteed a call back from the Doc as required on the same day.

 

To be completely fair, when I did get through and having endured the pre-recorded lecture of excuses for poor service and tellings-off of all those nasty, naughty rude patients I did get the appropriate appointment allocated for "sometime this morning" and the doctor did then actually phone back before 10:00 and did the necessary medication adjustment.

[J. S. Bach]

46 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

We got a call at work a few weeks ago from an officer who'd just been posted into a position enquiring about a computer that was in the corner of his new office.

 

The previous guy didn't know what it was for, nor had the guy he took over from, and so on, so he called the local base IT guys who went and looked at it and suggested since it looked a bit special it must have been part of the system I support. 

 

One of our guys went over to check it out and came back with one of these

 

 

I guess it had been sitting in the corner of that office  since the '80's and part of the handover takeover routine for that job had obviously been "Ï don't have a clue what that is, it was here when I got here".

 

 

It still works and we plan to use it to replace the PC of the next  complaining user with it.

 

I had the Model 4P (portable version of the 4; all buttoned-up, it looked like a sewing machine)running Trs-Dos  that had neat feature; if you loaded the program disc in drive B instead of A, it would check A then go to B and run the program. The other popular at the time DOS (MS?, I no longer remember) would stop and tell you that there was no disc in A and stop.

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by J. S. Bach
To correct a typing error.

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

A little more progress has been made in the cellar, the brickwork surrounding the fireplace has been cleaned down and sealed and I’ve also managed to paint the fireplace itself. It’s starting to look pretty good now, but I think I’ll give the fireplace another coat of paint. 

 

Charlie turned up after dinner, but he didn’t bring is model with him, as he’s finding it very fiddly. To be honest, when he first showed me the kit, I thought it was a bit ambitious. But he keeps making small painting mistakes which he has to rectify and I think this is what's getting him down. He’s thinking of getting another kit, but one that is a bit easier to do and leaving this one until he has gained a bit more confidence. So instead of going to the workshop, we sat in the living room and spent the time chatting. 

 

I had a phone call mid afternoon from Wythenshaw Hospital, giving me a date for my operation, 11 November and I have to be there at 7:15am! Before that, on October 22, I will have a pre-op assessment at our local hospital. This is with in walking distance of home. I also need to go there on the 8 November for a pre-op Covid test, after which we both need to self isolate until I go in for my op. 

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[laurenceb]

 Night awl

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[NGT6 1315]

Moaning awl. Too frellin' early!

[chrisf]

Greetings

 

Before reporting to the Corn Exchange for day 2 of the beer festival I had my hair cut.  For a few days at least my hair now looks relatively neat and tidy and I shall try to remember to have it cut more frequently in future.  Good luck with that, you chorus, and with good reason.  The next port of call was W H Smith to buy my 2022 diary and a magazine.  The latter was much easier to find than the former.  Having gone to the place in the downstairs part of the shop where diaries used to be I found only Filofax refills.  In the best tradition of retailing I found that the diaries were now upstairs.  I wonder where they will be next year?

 

So, then, to the beer festival.  The evening meal turned out to be roast pork with all the trimmings, a pleasant surprise indeed.  I learned from two lads sitting next to me that the last bus from Bedford to Rushden is at 7.24 pm and that it would cost them £30 for a taxi when the time eventually came to go home.  They appeared to be in no hurry to leave and who can blame them.  How glad I am that such buses as there are to my neck of the woods leave from right outside the festival venue and that I have a bus pass.

 

Best wishes to all

 

Chris 

[jamie92208]

Good moaning from a still dark Charente.  Woken early by the grey bin lorry. It's the same one thatvempties the yellow bin on Tuesdays.  We have communal bins for each group of houses.  Ours is rather conveniently right outside the gate.  Not a huge amount on todays agenda but that might well change. 

 

As to old computers, we had a small Sinclair, a ZX I think.  I even managed to write a little programme that helped the kids learn their times tables. If they got 10 out of 10 they got a screen telling them they could have a chocolate bar.  That was about the limit of my programming  we then got a QL but the natty little tape cassette drives were very unreliable.  At Poly in 1973 we did some BASIC programming and dropped the handwritten programmes in a slot at the computer suite door. The next day we gotva print out and a little roll of punched tape back.  The printout usually said something along the lines of.  ""Failed at line 250".

 

Jamie

 

[New Haven Neil]

Morning, just getting light on a windy but dry rock that manages an air temperature of 15c.

 

Bike club morning, I guess it will be one of the last group runs out, the oldies don't like the cold.  We are starting with a full Manx breakfast before the ride so will be fortified for our expedition.

 

That *&^%$£"! video advert thing is really getting on my              errr, nerves, it flips the page down past where I want to start.  It won't work as advertising for me as I ignore the images completely, having gotten bored with x-ing it closed every time.

[TheQ]

Mooring Awl, Inner Temple Hare..

5 hours sleep ish followed by... not a lot..

 

Ben the I don't like the dark Collie rapidly went out this morning, after topping up rainfall levels, he came to me for reassurance, a good stoke of the head many times.. Then he went back to the house..

 

Very very dark out there and very quiet, the mist killing all noise, except for a Deer calling not too far away.

 

 

There are still user groups for The QL around the country, many have developed the QL far beyond what Sinclair did using much later proocessors in the 680XX series ..  There is an Enthusiastic following in Denmark, where for some reason it did much better than the UK.. The QL's I have, were later models where they got the microdrive working much better. Sometime I'll dig the QL's out and have a play again.. Did a lot of my degree typing on a QL.. 

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/

https://quanta.org.uk/

 

Ordered winter driving  gloves, and copper paint for small objects.. it's noticeable that everything  has delivery dates a few days later than a while ago..

 

Just finishing off this weeks second major system, it went quite well, letting it's 1 G Ohm resistor settle at the moment, then it's just product the correction files and set the cross check running..

 

Time to  wait some more..

[PhilJ W]

Morning all from Estuary-Land. No fist and mog this morning but overcast and grey. But Arthur Itis and Co. are quiet this morning. Time to get breakfast on the go, be back later.

[polybear]

Bear here....

Well I seem to have fixed the problem regarding the "MultiQuote" function not working for this Bear 

The fix?  Use Edge instead of Firefox.  The catch?  I then get obscure videos running on the rhs of the page  - but no adverts.  The fix?  Use "Private Mode" with "Strict" Tracking Prevention automatically enabled.  Haven't discovered the downside on that one yet, but seems to work ok for RMWeb so far...... 

 

Bear has car washing to do, sorry, start today.  All I can say is that it'll feel real good when it's done....

 

 

 

 

[Barry O]

Ey Up!

Excellent meal last night with some of the Pensioners from one of my old work places.

 

The deer were making a lot of noise in the farm around the soon to be old Company HQ.

 

Memories were shared and further meet ups arranged.

 

Royal Mail are delivering a parcel this morning so I need to stay in. What's the betting it turns up at the latest possible time?

 

Off for some breakfast ..but first...a mugatea!

 

Stay safe!

 

Baz

[AndrewC]

33 minutes ago, Barry O said:

Royal Mail are delivering a parcel this morning so I need to stay in. What's the betting it turns up at the latest possible time?

 

There is an offshoot to Murphy's law that explains parcel arrivals. Not necessarily the latest possible time but the latest & most inconvenient time that is least expected. 

For example if they say between 11 and 12, it won't arrive at 11:59 but it will arrive at 11:45 if you are on the toilet or just received a phone call. It will arrive at 10:55 if you just had to pop to the shops for milk. If you sit at the door, it will finally arrive at 12:59 the next day. It is an extremely complex formula. 

[polybear]

Bear's Quote of the Day (courtesy of some Russian Guy on the Radio):

 

"If you have gas, you have power"

 

All Hail, Hippo....

[tigerburnie]

Morning, rather damp and dark up here today, but barely a breath of wind, no plans, so I might just wing it, though SWMBO has to go to the craft shop, so I may see if they have any clear matt varnish for both sealing oil paintings I have done and comes in handy for sealing weathering powders on certain objects with wheels that run on parallel bits of metal, stay safe all.

[simontaylor484]

41 minutes ago, polybear said:

Bear's Quote of the Day (courtesy of some Russian Guy on the Radio):

 

"If you have gas, you have power"

 

All Hail, Hippo....

All those coal reserves we have that are wasted all those power stations demolished in the dash for gas.

Gas should be left for heating homes and businesses not eaten by power stations 

 

Sorry for the rant but it just seems to me that UK Government whatever party is in power sells itself down the river