On 17 Nov 2016 03:44:01 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2016-11-16, Larry Jaques wrote:
On 16 Nov 2016 05:39:30 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2016-11-15, Larry Jaques wrote:
On 15 Nov 2016 03:01:39 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2016-11-14, Larry Jaques wrote:
On 14 Nov 2016 03:11:36 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

[ ... ]

Yep -- 80=90 VAC 20 Hz (or 20 CPS in the old days. :-)

Yeah, I grew up with Cycles Per Second, too.

Or -- for short, '~' on some data plates. :-)

Right. I had forgotten those. That's probably how it ended up on the
QWERTY keyboard in the first place. I use it now to approximate.

Maybe -- but it also belongs above certain letters in Spanish
and Portuguese to modify the pronunciation. Spanish it is 'n' and 'ñ'
(pronounced "ennye".

I had to learn those (Alt-0139 originally, it changed with different
fonts) early on since I tossed French, Spanish, and German words in my
BBS posts very early on.

And any idea what they looked like on other systems reading
from your BBS?

I don't recall in detail, but I know some people had to reset their
character sets to get the Euro fonts and higher ascii to show up. Most
happily did at the behest of the BBS owner, The Electric Shock Therapy
BBS in Fallbrook, CA. That name took a while to drag out of the
archive dungeons of my mind.


I tended to avoid anything outside the 7-bit ASCII
character set just so everyone would see the same thing. (I also stick
with fixed-pitch fonts for the same reason -- very helpful when posting
ASCII graphics. You can never bet what the proportional pitch fonts
will do to graphcs -- even if you post in a proportional pitch font.
The character width play games between systems and fonts. :-)

Yes, fixed pitch was the only usable font back then. I started on a
very fast modem, a 1200bps! A couple friends had 300s. You could
literally type a character and have to wait 2 seconds to see it on
your screen as being sent to the BBS. We've come a long way, baby.



I would probably have been reading BBS postings with either an
ASR-33 Teletype, or a Lear Seigler ADM-3A CRT -- both very fixed pitch
fonts, and no choices to change fonts. :-)

I'm not quite sure what the effect of it being
over an 'a' is in Portuguese. :-)

Maybe it's pronounced with a Suthuhn accent "ayund" The-yus a-yund
tha-yat. :-/

"São" as in "São Paulo" in Brazil. I sort of guess at something
like "saaao" (sort of a stretched "sow") but I am probably way off.
I'll have to ask my neighbor -- she is from Brazil.

Yes, in theory, it is, but they tend to talk so fast, that little
nuance is totally missed by anyone but a natural Brazilian speaker.
Ditto the differences between Spanish and Mexican, though folks from
Spain ended their words with a "th" sound rather than an "s". Wind one
up and you can't understand a word. It sounds like a 33 album played
at 78 (reference to a very old-school machine called a "phonograph"
which preceded MP3 players, to our younger crowd).


They were all evil, sporting that Prince of Darkness symbol on their
electrical systems, so I didn't follow them. (Yes, "Lucas")

Actually -- things were pretty good for the MGA -- other than
the electric fuel pump, which was *not* Lucas, but rather "SU" -- same
people who made the carbs. :-)

It was hell keeping twin or triple SUs synced. I had a guy in a Jag
v-12 come into the shop in Fallbrook once, asking if I could give it a
tune-up. I told him that if he bought me an airflow-meter, I'd give
it a shot. I'm glad he didn't take me up on it. He ended up taking
it down to Sandy Eggo for everything but oil changes and special
ordered wiper blades.


The T series cars were all rather boxy, with the MG-TF the least
so (the headlights were faired in the the fenders (wings) in the TF,
while they were in bullets above the fenders in the earlier ones.

The MGA was the first of the swoopy body designs for the sports
cars, and I always thought looked nicer than the MGB line.

(googling to refresh memory) My dad ran an Austin Healey 100/4 in
gymkhanas and autocrosses in me yout. I grew up/teethed on tuning his
spoked wheels. They were quite similar to the MGA, wot?

The Healy (at least the one which I knew) was a six-cylinder one
otherwise similar to the MGA. More HP, but also a much heavier engine,
and the weight of the engine was a big part of the overall weight of the
car. On the MGA, the floorboards were plywood.

Dad's Healey was the 100/4, a little 4-cylinder. Then there were the
100/6 and 3000 models, both sixes.


I think I prefer the look of the MGB, and the performance of a Sunbeam
Tiger, a Shelby Cobra, or the lines and performance of a McLaren P1
GTR, TYVM. vbg

I started with a 1500 CC MGA (my father's car left when he moved
with a job up to New York City, where car ownership was prohibitive
anyway). From that (after an accident) to a Hudson Hornet, and from
that to a MGA 1600 Mk II (1622 CC). Later in its life, I swapped in an
1800 CC engine from a MGB, and I think that was peppier than the Austin
Healy.

A true British Leyland buff, eh? Condo^H^Hgratulations.


It was certainly fun to drive, anyway. :-)

My sister had a 1973 BLMC MGB GT. (say that 3 times real fast)

O.K. IIRC, the GT models were ones with a hardtop, but I may be
wrong.

Yes, as was my first car, a '57 Chebby BelAir 4-dr Hardtop.

O.K. I really liked the convertible nature of the MGA, though
there was a model which was hardtop -- I never had that. I also once
saw at an autocross a MGA Twin Cam (original 1500 CC engine, but with a
different head -- dual overhead cams, and higher compression. That was
impressive -- except that it was hard to keep con rods in it. :-(

Yeah, the 3-second 1-hand top drop was outstanding tech! Chicks dug
it. I had an old '72 2WD International Scout with a roll bar in the
back. I could pop the top and drive it as a convertible in SoCal.
After looking into the price of bikini tops, I designed my own out of
waterproofed denim (powder blue body paint on the truck) and Mom sewed
it up for me. Chicks dug that, too. The second time I took some
girls "flying", I heard a really loud metallic rattle in the left
front suspension. Scared the crap out of me, but it was only the tab
for the shock mount. It took an hour to R&R from the leaf spring and
one of the body shop guys welded it up for me. (I couldn't weld worth
a hoot back then, except with oxy, and the shop tips were all
sheetmetal sized.) I was back flying the next week. g My old
Corvair convertibles were fun to fly, too. I'd follow my friends'
Combat Wombats (2-stroke 100cc Hodaka bikes) over the little motocross
course in it. Ahhh, the good old days.

--
I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you
have earned, but it is not greed to want take someone else's money.
--Thomas Sowell