On 26/03/2020 11:41, Jim GM4DHJ ... wrote:
On 26/03/2020 11:32, Gareth Evans wrote:
On 26/03/2020 11:21, newshound wrote:
On 26/03/2020 06:46, harry wrote:
On Wednesday, 25 March 2020 17:16:07 UTC, Brian Gaff (Sofa)Â* wrote:
Of course if a lot of staff are off maybe that is why coal is off,
after all
working in a coal fired station means you are probably inhaling
dust and
hence your lungs are not too good.
Â* Brian



Why should that be? Do you imagine little men shovelling coal into a
furnace?


Never been to a pulverised fuel powered power station, I suppose.

I worked at the Scientific Services Department of the CEGB
which was co-sited with the Portishead A and B power stations.

No coal dust floating around at all, and the B station had
a marvellous canteen, except that you had to warn them in
the morning that you were coming for lunch.

Nearly 50 years ago now, but it seems like only yesterday
that I first had an undergraduate internship there back in 1971
during which I experienced that most exciting of playthings,
a PDP11/20 computer with its Blinkenlights interface.

Ever since then, with the whole of the machine available
to me at a very low level (Single step or even single cycle
of instructions ! ! ! ? ? ? ) I've had a DIY attitude to
software, with very much a Not-Invented-Here (NIH) approach
to software provided by others.

very impressive Gareth.....

Kind of you to say so, Jim, but it has a downside, and that is
that I've a number of Raspberry Pis awaiting installation but
have stalled for lack of detail on the GPU processor which looks to be
more exciting than the ARM bit.

There's no doubt that the real power, and the concomitant
excitement thereto, in the Raspberry Pi lies
not in the ARM but in the GPU, and I wait forlornly for
the necessary data to be able to program it in
assembler or machine code.

Actually, one place I worked as a contract softy had
produced its product in hex machine code! This goes back to
the days in the 1980s when schoolchildren were considered
by some to be the real geniuses of computing and in this
particular company (no names, no pack drill!) the MD
had given the company's new product to be programmed
by his teenage son, but unfortunately that son's
experience of low level programming had been via PEEK
and POKE in BASIC so the product ended up as a block
of machine code to be laboriously entered by hand
into the PROM programmer!

WHen I went there, it was to program a PID controller,
ideally suited to the floating point in the C language,
and I recommended to them that they should purchase the C
compiler for the micro they were using, but unfortunately
they had only just discovered assembler which they
considered to be self documenting (which it might
seem to be if your only experience is with hex machine
code) and they insisted that the project be done in
assembler.