On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 20:00:28 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:

I just write Britain.

But that leaves out those knuckle-dragging Prods in the Six Counties.

That may never be, as you have a penchant for sucking off knuckle-drugging
idiots from the UK, lowbrowman! Right, senile cocksucker? BG

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:38:53 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:


Never trust anyone with a name that ends in a vowel...

Yep, you've obviously been infected with Birdbrain's virus after sucking him
off too often, lowbrowman!

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:49:40 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:

On 02/07/2018 11:29 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
I never learned touch typing, I just got used to it as i went. I can
type on a keyboard with no markings left on the keys. This confuses
others. Do you look at your gearstick (if you drive a stick shift) when
you change gear?

--

No. Nor do I look at my fingers when I'm playing a guitar or flute.

That's because you've blown his flute so often, you demented senile fluter!

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:51:58 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:


We should have let the Nazis win. Just imagine a world without Jews.

The EU would be a hell of a lot more functional. Germany runs it anyway
but they can't invade Greece and kick ass when the peasants start to
grumble anymore.

Aren't there newsgroups for driveling senile idiots like you, lowbrowman?
You definitely need to look for one, you disgusting old moron!

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:47:48 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:


No, our country is very progressive; that's the frigging problem.

Your country obviously doesn't know how to look after it's senile
pensioners, lowbrowman. Tell us about your loneliness and why you need to
suck troll's cock on Usenet for kicks! BG

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 20:06:40 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:

electric fences above it and one caught my arm, making me jump and spin
round, going the rest of the way down head first on my back with no
control whatsoever. I landed in a muddy pool at the bottom, then
clambered out and climbed up a slope with a rope, not realising I was
exposing myself to the spectators. There was much screaming.

More likely hysterical laughter...

The gay Scottish sow exposes himself ...and lowbrowman, the cocksucking
toothless geezer from the States, quickly runs along again! LOL

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:28:13 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:


We gave the US lots of our secrets, like advanced Radar to encourage you
to help us in WW2.

That's nice and all but it was German rocket engineers that put the US
into space. All the Brits knew about rockets was how to duck.

But compare that to yourself: all know is how to suck!

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:33:41 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_t..._Great_Britain
The railway system in Great Britain is the oldest in the world.
Wagonways were built in Britain in the 1560s and soon spread across the
country. The first locomotive-hauled public railway opened in 1825.

And you're still using the originals tracks and rolling stock.


Also, Britain was the world's first underground railway. Opened in 1863.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

They seem to look after their old folk, as those obviously don't need to
pester Usenet groups with their endless senile drivel like you forsaken
senile Yanks keep doing here!

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 4:02:41 PM UTC-5, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 11:39:00 -0000, Cindy Hamilton wrote:

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 4:48:43 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Tue, 6 Feb 2018 12:15:36 -0600, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 02/06/2018 09:11 AM, rbowman wrote:

[snip]

I often use base 16.

Cindy Hamilton


0723

0x1D3 (although I actually prefer $1D3), or even (at least some times)
%000111010011.

?

I am a hex guy. We would say x'01D3' for that binary string.
Cindy's notation looks like octal to me.
Binary is always going to be binary tho.
BCD anyone? ;-)
That is 6 bit code plus a parity bit hence 7 track tape drives.

The attributions got loused up. I favor 0x for hex. For example,
0x00001010 for a bitmask.

I've never heard "loused up" before. Where does that come from?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/louse%20up

Cindy Hamilton

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:46:55 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:


Bull****, their weights and measures are very easy to use.


The had to be; they're French after all.

Of course, oh senile one! BG

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 19:29:11 -0700, lowbrowman, yet another endlessly
driveling senile idiot, blabbered again:


That was then..WTF does Britain produce now that the world wants???

Marmite.

....and gay Scottish ******s that you Yanks obviously like to suck off so
much, eh, senile cocksucker?

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 9:49:25 PM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 02/07/2018 11:29 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
I never learned touch typing, I just got used to it as i went. I can
type on a keyboard with no markings left on the keys. This confuses
others. Do you look at your gearstick (if you drive a stick shift) when
you change gear?

--

No. Nor do I look at my fingers when I'm playing a guitar or flute.
Typing, however, was meant to be done by secretaries.

Should I dictate my code and have a secretary type it up?

for open paren eye equals 0 to one thousand twenty three close paren curly brace

Cindy Hamilton

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:12:15 -0000, Birdbrain Macaw (now "James Wilkinson"),
the pathological attention whore of all the uk ngs, blathered again:

I'm a terrible typist. My left and right hand don't operate at exactly
the same speed, so letters overtake each other. Back in the days of
typewriters, I often wore holes in the paper trying to blot things out.

Wow! That's so interesting and original again, you demented piece of
sociopathic ****! BG

Tell us, what was your psychiatrists' official diagnosis of your mental
condition, Birdbrain? It could ONLY have been "sociopathy"!

--
More of Birdbrain Macaw's (now "James Wilkinson" LOL) endless sociopathic
bull****:
"We don't have shrinks here because we don't need them, we're not ****ed in
the head like Americans."
MID:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:14:35 -0000, Birdbrain Macaw (now "James Wilkinson"),
the pathological attention whore of all the uk ngs, blathered again:


I get classed as a troll all the time. The only difference between me
and everyone else is I have unpolitically correct views and damn well
stick to them.

Nope, Birdbrain! You are simply a prototypal SOCIOPATH! Just show us your
psychiatrists' official diagnosis, you disgusting, mentally deranged piece
of Scottish ****!

--
Gay ****** Birdbrain lying about his sky-diving capabilities:
"All you do is turn up at the local airfield and give them £200. Sounded
like a big roller coaster ride to me. And it was, great fun! My instructor
said I was the only person she'd ever seen who didn't look scared when I
jumped out of the plane. FFS they give you TWO parachutes, what could go
wrong?"
MID:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:14:58 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:52:16 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 20:55:49 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

Try a summer vacation in Houston... Bring your Gold Bond Medicated
Powder so your balls don't rot.

I've been on holiday in anything from 15% to 95%.


What was the temperature? 20? 25?

As high as 39. C, not F.

39 and 95% humidity? Where was that?

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:16:13 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:02:08 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 20:58:58 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 05:10:11 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:30:23 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:36:19 -0000, notX wrote:

On 02/05/2018 06:45 PM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:

[snip]

But it's stupidly designed. C is sensible: 0 is the freezing point of
water, 100 is boiling point, easy to understand. Why don't you also use
some weird base for maths, sorry math, instead of 10?

Note that in both systems, the 0-degree point is artificial. That is, it
is NOT the same as the temperature that corresponds to no heat. That
system is Kelvin. They use it with light bulbs

It's not artificial, it's calibrated to the most important substance to mankind, water. Why do you think a kilogram of water is a litre etc?

That is the most elegant thing in the metric system. The world does
still stick with the watt or joule and the relationship with calories
is pretty sloppy tho. I still see a lot of horsepower being used too.

Aren't Watts pretty damn metric? I can't remember how you define one.

Not really. A KWH is 860 420.65 calories. That a number that just
rolls off your tongue. It is 3600 kilo joules that is a little easier
to deal with nut nothing like 1

Why think in calories? Are these more basic than watts? I thought calories was just a conversion for food.

So you don't understand the metric system either. ;-)
A calorie (before it was hijacked by the food people as roughly a kilo
calorie) is the amount of heat necessary to raise a cc of water one
degree C. There is no easy relationship with that to joules or watts.

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:17:19 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:04:51 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 21:02:34 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

I've never heard "loused up" before. Where does that come from?

WWI, It refers to being full of lice (Plural, louse), common in the
trenches. That is also where "cooties" came from.
Now it is just anything that seems screwed up.

I see. Odd, as the Brits had trenches too, and I've never heard that here. Only "****ed up", "screwed up", "messed up", "arsed up".

In New Zealand they just say buggered but that has become an all
purpose word, I even have an Australian "bugger" license plate (colors
inverted from the New Zealand plate). The guy who had that plate in
New Zealand still has the plate but they won't let him use it on his
car anymore. It is at his coffee shop The Bugger Cafe.

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:19:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 03:00:28 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/07/2018 01:56 PM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 04:42:08 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/06/2018 06:45 PM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Mon, 05 Feb 2018 15:01:19 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/04/2018 11:03 PM, Bod wrote:

Understood, but C has become the universal standard.

You seem to feel the world revolves around the POTUS. Until the US
adopts Celsius it isn't universal. Don't hold your breath.

Stop using silly acronyms.


Okay, going forward I'll always spell out United Kookery.

I just write Britain.

But that leaves out those knuckle-dragging Prods in the Six Counties.

I consider Britain as England, Wales, Scotland. Ireland can **** off.

All of Ireland or just the north?

On 02/08/2018 09:10 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:

[snip]

But C uses the correct gap between each degree.

Yes, because it's more related to other measurements.

And zero C isn't artificial, water is quite natural.

In the same way volcanoes, Antarctica, cats, and dry ice are quite natural.

What do you think temperature is a measure of?

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:23:33 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:10:18 -0000, wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)

Wouldn't those be more correctly called industrial calculators?

Not really. These were transistor stored program machines with tape,
disk and card media and up to an 1100 (132 character) line a minute
printer. The base 1401 boasted a whopping 4k of Core Storage topping
out at 16k although the 70xx machines were bigger.
Basic clock cycle was 11.5 microseconds. (87khz or so)

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:24:50 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:17:54 -0000, wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:16:13 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:02:08 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 20:58:58 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 05:10:11 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:30:23 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:36:19 -0000, notX wrote:

On 02/05/2018 06:45 PM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:

[snip]

But it's stupidly designed. C is sensible: 0 is the freezing point of
water, 100 is boiling point, easy to understand. Why don't you also use
some weird base for maths, sorry math, instead of 10?

Note that in both systems, the 0-degree point is artificial. That is, it
is NOT the same as the temperature that corresponds to no heat. That
system is Kelvin. They use it with light bulbs

It's not artificial, it's calibrated to the most important substance to mankind, water. Why do you think a kilogram of water is a litre etc?

That is the most elegant thing in the metric system. The world does
still stick with the watt or joule and the relationship with calories
is pretty sloppy tho. I still see a lot of horsepower being used too.

Aren't Watts pretty damn metric? I can't remember how you define one.

Not really. A KWH is 860 420.65 calories. That a number that just
rolls off your tongue. It is 3600 kilo joules that is a little easier
to deal with nut nothing like 1

Why think in calories? Are these more basic than watts? I thought calories was just a conversion for food.

So you don't understand the metric system either. ;-)
A calorie (before it was hijacked by the food people as roughly a kilo
calorie) is the amount of heat necessary to raise a cc of water one
degree C. There is no easy relationship with that to joules or watts.

I see. So the ampere and the volt which is what the watt is linked to are not metric?

Nope, nothing metric about basic electrical calculations.

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:27:42 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:21:27 -0000, wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:17:19 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:04:51 -0000, wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 21:02:34 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:

I've never heard "loused up" before. Where does that come from?

WWI, It refers to being full of lice (Plural, louse), common in the
trenches. That is also where "cooties" came from.
Now it is just anything that seems screwed up.

I see. Odd, as the Brits had trenches too, and I've never heard that here. Only "****ed up", "screwed up", "messed up", "arsed up".

In New Zealand they just say buggered but that has become an all
purpose word, I even have an Australian "bugger" license plate (colors
inverted from the New Zealand plate). The guy who had that plate in
New Zealand still has the plate but they won't let him use it on his
car anymore. It is at his coffee shop The Bugger Cafe.

https://youtu.be/cbBx4Ql6Umo?t=13s

Yup that's about it. You really should check out New Zealand if you
want to see a cool place. The weather will be familiar and the people
are really laid back. They even drive on the correct side of the road
for you. It was an adventure for me but being dyslexic anyway, the
transition was faster than you would think. I made my wife nuts when I
said "OK we turn left here" and we went right but from the driving
mechanics it is the same. (traffic approach, lanes you cross etc) I
just let my whole brain flip over.
She did like me being a gentleman every time we got in the truck. I
always opened her door first. ;-)
Nope no steering wheel, here you go baby, hop in.

On 02/07/2018 11:34 PM, Bod wrote:
On 08/02/2018 02:28, rbowman wrote:
On 02/07/2018 08:48 AM, Bod wrote:

We gave the US lots of our secrets, like advanced Radar to encourage you
to help us in WW2.

That's nice and all but it was German rocket engineers that put the US
into space. All the Brits knew about rockets was how to duck.

Not true.

We invented a hell of a lot:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scie...full-list.html



A few but not the important stuff. Von Liebig invented Oxo and laid the
foundation for marmite...

On 02/08/2018 04:43 AM, Cindy Hamilton wrote:
On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 9:49:25 PM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 02/07/2018 11:29 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
I never learned touch typing, I just got used to it as i went. I can
type on a keyboard with no markings left on the keys. This confuses
others. Do you look at your gearstick (if you drive a stick shift) when
you change gear?

--

No. Nor do I look at my fingers when I'm playing a guitar or flute.
Typing, however, was meant to be done by secretaries.

Should I dictate my code and have a secretary type it up?

for open paren eye equals 0 to one thousand twenty three close paren curly brace


https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html

A friend is quadriplegic and type with two pencils held in special
splints. He said he thought about using Dragon but figured it wouldn't
be too long before he and his wheelchair were out in the parking lot up
on blocks.

I was born in the wrong generation. My brother, the rocket scientist in
the family, was quite a bit older than I. He retired as a VP at Morton
Thiokol and I don't think he had any working familiarity with keyboards.

He did have one secretarial revolt when he went to work at the Utah
facility. She was a good Mormon and making coffee was out of the question.

On 02/08/2018 08:40 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 11:43:33 -0000, Cindy Hamilton
wrote:

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 9:49:25 PM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 02/07/2018 11:29 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
I never learned touch typing, I just got used to it as i went. I can
type on a keyboard with no markings left on the keys. This confuses
others. Do you look at your gearstick (if you drive a stick shift)
when
you change gear?

--

No. Nor do I look at my fingers when I'm playing a guitar or flute.
Typing, however, was meant to be done by secretaries.

Should I dictate my code and have a secretary type it up?

for open paren eye equals 0 to one thousand twenty three close paren
curly brace

I wonder which is faster, speaking it or typing it. Depends how good
your fingers are with the odd chords needed to get the brackets.


For programming it really doesn't matter. Unless you're pounding out
Java boilerplate the time spent typing is a small percentage. Or I
guess, Cobol. I never used it myself but I understand getting anything
done requires an equivalent of writing 'War and Peace'.

On 02/08/2018 06:36 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 15:12:31 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/06/2018 11:15 PM, wrote:
Some school systems are avoiding this with "home school". They are
still in the system but they get laptops and they go to school from
home, pretty much going at their own speed. This is a Skype sort of
thing with a live teacher but there is a whole lot of flexibility in
the curriculum and very small classes. One of my grand daughters is
working at around one grade level higher than her age. The other is
more like 2 grades ahead.

That's a mixed blessing. I started first grade at four which meant I was
two years younger throughout my educational process. It's a bitch
lusting after those 17 year old babes when you can't even drive. Senior
prom with a chauffeur just doesn't cut it.

How come you started 2 years younger?


It all started when my mother wanted to send me to kindergarten at 4.
The official age was 5, which I would not attain until halfway through
the year. Getting a waiver required a trip to the shrinks for an
evaluation to see if I could handle kindergarten. Their opinion was the
hell with kindergarten put the kid in first grade, so I was the four
year old in a field of six year olds.

That's why I'm not adequately socialized; I missed all those important
kindergarten lessons.

It's a different situation to those who skip a grade later on. Luckily I
was a big kid so I didn't have to also deal with being the runt of the
class.

On 02/08/2018 06:37 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:

I've heard talk of Britain calling it "winter holiday" to avoid
upsetting the ****wits ^W other religions.

That's par for the course in the US. While I'm not a Christian I'm a
cultural Catholic so I'm not big on the 'Happy holidays' crap.

On 02/08/2018 08:11 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 16:46:17 -0000, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 02/06/2018 11:14 PM, wrote:

[snip]

I can still speak Hollerith (punch card) and Baudot (paper tape). ;-)
If I think about it I can still do some morse but I sam digging deep.

Recently I wrote a program (for Arduino) that translated into Morse. It
was fun to get the translation table into 96 bytes.

And all that fun is now taken away with GB of storage everywhere.

Not so much with microcontrollers...

On 02/08/2018 08:12 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
I'm a terrible typist. My left and right hand don't operate at exactly
the same speed, so letters overtake each other. Back in the days of
typewriters, I often wore holes in the paper trying to blot things out.

teh classic pwned user...

On 02/08/2018 10:10 AM, wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)


That's about right. My first programming was in FORTRAN IV on a
System/360 Model 30 in 1965, iirc. I thought it really sucked. I did
hardware control systems until the '70s when you could stake out a
microprocessor on the kitchen table and play with it. Logic is logic,
relays, TTL, whatever.

On 02/08/2018 10:23 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:10:18 -0000, wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the
teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX
Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)

Wouldn't those be more correctly called industrial calculators?

Not really.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/srw.htm

There's a calculator... it could do square roots with nothing but
gears, cams, springs, and electric motors. It would also happily try to
divide by zero until you unplugged it.

On 02/08/2018 07:34 PM, wrote:
Yup that's about it. You really should check out New Zealand if you
want to see a cool place.

I'd like to see NZ and Australia but I'd have to be heavily sedated to
spend that much time in a flying sardine can. Without my support hamster
even.

On 02/08/2018 08:19 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 02:55:41 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/07/2018 01:55 PM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 04:38:43 -0000, rbowman wrote:

On 02/06/2018 06:44 PM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:

Humidity really doesn't bother me at all. What is it with your wimps?

Try a summer vacation in Houston... Bring your Gold Bond Medicated
Powder so your balls don't rot.

I've been on holiday in anything from 15% to 95%.

But not in Houston. Dallas sucks but it's a dry heat.

So it's the people that get you down, not the humidity?


As far as people, neither Houston or Dallas rank high in my estimation.
The only part of Texas I like is so close to New Mexico that you might
as well just cross the border and get it over with.

On 02/08/2018 08:19 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
I consider Britain as England, Wales, Scotland. Ireland can **** off.

They would agree...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPiX9hCShW8

On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 20:23:18 -0700, rbowman wrote:

And all that fun is now taken away with GB of storage everywhere.

Not so much with microcontrollers...

Yup, If I ever decide to dive back into the hardware/software arena,
it will be with small pics. I am trying to decide which way to go tho,
Raspberry, Arduino or whatever. Right now I still use CMOS and SSRs to
do things around the house but I am getting more interested in data
acquisition.

On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 20:33:02 -0700, rbowman wrote:

On 02/08/2018 10:10 AM, wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)


That's about right. My first programming was in FORTRAN IV on a
System/360 Model 30 in 1965, iirc. I thought it really sucked. I did
hardware control systems until the '70s when you could stake out a
microprocessor on the kitchen table and play with it. Logic is logic,
relays, TTL, whatever.

When I was dabbling in code, I was writing PIOCS assembler because I
was writing a diagnostic program to test hardware on DOS systems
without having to install anything. It ran as a batch program.
5 or 6 years later, guys were still running it. It was written for DOS
19 or so but it still ran on VSE.
My next big foray was writing in dBase. I came up with a barcode
inventory system we used for a $12 million parts inventory with 15
guys dipping into the pot and no dedicated "counter" man.
When you are dealing with CEs the trick is to make it easier than
using a pencil that they usually didn't use anyway.
It actually worked out well and we seldom actually lost anything.
Before that with 15 guys keeping 15 paper logs we lost stuff all the
time and they wasted hours each month trying to balance their book
with the one in Boulder.

On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 20:37:00 -0700, rbowman wrote:

On 02/08/2018 10:23 AM, James Wilkinson Sword wrote:
On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 17:10:18 -0000, wrote:

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 15:13:46 -0000, "James Wilkinson Sword"
wrote:


It used to be old folk didn't know what a computer was, and the
teenagers were the ones on the bulletin boards. (First computer - ZX
Spectrum)

Speak for yourself. I was in the computer business 53 years ago.
They did run on kerosene tho ;-)

Wouldn't those be more correctly called industrial calculators?

Not really.

http://www.hpmuseum.org/srw.htm

There's a calculator... it could do square roots with nothing but
gears, cams, springs, and electric motors. It would also happily try to
divide by zero until you unplugged it.

The Mk13 time of flight computer in the Mk26 fire control system was a
spring wound cam and gear machine. You had a key that you wound it up
with like an old alarm clock.

On Thu, 8 Feb 2018 20:40:47 -0700, rbowman wrote:

On 02/08/2018 07:34 PM, wrote:
Yup that's about it. You really should check out New Zealand if you
want to see a cool place.

I'd like to see NZ and Australia but I'd have to be heavily sedated to
spend that much time in a flying sardine can. Without my support hamster
even.

It is best to break the trip up into segments and lay over. We went
there pretty much straight through, coming back we laid over at LAX
long enough for a shower and a nap. It made it a whole lot better. You
are still on the overseas flight 12 hours. Buy a better seat than
coach. We went premium economy with a little cubby for yourself, not
just a seat. It lays down enough that you can really sleep and you can
stretch your legs all the way out. (Air New Zealand)
You are already close to LAX so that layover probably doesn't make
sense but with the LAX/ATL/RSW thing it was worth a hotel room.
You can also lay over in Hawaii or Tahiti and break up the overseas
flight. I just did not want to give them another chance to lose my
luggage or another flight I might miss.

On 09/02/2018 02:51, rbowman wrote:
On 02/07/2018 11:34 PM, Bod wrote:
On 08/02/2018 02:28, rbowman wrote:
On 02/07/2018 08:48 AM, Bod wrote:

We gave the US lots of our secrets, like advanced Radar to encourage
you
to help us in WW2.

That's nice and all but it was German rocket engineers that put the US
into space. All the Brits knew about rockets was how to duck.

Not true.

We invented a hell of a lot:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scie...full-list.html




A few but not the important stuff. Von Liebig invented Oxo and laid the
foundation for marmite...

I'd say the brain and CT scanners/steam engine/electric
motor/cement/photography/hyperdermic syringe/telephone/lightbulb/vacuum
cleaner/television/hovercraft/carbon fibre/world wide web were pretty
important.
--
Bod