RSPB and renewable energy

[Flyfisher]

At school? Good grief, you people are young.

Beat me to it . . . . no computers during my school days either. Even 'the' computer at Uni was kept in a separate air-conditioned room and we were only allowed to feed it with our punched-card programs via its guardian operators. Then along came the Commodore PET, which I could only aspire to afford but did get to play with, but I did eventually buy an Apple II (or ][ as it used to be written) as my first computer, with a massive 16K RAM, but expandable to 48K if you could afford it. It also used cassette tapes for program storage, although these frequently seems to behave as 'write-only' devices. My first Apple 5.25-inch floppy disk drive was a revelation - 134KB storage I seem to recall.

Now I suppose someone will post about their experience with thermionic valves. Happy days.

 

[Flyfisher]

Not much good for us then - as we're mostly water !!

Eskimos seem to manage well enough at well below freezing point. Mars pioneers will just need an extra layer of sealskin on the space-suit.

 

[shelli]

what about breathing ? - Haven't you seen the movie Total Recall?!! :shock:

 

[biffvernon]

Oh there's seals on Mars? That'll be all right then.

 

[Penners]

Without my sage influence, I think this thread could have got quite silly.

 

[wobs]

I was a Texas Instruments TI-99-4A type of chap.

TI Basic, with all the fun that you could type in.

Also had cartridges with games, that you just slotted in. Hours spent playing Parsec resulted in me getting my photo in Computer & Video Games mag.

At least I didn't have a mis-spent youth.

 

[MdB]

Is there anybody here who isn't a sad computer nerd?

 

[plumbers mate]

Is everyone here a nerd?
Looks a lot like it.
At work we had a room full of either junk or historical computing equipment depending on your point of view.
One piece of historical equipment (shows which side of the fence I was on!) was a computer which had a hard disk! Yeah, honestly, you could store stuff on it! Something like 60kbs! Wow!
Mind you, the heart searching and discussions that must on before they spent money on this fantastic machine were phenomenal (I am told - I was not working there at the time)
The cost? £15,000 that's fifteen thousand - back in the early 70's that was a lot of money for something with a small screen fixed to a keyboard with the gubbinses below the keyboard and a 5ins floppy disc drive. But an internal hard disk! Gosh, technology can't move on from that wonderfull machine, real cutting edge stuff ....
Oh.
I'm using a Acer Aspire One - a bit bigger than A5 with 4+ gig storage and almost a gig of memory.
How long before this is historic :-( :?

 

[Moo]

I've left the toilet seat up again.

Now that really is a shocking piece of news. I'm surprised and Most Disappointed to learn that you have such a horrid habit.

Please convey my deepest sympathy to Mrs P.

M

 

[Penners]

I'm sure she knows that The Sisterhood are at one in their sympathy....

:roll:

 

[Flyfisher]

I was a Texas Instruments TI-99-4A type of chap.

TI also made programmable calculators with magnetic cards for storing programs. I once wrote a lunar landing game on one of those calculators. It was a few years after the last actual moon landing so I didn't think NASA would be interested in it as they'd clearly cracked the problem.

Talking of calculators, anyone remember the first Sinclair calculators? A school friend had one of the first scientific models and it was so slow that we used to play "find the longest duration calculation" with it. I recall the record was about 45 seconds to calculate the tangent of a certain number.

Is everyone here a nerd?

 

[Penners]

anyone remember the first Sinclair calculators?

I'm not sure whether it was a Sinclair, but I can remember a colleague buying the first pocket calculator that I'd ever seen, in the early 70's. He was immensely proud of it - it would add, subtract, multiply and divide!

It cost him £75*.





*No, that isn't a misprint.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

anyone remember the first Sinclair calculators?

I'm not sure whether it was a Sinclair, but I can remember a colleague buying the first pocket calculator that I'd ever seen, in the early 70's. He was immensely proud of it - it would add, subtract, multiply and divide!

And you needed a pocket the size of a small portmanteau to put it in.

Totally with you Penners on BASIC. It was a great education in logic, as well as accurate typing. I remember typing in hours and hours of code for a maze game - somewhere I made a mistake and the maze had no solution.

Kids today don't know they've been born (yawn, etc). Indeed, because they've never got down and dirty with DOS, they've no idea how their PCs work or why they've gone wrong. They've also never had the exquisitely nervewracking anxiety of typing FDISK and hitting enter!

Anybody else construct their own anti-static faraday cage and handcuff themselves to a radiator in order to upgrade the RAM in their speccy from 16k to 48k? That was fun! Almost as much fun a shelling out 100 quid for a 10mb hard-card for my Amstrad PCW1512 - that seemed so large I wondered how I'd ever fill it!

 

[Pford75]

I was unlucky enough to have an early mobile phone (not my own, but the 'shift' phone for the engineer on call)...it had a separate battery pack with a shoulder strap!

 

[FamilyWiggs]

TI also made programmable calculators with magnetic cards for storing programs. I once wrote a lunar landing game on one of those calculators. It was a few years after the last actual moon landing so I didn't think NASA would be interested in it as they'd clearly cracked the problem.

And NASA did it with much less computing power than your calculator.

 

[Flyfisher]

Allegedly. Although the HP calc was used as backup for the Apollo-Soyez mission, apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-65.
It wasn't mine though, far to expensive. Belonged to the Medical Research Council.

My old boss was on the engineering team of the Gemini and Saturn guidance computers and had some interesting tales of that era.

(talk about off-topic rambles)

 

[MdB]

In one of the products I designed, there is a single chip computer with 4k of flash, 128bytes of ram and runs at 12MHz. (Apollo computer was 32k, 4k and 1MHz). The chip costs £0.50 each.

 

[skier-hughes]

I was unlucky enough to have an early mobile phone (not my own, but the 'shift' phone for the engineer on call)...it had a separate battery pack with a shoulder strap!

My friend who designed and converted Elan +2's to convertible models swapped one of those cars for one of those mobile phones :shock:

 

[Schoolmarm]

I was not a computer nerd :mrgreen:

My son was, but I have hated them with a PASSION until 2004, and only then did I start teaching myself how to use one.

 

[Edwardia]

I still have the first solar-powered calculator my Pa was given as a freebie, and I have an early IBM PC in the loft that used to be my uncle's. I bought a 1920s Remington typewriter for £15 from an antique shop in the 90s. I recycle my cellphones, my first was a Motorola but I'm a Nokia fan now, for the camera more than the phone ! Recently I bought a friend currently undergrad at LSE, a mechanical calculator from the 1940s.