* Posts by Workshy researcher

12 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2022

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Workshy researcher

Hand built by Roberts - good reference.

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Workshy researcher

Re: "best in the US"

I too, live in semi rural area of the UK. A few years ago our office was moved further away from me. We were encouraged to look at public transport solutions. In my case, getting to work for 8:30 would involve leaving at 6pm the previous day.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Workshy researcher

Phrase of the week

Thank you for the phrase "jazz cabbage". It's made my day!

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Workshy researcher

Unix Desktops at Essex University

I seem to remember that we had Unix desktops at Essex University in the early to mid 1980's. They were an in house build called "Senate". I remember climbing around dusty buildings installing the 10BASE5 (thick ethernet) cables to support them. They had 20Mb hard disks and almost all of it was taken up by the operating system!

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Workshy researcher

Re: Not a lift but…..

That reminds me of having to pick up a scintillation counter from the University of Surrey (or was it Sussex?) and bring it back to Essex University in a Mazda pickup truck in the mid 1980's.

It was very easy to load as the university had a loading bay with a ramp of the right height. A couple of chaps pushed it onto the bed of the pickup and then it was down to me.

It was very tall and extremely heavy due to the lead lining making the handling of the truck quite difficult. When I got back to Essex, no such loading bay existed at the destination, so a number of burly technicians were tasked with physically lifting it off the truck. Having done my bit, I beat a hasty retreat....

As a young tyro I was surprised that the truck was charged as a car when we crossed the Dartford tunnel unloaded, but as a commercial vehicle when we made the return journey.

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Workshy researcher

Re: 37 Billions

Have an upvote. I too failed CSE maths.

Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can

Workshy researcher

DOS Wordprocessors

Ah DOS Wordprocessors...

I taught adults WordStar and then WordPerfect for many years.

In Wordstar:

"What do you mean you can't start a line with a full stop?" (it is treated as a comment)

"Do youy want do do this Y/N?" "Do you really want to do this Y/N?" "Are you sure Y/N?"

In WordPerfect

"I told it I wanted the title in bold and it hasn't done it!" Scroll to the top of the document and reveal codes. You then see n (where n is a large integer) [Bold] codes.

Particularly problematical when you are invilating an RSA Word Processing exam!

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Workshy researcher

Sometimes people are smart

I remember working at Essex Uni in the early 1980's and got my first taste of Unix on their network of Senate computers (built in house I believe) . The network used thick ethernet which I had helped to install. The spec of the Senate computer was quite a high one and included a 20 Mb hard disk, which was impressive for the time. The Unix system took up most of it, so one day I started deleting all the stuff that I felt was not required. "Surely we don't need yet another compiler" etc. By the end I had gained quite a lot of disk space.

I logged off at the end of the day, and when I logged on the next day, everthing had been copied back over the network during the night. So someone somewhere had some forethought.

Apart from Unix, my first OS was CP/M.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Workshy researcher

Punchcard

A fixed 80 character line?

Workshy researcher

Fonts

I can almost understand the lure of the font though. When you've been using WordStar on a CPM machine with Courier as your font and a daisywheel printer, then suddenly finding that changing the font doesn't mean having to change the daisywheel, I can see the appeal.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Workshy researcher

Inappropriate

That reminds me of when I was teaching IT to school leavers in the mid 1980's. We were storing basic details in a (dBASE2) database and then searching for combinations of data. I was helping a particularly attractive 16 year old young lady. I knelt down next to her computer, so I could see her screen and heard myself asking "What are you looking for in the sex field?".

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Workshy researcher

Alignment

Not to mention the disk drives that were so misaligned that they could only read or write their own disks.

I used to use an old 8" floppy drive as a doorstop. They were certainly built to last.