Posts by DJV 2667 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
We had B21s, B25s and, I believe, one B28 and one B38 before PCs started encroaching on the CTOS empire. Also, the CTOS "command line" was a masterpiece in user friendliness compared to any other command line system I've ever come across either before or since.
There's a whole bunch of pictures/docs here for anyone interested: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/convergent/ngen/
Oh, and please write your On Call - I'd love to hear about it and I'm sure others would as well!
The place where I worked from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s was Burroughs/Unisys house. The PHB decided sometime around 1989-ish when 286s were already being superseded by 386s that we needed to get into this PC malarkey thing. So, being a typical clueless PHB, and not wanting to spend money on the latest and greatest, he happened to discover that there was an auction going on somewhere not too far away and that it had some PCs in the list. Despite us programmers telling him that he needed to get something that was at least a 286 he proudly came back a couple of days later carrying what I think may have been an IBM PC or XT and was rather put out when he told him it was too old for us to use, especially as he'd paid somewhat over the odds for the thing (I think we laughed when he told us what it had cost).
I suppose nowadays it would be cleaned up, retrobrighted and displayed in one of the many retro museums around for people to gawk at!
"The user interface looks dated and intricate, though those familiar with it perhaps like it the way it is."
Well, thank goodness for that. If they fuck around with the interface like Mozilla have been doing for years with Firefox then the likely outcome is that Thunderbird will lose users and donations will most likely plummet.
About 20 years ago I had a "close encounter" with a breakdown. It was lunchtime and several work colleagues (about 6 or 7, I think) piled into the elevator ahead of me to go down the 2 floors to the exit. I looked at the crush of bodies, ignored their "room for one more" and decided to take the stairs instead. After coming back from lunch I discovered that the lift had broken down and my work colleagues had spent around 45 minutes stuck in the elevator between floors until the call-out engineer had arrived to free them. They were far from chuffed, and I probably sniggered just a teensy bit!
Then again, Nestle are known to be one of the most unethical companies in the world. Their past track record is unenviable:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/nestle-company-pollution-children/
https://skierscribbler.com/7671/opinion/nestle-the-worlds-most-corrupt-corporation/
https://listverse.com/2018/01/03/10-outrageous-nestle-scandals/
There's also growing concern over Purina/Felix cat food (Purina are owned by Nestle) as the recipe has recently been changed and some people have found their cats becoming ill after eating the new recipe, with some even stating that it has killed their cats.
https://www.change.org/p/purina-recall-felix-as-good-as-it-looks
Apparently, it's been reported that the previous "meat" content of the food has now been replaced by something derived from crushed insects! I'm not sure exactly how true any of this is, but given Nestle's track record, nothing would surprise me about that company.
...have stuck to making records.
What? Wrong Dido? Oh well, I suppose this one has made some "records" of a different sort - such as wasting the most amount of other people's money in the shortest possible time. Then again, that applies to most of the idiots she knows, so maybe even that's not a record.
Oh hell, that reminds me of a holiday cover temp job I did back in 2005 for a local web company. On my first day there they wanted me to start putting together a new site. I asked, "Where's your library of common functions/utilities?"
The response was a blank look of confusion.
I was horrified to learn that their method of building web sites was to have a graphic designer sit down with the customer and ask "What do you want the site to look like?" After the customer described it, the graphic designer would produce graphical mock ups of several key screens (one image per screen). These, once the customer had approved them, would be sent out to India where the images would be chopped up into smaller graphics and then have some HTML wrapped around them to produce individual static HTML pages. These were sent back to the web company who would then custom build hack some ASP code into each one individually to connect it through to a database. Common functional code? Not a chance.
Despite them offering me a full-time job, I buggered off as quickly as I could! They went bust about 2 years later.
Oh yeah, I vaguely remember joining that at one point not long after it started up, as did a couple of my friends. I think I may have used it once or twice before deciding it was a pile of shit and then, of course, it got sent to the Google Graveyard to join lots of its mates.
Is it the (S)Hitron business one?
I "upgraded" my domestic account to business one as it was cheaper (no, I have no idea why either) and they swapped out my perfectly working (and boot in a couple of minutes) superhub for a pile of crap (S)Hitron one (with the 10 to 15 minutes reboot time). About 5 replacements down the line (and much swearing to VM Business) I finally had one whose admin interface didn't die after about an hour*. The faulty ones would still work ok for providing a connection to teh interwebs but the on-board web server would die so you couldn't change the settings.
* No, it died after a few months instead until a recent** automatic update revived it again.
** 40 Days,15 Hours,48 Minutes,44 Seconds ago - yay, it's still working!
Some years ago a friend of a friend asked my advice on the secondhand laptop he wanted to buy. I took one look, saw it was Pentium 4 and said, Don't touch it with a barge pole - it will overheat and burn itself out. So, of course, as he was an idiot, he ignored my advice and bought it. Within a year it had overheated and the CPU died. I took pleasure in saying, Told you so.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Mine did come around to the front again and stand with their front legs on the monitor tops and back feet still on the desk staring at the reduced "top"ology of the new arrangement, no doubt wondering where the nice wide/warm shelves had gone, and giving me the evil eye for some days afterwards.
My cats used to do that when I had dual CRTs on my PC. They'd leap up from the desk and spend hours curled up on top of them. They were very confused the day I swapped the CRTs out for flat screens - they leapt up and then fell down the back of the desk, the looks on their faces a joy to behold!
Back in my youth (mid 1970s when I was about 19) I was a trainee TV engineer for Rediffusion. I was once at a customers house with the back off the TV and the valve-packed chassis angled slightly downwards from its normal vertical position so I could fault find. The customer, an elderly gentleman, sat next to me watching interestedly at what I was doing. Then he did something I suppose he thought might have been useful. He said, "It was sparking a bit round about here," and put his fingers on the PCB in the high voltage area. It sparked once more, using his fingers to earth the current.
"Ow," I think he may have said (or possibly something stronger).
I looked at him, deadpan, saying something like, "I know where to poke my fingers safely. You don't. Don't do that again."
At least he learned his lesson first time around.
