Re: Computers in the 1950s
At Bletchley Park they realised that they were reliable left permanently switched on.
269 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jan 2011
Not fair to class George III as 'all-powerful', he was a constitutional monarch by the standards of the time. BTW his personal views are on record as being in favour of Abolition. The American Revolution was inevitable as a large developed polity wanting to govern itself, not geographically remotely.
About 50 years ago I bought what would then have been a ~20 year old table-top radiogram at a 'car boot(trunk)' sale. I laid in a set of spare valves (vacuum tubes) whilst still available.
It still works with the originals. Also with the original electrolytic capacitors, a pleasant surprise.
(Devuan with Trinity desktop; Windows 7 for Skype, here).
Johnson's resignation 'series of scandals' was stitch-up allegations over trivial matters in the context of Covid and of dubious provenance. It's all coming out now despite being deliberately ignored by the current ridiculous Enquiry. "The Science" is in itself a non-scientific concept, and the 'scientific' advice is now seen to be chaotic and inaccurate in its own terms.
My hardware vintage is well over 10 years old. I have W7 'on the metal' in a partition, and XP in a VM just to drive an ancient scanner. Usage is very rare. Multi-system boot management is done from one of the Linux partitions. When I use W7 MS has kindly deactivated it for me, but I press on ignoring the remonstrations. But last time it also screwed-up the initial boot system on shut-down. As It happened I had configured boot for rapid recovery.
I like David Hare's "Exe GNU/Linux", a packaging of Devuan and the Trinity (fork of KDE 3.5) Desktop. I have used this for many years, and never had a problem with installation from the live ISO-image or DVD. My (venerable) target machines being a workstation with Intel processor motherboard at least a dozen years or so old, and an HP Elitebook 8470p laptop. Also VirtualBox VMachines.
I also have an i7 laptop 10 years old (and a similarly aged workstation). I use the TrinityDesktopEnvironment fork of KDE3.5 (on Devuan as it happens), and its' file manipulation is 'a breeze'.
They still have a Windows 7 partition 'on the metal', which OF COURSE Microsoft have kindly de-activated for me.
Although IANaRocketSpecialist, what strikes me is the 'long and thin' configuration. The Polar Moment of Inertia would be much greater than with 'short and squat' for the booster This would, I suggest:
- Impose greater bending stresses at the Booster/Payload interface
- Imply greater demands on the corrective/manoeuvring trimming before and during separation.
(?)
"... will you upgrade or buy a new PC? "
ROFL . Perhaps if they changed W10/11 to not reject host hardware on which Live-adapted Windows 10 on an external USB SSD will run.
(I only tried that to experiment with the hardware issue; it cannot access the host hard drive - one of the reasons it was created I guess.
No,for me it's remains W7 on a Linux VM on the rare occasions that I need it.
Perhaps slightly beside the topic, but I have suspicions (although correlation is not necessarily causation)...
I have used Skypeforlinux on Devuan (with Trinity desktop) for some years to talk with family on the other side of the world.
In the last few weeks Skype started crashing.It's as if it is missing something. Both on laptop and workstation.
I made another partition on the laptop and installed a Debian systemd distro (Q4OS with Trinity Desktop.
Guess what? Skype works on that.
I'm a happy user of Trinity (fork of KDE 3.5 in case any reader of this hasn't seen it before) on workstation and laptop. On Devuan BTW.
A fine suite of convenient tools, and no intrusive irritating eye-candy. Windows 7+Classic Shell 'on the metal' for the 0.1% of the time I might need it (retired,so no commercial requirements pressure) ; W7 and XP in virtual machines.
For my (amateur) film photo editing, Photoshop Elements 2 (came bundled with a scanner years ago) running on Wine does all that I need and is easier to use than Gimp. Also easier than later Photoshops that added a lot of stuff that I don't need.
I have a mid-1950s Radiogram, bought second-hand in the mid-1970s. I have a spare set of valves (vacuum tubes), never had to fit one yet. NOR any electrolytic condensor (capacitor). It thunders out the music input from our Virgin box every day.
Thomas Flowers (Colossus) was right.