Posts by Ol' Bob

Google's Pankhurst doodle doo-doo shows the perils of using Google to find stuff out

I, for one, do not believe that Mrs. Pankhurst was ever born. *I* personally have never met the lady, and thus she does not, de facto, exist, per se, exactly. Yes, yes, I know - she's also dead - or supposedly so - but this only holds true (???) if she was in fact at some point in time ever actually alive, which I must say seems less and less likely given that no one can manage to state with clarity the date upon which she was supposedly "born", so-called. Frankly, I think there's far too much about the past that we don't know to state that we, in fact, know anything. Who was your great grandmother's great grandmother? Which one? I don't know - any of them! No, not the one you know about - the other ones! There, see, just goes to show. If you don't know that, then it's likely you don't exist either. Now, vanish in a puff of logic, there's a good lad...

Your kids' chances of becoming programmers? ZERO

BASIC? Magazines?

Luxury!

When *I* started programming (back in the day when men were men, women were women, an' computers were great snorting beasts that filled entire rooms and consumed enough EVERY DAY to light up a good-sized city for a week!) we had to toggle our programs in using the pushbuttons on the front panel! Aye, an' memorize the opcodes (I still recall that "15" was STORE) so's we wouldn't have to waste time looking them up! We didn't have "solid state memory" or "core" back then. No! Our main memory was a great rotating drum, an' when y' powered up the machine you had to wait until the daft thing came up to speed before you could do anything! (No, I'm *not* making any of this up!) And o' course, we couldn't afford hexadecimal back in those days - we had to make do with octal - but we were happy then, though we were poor...