Posts by ricardian 153 posts • joined 12 Jan 2016
I used the CBM PET as an introduction to 6502 assembler and bought Raeto West's invaluable book "Programming the Pet/CBM". I think I paid about £5 for it in the early 1980s - now Amazon are selling copies for over £60 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming-Pet-Cbm-Raeto-West/dp/0942386043). I must have a dig around the attic to see if I kept my copy.
The English Electric Lightning was a fine fighter aeroplane but it had one annoying habit. After landing on a wet runway the spray and mud built up in the nose-wheel bay and eventually prevented actuation of the microswitch which indicated that the wheel had retracted. The time-honoured method of fixing this problem was to take a six foot length of scaffold tubing and lump hammer, place the end of the scaffold tubing next to the microswitch and give the tubing a hefty wallop thus dislodging all the accumulated mud & rubbish. My friend was performing this remedial action one day when the station commander was paying an unannounced visit. When he asked my friend what he was doing with the lump hammer and scaffold tubing my friend replied "Adjusting a microswitch, sir!"
The station commander was not amused!
Latest updates from https://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/news/2020/smile-service-information.
8am, Saturday 11 July:
Following emergency maintenance on both our smile and Co-operative Bank systems, we have been able to restore access to smile online banking and the smile mobile app for our customers. We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this issue has caused as we know this is not the standard of service expected from us. Thank you for bearing with us.
We will work to support any of our customers who have experienced any detriment whilst smile online banking and the smile app were unavailable and we encourage any impacted customers to contact us to discuss their circumstances.
In the old BBC Radio series "Journey into Space" (https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/sci-fi/journey-into-space) a "Martian" is discovered to be just a computer. The sound effects for the "computer" seem to have been recorded in an old Strowger exchange - probably the best they could do in the 1950s.
The lightstraw site is a handy collection of information but it perpetuates one myth - "all employees sign the Official Secrets Act". No they don't. HM Queen Elizabeth II signed a Bill that became the Official Secrets Act, mere mortals like us sign a form like this https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/346762/FOI201404093_Official_Secrets_Act_Form.pdf.
My grandfather was a railway signalman before he retired in 1954. He once told me that a fellow signalman had rung him to tell him that a special train carrying a newly appointed railway bigwig (fresh out of university) had just gone by the large group of freight sidings a few miles away and the new boss had not spotted that there were unsorted wagons in the up reception yard – and this was a sure sign that the railways as he knew them were finished! I think he regarded senior managers who were not railwaymen as pariahs
A colleague and myself signed up for a course in "C" at a technical college in Gloucestershire. The notes for the course appeared to have been written in the pub the night before and the IBM PCs were on a flaky network which served the whole campus. We quickly discovered that quitting the editor in any way other than the approved method (which involved half a dozen key strokes) would crash the server
Back in the Dark Ages when I was in the RAF the maintenance manuals for vehicles contained phrases like "Every 3 months give this nipple 2 squirts of a grease gun". This was quickly changed to "Every 1,000 miles give this nipple 2 squirts of a grease gun" when a large number of vehicles developed blown seals because the vehicles were in storage and only travelled brief distances every month or were even stored up on jacks.
Commodore Pet and 6502 assembler programming required THE handbook by the imaginatively named Raeto West.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming-Pet-Cbm-Raeto-West/dp/0942386043.
Thanks to that I got two Pets talking to each other via IEEE488, each Pet thinking that it was the master thanks to a cobbled-together token system
About 15 years ago there was a small company called "Oecumuse" which produced out-of-copyright music. The owner started the company because he was a choir-master who got fed up of music companies claiming that work was "out of print". He bought a couple of state-of-the-art photocopiers and set to work producing and selling bound copies of music to order; he had an extensive catalogue of pipe organ & choral music. One of his innovations was "de-turdification" - the removal of tiny specks of fly crap which seem to accumulate on old copies of music.
Sadly, he was last seen circa 2004 leaving his office in Ely, Cambs and getting on a train.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8516487.stm
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/crime/wanted-man-with-links-to-downham-market-featured-on-crimewatch-1-1203271
Microsoft still blocking outlook/hotmail/msn emails from my IONOS hosted email accounts. IONOS provided this unhelpful response
"Thank you very much for reporting your issue on 27.02.2020. Your support query has been logged with the appropriate team, and we will contact you directly as soon as we have new information."
I moved to a new office in a very secure building in Cheltenham. The networking was brilliant, lots of clearly labelled sockets and plenty of mains outlets. There were also lots of telephone sockets but whoever installed them had most definitely NOT labelled them very clearly, if you were lucky there was a barely legible pencil scribble on the plastic socket.
Yes, the Commodore PET had IEEE-488 routines hard coded into its ROM. Very handy when using 6502 assembler - a bit confusing though with calling all the TALK, UNTALK, LISTEN, UNLISTEN routines etc. My triumph was to get two Commodore PETs "controlling" the same pieces of equipment over IEEE-488 by using a collision detection system in 6502 assembler. Happy days - and then we got the IBM PC running at a staggering 8 MHz and the Aztec C compiler. I was told that our lords & masters chose Aztec because it was being used by the CEGB in nuclear power stations - but that could be an apocryphal tale.
About 30 years ago I was working for a large Government department based in Cheltenham. I began to receive complaints about slow response times on 2 or 3 programmes but not from all users of the programmes. It took a while but I discovered that using drive letter "F" was the culprit. Apparently Microsoft had decided that drive letter "F" was the one to use for debugging any software and thus anything on drive "F" ran slowly because of all the various hooks that could be used to debug software on that drive. For how long this situation persisted I know not because I moved away on promotion and no longer had to endure Microsoft.
My cousin recently retired as a senior person in what was once the Inland Revenue (UK version). As a lowly executive officer in the North of England back in the 1960s he received a very large reward for suggesting that when the office received large (>£10,000,000) cheques from large companies such as ICI the cheques should immediately be given to an office junior who would take the train to London and pay the cheque into the Bank of England thus getting the overnight deposit rate which would pay far more than the daily wage of the junior and the train fare.
Not quite so disastrous as some of the things described on here but back in the 90s I was in an R&D environment and the test network had a PC with several hard disks. After a while it became apparent that drive F was very slow so the hard drive was replaced. This had no effect so further investigation began. Eventually someone discovered a Microsoft document which described how every drive F had lots of extra back doors, etc which could be used in development work, these extras caused the drive to run far slower than a "normal" drive. Presumably drive F is now just another drive letter
Back in the 1980s I took a day release course at the local tech college. It was supposed to teach "C" but the notes all appeared to have been cobbled together during a lunchtime pub session and the network in use was dire. We were forbidden to shut down the editor (think early version of EdLin) in any way other than the "official" way which involved half a dozen key strokes; any other shutdown would lock up the network. Fortunately I discovered another course at a nearby tech college where the instructors knew their stuff, produced decent handouts and the network was (relatively) stable.
I worked for a large Government department in a secure building. We logged in and logged out so security always knew who was in the building. In the event of a fire the security staff would print out a list of who was in the building and use it as a check that everyone was out. Alas, the security staff were low in the pecking order and were only supplied with an elderly PC and an even older dot matrix printer. Printing a list of several hundred staff would take longer than it would for the building to burn to the ground - as long as the PC didn't crash, the power didn't fail and the printer didn't run out of paper or ink ribbon
Orkney Islands Council and the BBC installed a temporary 5G aerial on our island's only school a couple of months ago. They also issued several 5G handsets and requested that the users report on how useful they were. Two families immediately removed their children (a total of 8 children) from the school because of "radiation". Today the BBC announced that the 5G transmitter will be turned off next week, here's the response from the head of one of the families (posted as it was received, complete with lower case initials, etc):
"Stronsay 5g trial update - all parents have just received an email from the head teacher saying mast will be turned off on monday and removed sometime in October.
I am obviously very pleased that our kids can finally go back to their school. But I think my main emotion that I am left with is sadness. There is something far wrong in orkney if the oic are prioritise using our schools for anything other than educating our children especially when it results in 25% of the kids being withdrawn from the school! I am hopeful that we will have further discussions with oic regarding the trial and the implementation of it.
I would like to say a huge thank you to all of the folk that have sent us advice and messages of support it has meant a great deal to us over this very frustrating time."
Similar problem in a new-build house near us in Scarborough. The upstairs bathroom toilet connection had not been made so everything from the toilet went into the gap between the exterior brick wall and interior breeze block - this went on for several months during which time the owners complained of the smell and the builders insisted that there was no problem with the toilet. Eventually the insurers paid for the owners to live in an hotel for several week while the builders sorted out the problem
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