Posts by eraiser 9 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2019
I remember, as a trainee, going on site with a more senior engineer to do some maintenance on a venerable system which had filament indicator lamps. My colleague decided to use some long nose pliers to remove a failed lamp, rather than the recommended extractor. The glass popped and the pliers shorted the supply resulting in a rather unceremonious 'shutdown'.
I always used the extractor...
My ZX81 self-build kit was a present from my parents when I was 14.
It had been packed in such a way that the pins of a couple of the ICs had punched through the membrane keyboard, rendering it useless - it took weeks, and many irate phone calls by my mother, to get a replacement.
Eventually it did all work though, and I spent many a happy/frustrated hour tinkering - I built it into an old Linotype Paul case with a full size keyboard, inverted video output (white text on black background) and a ram expansion on a ribbon cable (so no wobble).
40 years later and I'm still a serial tinkerer and coder.
A few years ago a school friend got me an autograph from Sir Clive with an apology for the damaged keyboard!
While this is, for now, aimed at hub to hub transport, Ford were/are developing a bipedal robot that rides in the truck to make actual last-mile deliveries.
I can't see any of those being mugged as they shuffle along the street with armfuls of little Johny's Christmas presents... no, definitely not.
All this blase optimism about how great these autonomous systems will perform seems unrealistic to me.
I guess cynicism is proportional to the square of age...
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