The Lemon Fool

Did you spot Betelgeuse shining dimly ?

It's easy to find, up top left of Orion, it is (was) bright and orange red, but has dimmed drastically recently

Ach, it may be its normal cycles having a particularly deep 'low'
Or, it may be about to go supernova - which would be rather spectacular and not good news if you happen to be within 50 light years of it

AleisterCrowley wrote:Ach, it may be its normal cycles having a particularly deep 'low'
Or, it may be about to go supernova - which would be rather spectacular and not good news if you happen to be within 50 light years of it

Happen to have been (unless we have to wait another 650 odd years)

DM

You know what I mean.... If it happened in the last 50 years based on your local calendar and you are, erm were, within 50 light years..
If it goes pop shortly (from an earth observer pov) the event actually happened in the 14th Century

Snorvey wrote:The red one is 500gb and powered through its USB port.

It would still look pretty huge next to a 1TB micro-SD card https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexar-Professi ... B07P64KZLX

Scott.

I've still got my ZX81 RAM pack: about fag packet size, £35 in in the early 80s and a massive 16k...

swill453 wrote:

Snorvey wrote:The red one is 500gb and powered through its USB port.

It would still look pretty huge next to a 1TB micro-SD card https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lexar-Professi ... B07P64KZLX

Scott.

Mains powered?

--kiloran

The first disc drive I worked with was 40Mb and the size of a washing machine

Not this one but similar

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp04.html

Rob

robbelg wrote:The first disc drive I worked with was 40Mb and the size of a washing machine
Not this one but similar
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp04.html

Same here. 40Mb shared by about a dozen staff.

The computer (PDP11) and its disk drive lived in a glass cubicle at the end of the office. The computer had aircon, the staff didn't.
One day, we were all slaving away at our dumb terminals, when they all stopped working. We looked to the end of the office and the computer cubicle was completely full of smoke. Disk head crash. Modern computers just don't fail so spectacularly.
The scrap hard disk was a steel disk about 16" across, and about 8mm thick. Scored about 3mm deep where the head gouged it.

Gryff

Disc drives??
Eeeh, when I were a lad the cheap option was an 85KB Sinclair 'Microdrive'
The posh computers at college used 5.25" floppy discs, and in my first role at work I was using the 3.5" jobbies to send site databuild to a large US mobile company (laMoroto anag.) BY POST
God, I'm old

My first computing experience involved a Hollerith tabulator, data input by punched cards and the program was a jumble of links on a breadboard. This was in 1956 and I was calculating my crystal structure from x-ray crystallography images on film. My results are somewhere online in Acta Crystallographica, published rather later in a paper by Fang Ming Mao.

TJH

I doubt we can beat that, although I'm sure some here used Mr Babbage's Difference Engine running the first release of ADA (literally)

Well, when I were a lad the fastest storage/write device available were a pencil. Then, around 1970, one of my mates spent a month's wages on a Sinclair pocket calculator. We were all enthralled at this whizzy new device, and we were positively willing him to do something exciting with it. Sadly, he'd already done the most exciting thing, which was to show it off to us.

My first computer, a 1983 Camputers Lynx (still boxed and up there in the attic) was the last word in high-graphic sophistication. It had a massive 48K of memory, which looked a bit less good when you realised that that meant 16K of red memory, 16K of blue and 16K of green. All of which were stored in parallel, so you'd actually got 16K with everything being stored in triplicate.

It was, however, quite good for designing simple graphic games in Basic, and those games kept my girlfriend's kids entertained downstairs while we were attending to more, ahem, important matters. They're my wife and kids now. The Lynx is worth a bob or two these days, but I'd be in a lot of trouble if I ever sold it.

BJ

I still fancy getting a Jupiter Ace and trying to do something with 'Forth'
Real computer archaeology

The computer room at my Poly had Atari 520STs, and we had BBC micros as 'dumb terminals' on a Philips system in the labs

Back home we 'upgraded' to a Tatung Einstein (I worked for the company for a few years, when they were in Telford)
Now my mum has some Dell tower jobbie, and I have my Lenovo ThinkPad

Ahem - fewer pc's and more pics please!

Are the local oatcakes like the Staffordshire one (basically oat pancakes) or more like biscuits?

Snorvey wrote:A little way along the coast today to a pleasant little fishing village.

The rain wasn't far away though and a wander around the beach, harbour and village itself was cut short as the drizzle came on and we retreated to the local cafe

Lucky You. It was work parties at the loch this morning in pouring rain. I was hacking back the brambles and they were hacking back at me. Our joiners were re-constructing our raised bridge over swampy ground which was fast becoming part of the loch and I didn't think that my companions would feel that taking a picture of the cormorant gobbling up our fish would have been the most appropriate behaviour. Other more severe actions were preferred.

Snorvey wrote:Video of the UK's first Boeing Poseidon P8 Maritime patrol aircraft lands at Kinloss Barracks a short while ago

https://www.facebook.com/RAFLossiemouth ... 244203921/

Kinloss will host 2 of the beasties whilst the runway at Lossie is being worked on. The Quick Reaction Typhoons have been moved to Leuchars in Fife for the same reason.

Do they get priority for fixing potholes?

--kiloran

Bring back the Shackletons