- Joined
- Jun 24, 2008
- Messages
- 45,517
- Location
- London
- Car
- 2022 Hyundai IONIQ 5 RWD / 2016 Suzuki Vitara AWD
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Oh I had the extra gauges on my Morris Minir...and oil pressure gauge and a rev counter and water temp.At around 18-19 years old, I had the same black pinstripe on my white, V Reg Escort van.
I was well chuffed with it.
In the same era, I never had anything smart enough for the extra clocks/dials.
Remember those?:
https://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/sliderules/side2.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71rG12qt8JL.png
Show them to a kid and he/she would have no idea what they are.
What am I saying... a kid? Anyone under 60....
Bengal Matches on sale around Bonfire Night.
Cassette Tape and Tangled Innards on the Grass Verge!
I still have my sliderule, although I haven't used it in a long time (over 40 years) - but it might come in handy one day.Remember those?:
https://www.math.utah.edu/~alfeld/sliderules/side2.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71rG12qt8JL.png
Show them to a kid and he/she would have no idea what they are.
What am I saying... a kid? Anyone under 60....
Bangers on sale from the start of October onwards to any kids who had the money.
I still have my sliderule, although I haven't used it in a long time (over 40 years) - but it might come in handy one day.
Comptometer operators
Punch cards.......
Another one here with my 55 year old sliderule. I amazed myself just the other day when I spotted it, picked it up and could still remember how to use it!Ditto - I took it to work with me a couple of years ago and showed it to a bunch of engineers who had no idea what it was.
Modern luxury. At work I wrote FORTRAN programmes to control test equipment then manually transferred them to paper tape. I put the paper tape into a reader then spent quite a while establishing a phone call to New York before sending my code down the line where it was transferred to one of the few computers in the world capable of running it. After it was compiled (hours or days later) they called me and we established a phone link from the computer to my test equipment. When it worked - great. When it didn’t work the fun started trying to find out what was wrong: my programming, punch tape error, line corruption on the way to the states, compiler error, line corruption on the way back to the U.K., or test equipment fault. I very soon learnt to make sure there were no errors in my programming!OMG, hours spent in a little room at uni writing a computer programme 1 line at a time onto punch cards then taking it across to the computer centre and running it through a compiler to find the errors! Small programs could be run on site but bigger programs had to be sent to the main University of London computer centre so took a day per trip!
I did a lot of estimation on mine and had several sets of estimating formulae - it became redundant when desktop & laptop computers became pervasive.I still use an HP (18 I think) and have a 41 in a drawer unused for many years. In the day I had the card reader and printer for it, and wrote small programs for my work! I remember it being banned from exam rooms as it had the ability to communicate with other 41's across a room, plus it had many built in functions that you were supposed to know without using the calculator's inbuilt stuff! Plus IIRC I did my O (maths, physics,chemistry) and A levels (pure maths, physics) with a slide rule and log tables, calculators were not allowed.
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