Direct digital I/O ?

Agreed. Fleming is a foul-mouthed person.

I fit in nicely everywhere, but it is those such as yourself who cannot discuss withiout resorting to personal remarks who are the real problem.

In all 22 years of using Usenet, I have never been the originator of personal remarks, but being only human, on rare occasions I have risen to the bait and responded indignantly as, indeed, I do here.

Any reputable news client can block his posts and all replies. If you never have to see them how can his posts ruin a news group?

Exactly right. I suspect that they are using me to justify their own abusive outbursts.

Were they to grow up past the emotional age of a 5-year-old, then perhaps they could take responsibility for their own tendencies for abuse?

Thinking outside the box has been the mantra of ineffectual management in industry for some years now, but when there are those who do that, odd that it stimulates abusive personal campaigns.

Once again, I challenge those who say that I troll and ruin numerous NGs to give specific examples.

In rec.radio.amateur.antenna I mused that the formula for radiation from antennas were based only on experimental observation and that the medium could also in some way govern radiation. Such a subject is not covered in the textbooks.

Also, having English textbooks on the subject from the 1940s, I bemoaned the lack of education amongst techies for using the wrong plural, antennas, for antennae.

In uk.radio.amateur I have held. a stance for 20 years that the twin traditions of gentlemanliness and technical motivation should be maintained.

In comp.dsp, in revising my electronics knowledge (Essex, 1969 - 1972) it seemed to me, subsequently shown to be right, that there was a significant mathematical error in what was presented in most textbooks for the explanation of sampling.

In all those cases, I was met with many people who could not discuss the topics and angrily quoted their textbooks at me finally resorting to personal abuse.

That now happens here, merely because my interest is in low level system software of my own creation, fomented by my experiences from

1971 till 1974 working at the Scientific Services Dept at Portishead Power Station on naked PDP11s, and interest which does not fit in with the mainstream of Pi users.

Why cannot people behave as do grownups, and, if not interested in a topic or in me, use a KF instead of leaping in with personal abuse?

Were you to look at the NG uk.radio.amateur over the past few months, specifically the posts from The Three Amigos, reay, cole and tomlinson, you would very soon realise just who is ruining that NG (and also this one, it would seem)

Serious point: by using something like Google Groups, which don't AFAIK have filtering or killfile facilities, to read newsgroups you make trolls lives easier because you don't have the facilities to make them invisible.

I killfiled the troll a few days ago and, according to Pan stats, thats

10-20 posts I don't see each day. Result!

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

I have him killfiled in a number of groups. But the thread still shows up because people keep replying to him. I can manually ignore a thread which I should do with this one.

--

Rick C

I'm not aware that there have been any trolls in the Pi group recently.

To whom do you refer?

Ignoring me is fine, for my remarks are not targetted at the incurably block headed; but why then resort to the infant's style of abusive remarks?

Why even respond in this thread in the way that you have?

ditto

--
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk 
    PC Services 
  Raspberry Pi Add-ons 
 Timing Diagram Font 
 For those web sites you hate

But what do you again by crowing here that you have KFed someone?

Why respond at all, unless it is malicious?

If you use a news client that can filter on body as well as headers you can eliminate any mention of him (as long as any follow-ups have properly formed attributions, which is the vast majority).

Another non-relevant troll making personal attacks?

Why does he do that?

You're well off topic here AND feeding a troll.

ONE

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Several technologies were used for front panels: miniature incandescent lamps, neon, nixie, even DM160 (kinda like a magic eye tube: amplifier and display in one).

The wikipedia for Bi-quinary coded decimal

shows many early computers' variations, and the IBM 650 neon indicators.

Serial machines such as the LGP21 used a 3-line oscilloscope to show the registers.

Clever workaround! No lamp test? Such buttons were usually hidden in the field/customer engineer's panel.

The "nice" panels had front-replaceable lamps. Others required disassembly, even desoldering!

Some systems were clever and space-saving such as the Univac 1219 where the illuminated pushbuttons double as display and input!

On the original PDP11/20, the lamps were wire ended. Replacing them was relatively easy, but the effort and mechanical shock involved in plugging the card back in could make a few others fail!!!!!!!

I remember seeing DM160 on valve radios as tuning aids but don't recall seeing them any place else.

In my postgrad year I was using Philips crystallographic X-ray kit. The older system used decade counters with a fluorescent spot - you looked at the top of the tube while the spot whizzed round against the number written on the panel alongside the tubes. The newer machine used nixie tubes.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Your memory may have developed a drop here: The DM 160 is just a digital on-off indicator. The tuning indicators have been some other DM:s with analog pattern display.

The whizz-spot tubes were the counters at the same time. Each incoming pulse moved the spot to the next anode.

--

-TV

Digitrons, and if dispalying a digit instead of a rotating spot, Dekatrons.

Then I've never seen a DM-160, only the magic-eye tuning indicators on valve radios. From the up-thread context I thought they were called DM-160s - my mistake.

Yes, I realised that and that the counters with nixie tube displays also needed a set of decade counters to (a) accumulate the counts and (b) drive the display tubes.

About a year later I was working with a Mossbauer spectrometer. This used a scintillation counter as its detector and a 400 channel multi-channel analyser to accumulate the counts that formed the spectrum. The analyser was based on solid state electronics but still used a CRT to display the spectrum.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |