Where can I buy a large analogue meter?

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

Same with the PS2 for the business market and that failed too.

But was quite adequate to see the PC take off spectacularly.

The main competitor at the time, the Apple II, had a similar horsepower cpu and the same plug in card approach.

And the AT was a more viable design.

I liked the Z8000 and still have a Captain Zilog t-shirt from a Zilog seminar. The story was Exxon owned Zilog and was in a pissing contest with IBM so the processor was never considered.

I had a 68000 development board and also thought that was a good prospect but 68008 parts weren't readily available. I was gun shy about Motorola anyway. Design one of their processors in and they would get an order for a billion pieces from the automotive industry and hang you out to dry. The early '80s were a preview of today with suppliers quoting one year lead times.

Then there was the iAPX 432 fiasco... I never had my hands on one of those; I don't think many did.

At least we don't have to compile with tiny, small, compact, medium, large, and huge libraries anymore.

Did it run the same code? I don't remember if you had to reassemble to go from the 8008 to the 8080 or not. I have an 8008 computer. It has not been fired up in years. The serial port was 20 mA current, 110 baud. I tweaked it to work with RS-232. Still, most async serial ports are TTL through a USB cable these days. But they work fine. 110 baud is hard coded into the ROM, yes, ROM. I think the unit was designed to use 1702A EEPROMs and even has a programmer, but I don't know if I've ever tired it.

The 8008 is a very slow CPU. It is the basis of the machine cycles on the 8080. The 14 bit address was multiplexed over the 8 bit data/address bus in two clocks and the data on a third clock, so T1, T2 and T3. Sound familiar? Even though the 8080 is not constrained by the 8 bit port (so the 8008 would fit an 18 pin package), it uses the same internal timing. Just at a much high clock rate. I think the 8008 I have is clocked at maybe 400 kHz.

<SNIP>

As long as you have memorized those hieroglyphs. Eclipse comes with 50 icons. It takes a a month to memorize these and an hour a day to refresh. Then comes Blender, and imp and ... Strange fact about English is that the meaning of words change much. OTOH there seems not be a general accepted hieroglyphs for HELP!

There is not difficult to show commands in a list and to accept a first letter. No need to use the mouse.

You are forced to use the mouse past insane sequences of random characters, that are used in the url's. <SNIP>

The Chinese are literate, the USAians are not. We will see who wins.

Groetjes Albert

PDP15 backplanes were wire wrapped for a good reason. (square meters). wire wrap is about ten times more reliable then solder joints, and can more easily be corrected.

Groetjes Albert

<SNIP>

The Chinese can read the Chinese character set or as much of it as they can memorise and keep remembered. Apparently you have to read for an hour a day to stop the recognition system from forgetting stuff.

The USAians learn to read an alphabetic character set, with many fewer symbols. It's not hard to get stay literate and stay literate, even when you real as little as many Americans seem to.

Chinese culture puts a great deal of emphasis on the virtues of being literate because it has to - people have to be motivated to get literate and stay literate.

They didn't try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a home computer. Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better graphics. Most makers understood the importance of that aspect.

PS2 was a blatant attempt at a FUD lockin and had the interesting effect of uniting all the other PC clone makers to generate a better ISA bus.

It really upset the scientific instrument makers who had their own series of dedicated daughter boards that plugged into IBM PCs. It even caused Intel to go on make an OEM 386 PC clone of its own for industrial and scientific users which ISTR still had some old style slots.

Mainly because no one was every fired for buying IBM.

6502 punched well above its weight for the time.

And interestingly whilst selling an IBM AT to Russia was entirely legal at the time they came out selling a faster 8MHz Compaq clone was not! Amazing what having an inside track on the political system can do...

That is a separate issue to the silly claim that IBM didn't believe in the PC market.

Unsurprising that IBM couldn't compete on price. They couldn't with the original PC or AT either.

But because it was later, it was better than the Vic20 and C64 which both sold very well.

That's overstated on the uniting. DEC didn't go that route and did its own stupidities.

Yep.

Yes, and preceeded the IBM PC,

Not convinced that that was the reason for that.

Possibly apocryphal but the rumor was Christensen tried to get his bosses at IBM interested in PCs. A memo came down the chain of command saying if he wanted to play around with them on his own time that was okay but there was no future.

That was IBM's idea of a small computer in 1980. Despite the 51xx naming convention it had nothing to do with the 5150. The 5100 was a 'portable computer', meaning it didn't need a forklift but it weighed about 50 pounds.

The 5120 was a strange beast since it retained the 5100's APL capability with APL hieroglyphics on the keys, but also had BASIC. The idea was the

5120 was a starter set and you would eventually move to a System/34 which also had a BASIC interpreter along with RPG II. The 5120 had BRADS, sort of a low rent RPG. It also has an assembler of sorts and a way to get into a system monitor. That provided me with amusement when I got tired of the inventory control system I was supposed to be developing.

A year later the System/23 came out. It looked a lot like the 5120 but used an 8085 rather than the PALM 'microprocessor'. The PALM was actually a bunch of gate arrays running microcode. (Put All Logic in Microcode) which was how they emulated the System/360 to port APL.

All this obscure history had its impact on the 5150. Boca Raton wasn't completely in a bubble. System/34 BASIC went back to '77 and the System/23 design using a 8085 may have stacked the deck for Intel.

I'll admit that at the time, while I made my living with computers, when Joe Sixpack would ask me what they should buy and what they could do with it my answer was basically 'beats the shit out of me.'

And after that, IBM woke up and smelt the coffee and changed its mind on that.

Initially, IBM didn't. The PC was designed, not as an "office computer" or a personal computer, but as a smart terminal for using their mainframe equipment.

Yes, IBM never tried to compete on price. That was not their claim to fame.

I wasn't really talking about icons. Just a GUI so you can use a menu, full of English words.

I do prefer English on a washing machine, because whatever moron decided a tumble dryer is a square and an iron is a triangle needs his head read.

Question mark in a circle.

Not sure what you're getting at. Windows makes it easy to find what you need.

I hope the USA dies soon. The whole world hates them. Maybe have a word with Putin?

Yeah squeeze it and hope. Why not just use metals that do solder? Only time I've seen non-solderable metal was on a piece of shit overpriced Sennheiser headphones.

It is modern.

I don't call wires components.

How are computer MBs done then?

ROTFPMSL!

That's the most f***ed up site ever. What's the difference between: Other race Unknown race Not Hispanic or Latino Unknown

Glad to hear it.

You f****ng idiot. What makes you think Bowman is in the electronics group? Learn to use a computer there's a dear.

I'd assume other race includes Asians but the number seems low. No idea on the two unknowns. The UCR (uniform crime reporting) system is anything but uniform.

Then we get to Hispanic/Latino... Many forms have the category 'White non-Hispanic'. I check that one. Hispanics sometimes are white, sometimes not depending on which is more advantageous. Some are actually old stock Spanish. Others are mestizos or some other complicated mixture of white, black, Asian, indigenous, or Klingon.

It's like our stellar VP who prefers to identify as black rather than Indian.

"A study from 2014 estimated the genetic admixture of the population of Cuba to be 72% European, 20% African and 8% Native American"

That's Cuba but may typify most of Latin America.

But we all know there is no such thing as race; it's just a social construct except when it isn't.

I think the research dates back to 2017 but it finally hit the MSM. It seems dingoes aren't quite dogs. They look like dogs, interbreed with dogs, but aren't quite the same.

I like dogs but don't care for blue heelers (Australian Cattle Dog). Metaphorically speaking I think they were God's first attempt at making a dog. When he saw the outcome he said "Oh shit, I can do better than that and tried again but failed to discard the first version. Since they were a cross between dogs and dingoes apparently my gut instinct that they aren't quite a dog was correct.

Of course, this has nothing to do with humans.

Actually I read alt.home.repair but given the amount of cross-poasters it's hard to tell. I think I did subscribe to s.e.d at one point but found it as on point as a.h.r.

Glue for doublesided, and stencil-printed solder paste, with a toaster-oven to reflow the solder. And, dozens of variations. Sometimes, high-temp solder creates a subassembly, which is not disturbed by later low-melting solder heating, so two or more different solder operations is kinda normal.

<snip>

Some Poms (Australian slang for residents of the UK) are still unhappy about losing some of their colonies in North America. The US has its faults, but so does the UK, and both need need work on modernising their social and political structures to make them more effective and more egalitarian.

The Gini index is a pretty crude measure of economic equality

but respectable places cluster around the 0.29 mark, the UK is 0.348, Australia is at 0.344, and the USA is at 0.414.

There's obviously a need for a certain amount of economic inequality, to reward the competent and persistent, but the USA does illustrate the point that you can push it well past the point of diminishing returns.

The book

spells out which returns are diminished. It was written by a pair of medical epidemiologists, and will go right over Commander Kinsey's pointy head. Right-wingers do tend to reject the message even if they were clever enough to understand it if they'd wanted to.