General Chat

I can't get my head round the jargon Bob. Interfacing??? That's what I put in collars and cuffs! :-S


Coo eee Wend :-D :-D

That nice Mr Heidelburg.

I am glad that you found a niche. I assume with photo typesetting of the kind that eventually turned the British hot type industry upside down. A revolution.. "Mainframes" were very few and far between in the UK of the 1970s and 80s, far more often once encountered the "mini computers" (which still filled a room or two and weighed a ton) of DEC PDP and VAX, IBM 43x and the rest of the 7 dwarves. The PDP was a special favorite of the print industry.

I cut my teeth on letterpress as one of my rellies owned a printshop. I found it all a bit too deja vue. It was strange then that a while later I was busy with bleeding edge software to a large scale color printer in SW England. What goes around...

Offset litho printing is interesting, a sailing clipper technology that for the moment is still with us. Note though that Murdoch has cancelled the next generation of newspaper "presses". When they are done that will be that.

Print will become a highly desirable art form. Indeed this is already happening. Folio Society come back, your time has come. It is interesting that long lost letterpress machines have risen a lot in price, even for what are mostly restoration projects. Luckily the skills are still with us.

Please pass the cucumber sandwiches.

England have taken their lucky rabbit to Wembley are winning 1-0.
bye 4 now

:-S :-S

Rolls eyes like Mersey :-S :-S :-S

"working out the wages of the print industry."

As far as I remember the wages were usually worked out the old fashioned way with a strike until Murdoch took away the ball.

Thus the weaker ones went to the wall, Daily Chronicle, Reynolds News ....

For sure there were lots of American consulants with new ways of doing things such as payroll but the UK skilled working classes fought back hard. They lost so now we import coal from Poland, foreign ships whizz down the channel knocking over our wild birds with oil discharges and butchers with all of 6 weeks training as "cutters" despatch the finest cuts of horsemeat. Brave new world.

For my sins I once worked on payroll programs using a bizarre business language called COBOL (still used). It is like working in a salt mine for the mind.
MOVE LOTS_OF_MONEY TO MY_BANK_ACCOUNT ON PAY_DAY and so on.
Video monitors had yet to be invented so they used Hollerith punched cards. The 10in disk drives with all of 300K data cost about £ 30 K each. Which is why home computing took a while to get going. No mice.

DEC PDP 11 was the setup.........each satellite minicomputer was about 2 feet square around 5feet tall and had forced ventilation........the "mainframe" was another pdp11 in a floor to ceiling cabinet with two hard drives, around two feet, maybe 20 inches diameter, a separate tape reader and a distribution network cabinet.. think they used fortran for some of it......

a hand book about inch and a half thick with some well thumbed pages in the middle.......and a few pages on BASIC!

I's like Mersey and Wend :-)

Ive got a headache now :-S :-S :-|

A "perk" was when one of the office guys gave us a password to get into..........dungeo..............a dungeons and dragons type "game"

a cave exploration,with elves n hatchets n trolls n giants n beanstalks.......................n TREASURE!!!!

And I thought I was the only one that could lose the plot. :-S

:-D :-D :-D

Rollo - we're all sucking in the curtains, bless ya heart ;-)

I can't be harsed Mersey :-(

well I did say I couldn't be harsed :-D

:-S * falls face down onto keyboard* :-(

Shall we dance, cha cha cha :-D

Mau dont slabber on the keyboard.....its dangerous lol :-D :-D ;-)

lol now I've got qwerty imprinted on me forehead :-0 ;-)

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D Mau.....

Could have been worse Mau, it could have been POIUY :-0 :-D

For Rollo & Bob' with apologies to ladies (Part 1 only)

Part 1:
Olympia 80's + four-ply paper (+Tippex)
Gestetner machines (plus some red nail-varnish like equivalent to Tippex).
Remember them?

My first PC - 512Mb hard disk, 5 inch 'floppy' discs ....£1K :-S

Remember STARB & SPECOL - had to do a SSADM course using both, to produce an Air Traffic Control software programme :-S :-S

Part 2: (especially Island...)
You can still C + P without the ickle mousie! Just in case your battery runs out, or the spilt Horlicks sticks up the buttons :-D

Me? Luurrvv my mouse, even though I'm a 'touch typist' as well, it's just makes most PC things 'easier' :-D (you can scroll very quickly past certain posts if you have a mouse with the rolly thing in the middle ;-) )