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Well, I always fixed my own cars, no matter how badly they were gone, so I'm probably more capable mechanical-wise.
The trouble is that I have no interest whatsoever in cars, whether fast and overpowered or otherwise.
I've driven less than ten times, in the last decade, and then only when there was no other choice.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: I'm probably more capable mechanical-wise.
Really? I doubt that - changing spark plugs and draining the oil does not make you a motor engineer or mechanic. The money I made from people who thought they could rebuild an engine was very pleasant.
Mark_Wallace wrote: The trouble is that I have no interest whatsoever in cars, whether fast and overpowered or otherwise.
I have to admit that my interest has waned even though I raced for a couple of years, early on and spent about 10 years in the business. Now I just don't care - if something goes wrong I call the AAA.
Mark_Wallace wrote: I've driven less than ten times, in the last decade, and then only when there was no other choice.
What are you? A damn hippie???
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Karel Čapek wrote: Really? I doubt that That's a very rude thing to say.
I have rebuilt engines from the bottom up, and repaired just about every type and shape of bodywork that exists.
Karel Čapek wrote: The money I made from people who thought they could rebuild an engine was very pleasant. Really? I doubt that.
Karel Čapek wrote: I raced for a couple of years, early on and spent about 10 years in the business. Really? I doubt that.
Not very nice, is it?
Karel Čapek wrote: What are you? A damn hippie??? Just someone who has realised that the car is not enough use to me to rate its cost.
That usefulness/cost relationship is, I suspect, also true for most people; they just haven't realised it, yet.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: That's a very rude thing to say.
Why? I doubt your story - I'm just being straightforward. There were always plenty of people getting their cards towed into my shop because they thought they could be a mechanic.
As for the rest - whatever.
Some of us have no choice but to commute by car - public transport here is ok but sparse and a bit grotty.
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Karel Čapek wrote: Why? I doubt your story - I'm just being straightforward. Er, "straightforwardly" calling people liars is not entirely polite.
I pointed that out to you with equal straightforwardness, assuming it to be a cultural thing, but it now appears that you may not be able to take straightforwardness as well as you give it.
I suppose that we will all have to bear that in mind.
If you'd gone about saying the same thing in a roundabout or joking way, that would have been no problem, right off the bat; but you set a tone, and I simply complied with it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Er, "straightforwardly" calling people liars is not entirely polite.
I never said I was polite.
Mark_Wallace wrote: I pointed that out to you with equal straightforwardness, assuming it to be a cultural thing, but it now appears that you may not be able to take straightforwardness as well as you give it.
You may be as blunt as you wish: I will not get offended.
Mark_Wallace wrote: If you'd gone about saying the same thing in a roundabout or joking way, that would have been no problem, right off the bat; but you set a tone, and I simply complied with it.
As is your right - experience tells me that I (and other people I knew) got a great deal of work from amateurs who thought they knew what they were doing - as a result when people without proper training tell me they can do x, y and z to a car I tend to reflect back and say no, you probably can't.
Anyway, it is not my intention to argue or offend over such a trivial thing so I'll apologize and wish you a nice day.
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This is the world's first hard drive, invented by IBM. It weighed over a ton and stored a whopping 5 Megabytes of data. Picture taken in 1956.
[First hard drive]
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Imagine the laptop that went into!
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I am old enough to remember a time when a hard drive was a long trip over bad roads!
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Sadly, as do I!
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What do you think that big silver thing was in the background?
Software Zen: delete this;
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The opening behind the box on the forklift is the socket for the Flight Data Recorder
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The first one I worked on was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND[^] in 1967. Looked like two sections of sewage pipe one above the other, and hummed to itself all day (and night). The best thing about it was that you could hide behind it for hours.
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I worked around Fastrands for seven years or so. There was one just across the hall from my office, in the machine room. The horror!
I never heard of one crashing through a wall ... I did hear of a Fastrand, secured in its special wheeled moving rig, roll down a sloped corridor, zip through the reception area and then out the front door to the parking lot. I don't know if there were any hardware or wetware casualties from the incident.
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Yes, we all 'heard' about that story.
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I remember a similar incident when the San Jose Mercury News installed a new HP3000 system. Standard installation involved a 24-hour spinup on the hard drives. The computer room was not complete, so the back wall consisted of industrial plastic sheeting. 17 hours into the spinup, the technicians checked the status of the drives. Drives 0-4 showed no faults, drive 5 showed a minor fault that registered 11 hours into the test. During the physical part of the check, the technicians discovered that the minor fault was due to the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system used to deliver newspapers to the trucks, ending on its side and continuing the rigorous series of checks with only the minor fault.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Member 10707677 wrote: the disk drive taking a tour out the back wall, colliding with a conveyor system ... While magically still being connected to its power supply and data cables.
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Distance travelled to back wall, 3 feet. Distance from computer room to conveyor system, 4 feet. The drive hit the belt and toppled with 1-2 feet down the length of the conveyor. These were the old Perkins eight-platter 18-inch drives, designed for use onboard naval vessels. Cables were typically 60 feet long, with the excess coiled under the floor of the computer room. If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it possible. The techs shut down the drive and gave it a thorough going-over. The only damage was a ding in the base cabinet. Luckily, the drive was designated a standby reserve, so the whole of the installation wasn't too badly affected by the extra testing of the drive. (This time, the techs remembered to lock the drive cabinet in place.)
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Still remember working on the DEC 10 system in 1987, perhaps one of the first ones to be installed in Bangalore, India at the Indian Telephone Industries (ITI). Faintly remember that the storage device there was a magnetic tape drive.
While writing programs (in FORTRAN then), it occasionally used to throw this message: "System shutting down in 5 minutes. Please save your files", followed by a countdown, till shutdown. Early versions of Windows used to do it best - throw up a BSOD
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Message Closed
modified 25-Mar-15 17:48pm.
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Cornelius Henning wrote: calculate prime numbers
Yes - those were our favourite programs - with others being implementations of the Newton Raphson method, Regula Falsi method, Simpson's rule and Gaussian Quadrature for numerical integration.
One other interesting program we wrote was called "Odd Order Equisum Square", just another name for a magic square program.
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I worked on a PDP-11/34a with 2 RK06 7meg word diskdrives (and a tape drive).
I wrote a directory sort program that directly modified the directory pointers,
(Skipping the slow step of loading into an indirect array, and then applying the
changes). it was SO much faster. With one issue. Apparently I had a bug, and I
cross linked 5 files in an infinite loop (directory enteries were a Singly Linked List).
So, when I went to do the directory, the last 5 files kept repeating. But the segment
of code was being run by the OS, and would not break. The drive head was going back
and fourth over 2 points, and the drive slowly started ROCKING... More and More.
A Mad dash to the front of the CPU to HALT the system. Forced an Odd Address Trap,
to avoid the reboot, and then I had to remove my account, losing my files.. Because,
like an idiot, I was working on the live system, without a backup. Pretty soon, I
learned how to do backups.
High School... We were lucky to survive some of our mistakes!
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Wow! Early day OS-level programming! Must have been very exciting! Some of the things you did would have made history - perhaps the first time in the world that someone did them.
Being a Mechanical Engineer, I was not so lucky!
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