Mundane facts about your day...

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EasMid

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I can understand why there would need to be a queue at the point of he having to pay online, in order to manage the numbers of people needing to come to the store to collect and the number of staff in store to cope.

To have a queue just to browse the website is utterly unnecessary bollocks though.
When they first started this queue system before Easter they actually had a message at the top saying they’d created a “virtual queue” to limit the number of people visiting the site. They even had a number showing how many people were in front of you in the “queue”. At 1 point I had over 350,000 people in front of me with a wait of “over an hour”. They’ve changed the layout now though. Still a load of bollocks though.
I’ve seen this exact system on several “click & collect” sites since, Wickes use it but strangely Screwfix don’t yet even though it’s part of the same group as B & Q.
 

staffordjas

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I used to have the first computer game I ever wrote on paper tape*, from the summer of 1976. I might still have it somewhere in the loft.

* - I even tried reading it through the office telex machine once, but all that came out was gobbledygook.
We used to have to be able to quickly read the tapes (Wish I had have saved mine now and had a go at reading it again ). Thought we were so advanced when technology progressed onto writing our own programs onto floppy discs . Never would have thought at that time that you could have actually seen what you was typing on a screen, never mind all this sophisticated internet .

(I remember ringing in from the phonebox down the road to pull a sickie , thinking it's a good job phones weren't invented where you can actually see the person on the other end.... Never could have imagined all this skyping, face time etc)
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Have been to Aldi tonight. A far better experience as it was really quiet. The only thing on my list I couldn't get was lemons.
I went to Lidl tonight, in Roscrea, it is the nicest supermarket in the world, even in ordinary times, but especially so now

I got everything I went for, plus a few impulse items.

One of the items I treated myself to was an aerosol can of PTFE spray. I told the cashier I was going to rejuvenate an old frying pan with it...

I also did some shopping for some local oldies, as over-70s are under house arrest here.


We used to have to be able to quickly read the tapes (Wish I had have saved mine now and had a go at reading it again ). Thought we were so advanced when technology progressed onto writing our own programs onto floppy discs . Never would have thought at that time that you could have actually seen what you was typing on a screen, never mind all this sophisticated internet .

(I remember ringing in from the phonebox down the road to pull a sickie , thinking it's a good job phones weren't invented where you can actually see the person on the other end.... Never could have imagined all this skyping, face time etc)

I still have a few paper tapes, but most were used to ritually light a barbecue to celebrate the escape.

I remember a bloke at the Poly, in 1974, saying "There'e be a chip in everything one day, even your toaster" - we thought he was bonkers.

I never used the cards, but a friend did, and drove up to the NPL in Glasgow with a boxful in the boot, when he got there, after the whole trip had been in a torrential downpour, he found that the boot of the hire car had leaked and they were soaked, so he spent most of the night in the hotel drying and flattening them in the trouser press and with a travel iron, whilst trying to keep everything in sequence - he actually got away with it.

I do still have a Ferranti paper tape editor, though.

product-86394.jpg
 
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staffordjas

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Just found out we don't actually have a late night postie delivering around 7pm each day in addition to the late morning one who misses our house each day. :roll: Numerous items have been posted through a neighbours house along with theirs on several days, even though clearly having our number on, and it's them kindly pushing them through our door when they get home each night.
Not holding out much hope for my bank card and 2 lots of other important documents which were posted out weeks ago. Christ knows where they have ended up , someone could have either binned them or be in isolation so not be able to get out to put back in the box or push through. :hmm:
 

Lucy

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Work laptop has gone kaput (well there's a domain controller issue). Will probably have to go to the office to log on to the network to sort it out. Well the car could do with a run down the motorway.
 

BobClay

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I remember a bloke at the Poly, in 1974, saying "There'e be a chip in everything one day, even your toaster" - we thought he was bonkers.

In 1968 I was sitting the first year of a City and Guilds Telecommunication course exam and one of the quickfire header questions on the paper was:

"What is the binary equivalent of the decimal number 22."

None of us could answer it as we hadn't been taught anything about binary arithmetic. I remember well the complaints to the tutors afterwards who just shrugged their shoulders saying it wasn't on the syllabus.

Bit of a wake up call though, because within a few years we were being hit with Boolean Algebra problems in both City and Guilds and seagoing qualifications.
I can vividly remember going up to the library in Edinburgh and finding out what binary numbers were, and how they worked. (It's actually a very simple way to count, because it has only two states, 0 and 1.)

George Boole was a 19th Century mathematician who came up with a logical algebra of states, in particular two states … 'To be or not to be' so to speak. At the time people patted him on the head and said 'Yes George, that's very interesting … but …. errrr …. what use is it ?"

A century or so later along came digital electronics built up from logic gates … and Boolean Algebra found a home.

PS 22 in binary is 10110
 

staffordjas

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Went outside to call 'Sanchez' , the lost Conure Parrot missing from nearby and seen in the area since, to see if it squawked or came when name called as they said it might. Stood there shouting "Sanchez, Sanchez..." up to the trees.
Not the parrot who came swooping down , but a duck who then followed me back into the house. Had to get a slice of bread to get it to follow me back out :lol: Don't usually have ducks in the garden, must have been very hungry with lack of people visiting the canal and duck pond. (He wasn't interested in the bird seeds and lettuce I threw down for him)
 

Mikinton

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PS 22 in binary is 10110
or 16 in hexadecimal (X'16').

Anyway, anyone remember these? We used to have one in the office until the mid-1990s, mainly as a talking point. I've got this vague recollection that all mainframes used to have to have a card reader long after keyboards and monitors came in (and presumably a set of punched cards that could be used to IPL the beast).

product-116623.jpg
 

Glam

Mad Cat Woman
Went outside to call 'Sanchez' , the lost Conure Parrot missing from nearby and seen in the area since, to see if it squawked or came when name called as they said it might. Stood there shouting "Sanchez, Sanchez..." up to the trees.
Not the parrot who came swooping down , but a duck who then followed me back into the house. Had to get a slice of bread to get it to follow me back out :lol: Don't usually have ducks in the garden, must have been very hungry with lack of people visiting the canal and duck pond. (He wasn't interested in the bird seeds and lettuce I threw down for him)
He's home, safe. Next thing on Facebook will be a missing duck............ Someone will have to check @staffordjas' freezer!
 

BobClay

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I remember my first ACAS Radar (Automatic Collision Avoidance System) which had to be programmed by a roll of punched tape. This was state of the art for 1972 on a brand new Swedish built super tanker called the Hudson Friendship.

The Electrician, looking for an earth on the ships mains (this meant current passing through the hull which was a no no due to corrosion enhancement) downed the power on this radar from the switchboard by mistake, which scrambled the program on it's inbuilt Cambridge computer. The Old Man threw a total wobbler (quite reasonably so because those ships weren't exactly manoeuvrable) and sweated and stamped up and down while I set up the tape reader and waited several minutes for the program to load.

When the radar burst into life the Old Man calmed down and left the bridge to castrate the Electrician. I retreated to the radio shack and shut the door so as to muffle the screams. :heyhey:
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
or 16 in hexadecimal (X'16').

Anyway, anyone remember these? We used to have one in the office until the mid-1990s, mainly as a talking point. I've got this vague recollection that all mainframes used to have to have a card reader long after keyboards and monitors came in (and presumably a set of punched cards that could be used to IPL the beast).

product-116623.jpg
I have a collection of stuff for my retro office, all rescued from skips.

DSCN7963.JPG


A Facit calculator, a Leitz 4-hole punch and the aforementioned tape editor.

I also have a Remington typewriter.

vintage-typewriter-from-remington-3.jpg
 

staffordjas

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I have a collection of stuff for my retro office, all rescued from skips.

View attachment 8303

A Facit calculator, a Leitz 4-hole punch and the aforementioned tape editor.

I also have a Remington typewriter.

vintage-typewriter-from-remington-3.jpg
We had a couple of those from my parents house when they died. Ended up going to the scrap man as charity shops, museums and antique shops didn't want them ( or the 3 old singer sewing machines). Said they had so many of them they didn't need any more :(
 

BobClay

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Visited that a couple of years ago @Noah. Bletchley Park visit (they're two separate sites on the same location.) I can thoroughly recommend it. Mind boggling what those lads did, and how it's moved on since.

I particularly wanted to see the Colossus, utterly mind boggling achievement from brilliant Mathematician Bill Tutte, and a young Post Office engineer by the name of Tommy Flowers (now sadly forgotten,) who literally built the first digital computer using valves, and used it to de-cypher the Lorenz Machine, the coding method of the German High Command. Their boast was that some messages got onto Churchill's desk before it got to Adolf Hitler.

Took this pix of the Colossus, or at least a part of it. All fully re-constructed from diagrams and images of the time, and … working.

Colossus2.jpg
 
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