KDE4.3 beta issues <OT>

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 23 May 2009, Ric Moore wrote:
>On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 09:26 +0200, Donn wrote:
>> On Saturday, 23 May 2009 07:49:13 Ric Moore wrote:
>> > Worked like a dream for firing up a modem under
>> > CP/M.
>>
>> All I dimly recall about CP/M is "pip". The world spun pretty fast and DOS
>> was there before I could learn any more.
>
>I had to stay in the cheap seats awhile. A blooming XT cost a coupla
>grand, when they first came out. A harddrive then? Forgetaboutit. Next
>thing you know I'll be the cranky grandpa going "In MY day, I had two
>floppy drives and I was grateful to have that!" Of course Ole Gene will
>trump that with his ferrite cores and sore fingers from flipping
>switches. <grins>  Ric

Do I hear somebody taking my name in vain again?

Now, while I did see a room full of 12AU7's running relays to grade papers 
being fed through a converted Harris printing press where photocells read the 
marks and totaled up the scores in the later 50's, my first 'hands on' came in 
the tail end of the 70's when I bought an RCA 1802 based board called a Cosmac 
Super Elf from Quest Electronics, learned how to program it via its hex 
monitor, then built the rest of the stuff to make it into a VCR controller 
that cut one dub cycle from the process of making a tv commercial, while 
adding a new frame accurate academy leader countdown for visual cuing purposes 
using a nearly 2/3rd screen high set of characters from a character generator 
I'd made.  I was the A.C.E. at KRCR in Redding CA at the time.  It was used 
for about 13 years, and another project like it but considerably more 
primitive was shown by MicroTime at the NAB a year later.  I commented to 
their people that my rig beat that one all to heck, would they be interested 
in a copy of my stuff?  Got a quick No.  I came back by their booth an hour 
later & noted it was  gone, so I assume my prior art, instead of being 
attractive, scared them excrementless.  Since they were famous for their own 
legal team standing guard over their stuff, I guess it made them paranoid.  
Shrug.  I asked about it at the show the next year and was told it was killed. 
tsk tsk.

Believe it or not, I still have a paper copy of that program, along with a 
broadcast audio cart with 2 copies of it recorded on it.  Your trivia factoid 
for the day.

Your 2 trivia questions of the day are:

Did the RCA 1802 have a call/return function in its instruction set?
A: No, even those were routines whose exec addy was stored in another 2 
registers.  Any of its 16, 16 bit registers could become the PC in a single 
byte command.

Did it have DMA?
A: Yes.

So no, I have no experience with ferrite cores or toggle switches for 
bootstrapping.  I hope that doesn't disqualify me from being the resident old 
fart. :)  There are not many on this list that are my age and very few older.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them.
<https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp>

Elevators smell different to midgets.