Thirty years on.

Those were better days. Can anyone imagine "Auntie" embarking on such an ambitious (not to mention useful) project today?

I learned to program on one of those. I loved my BBC micro

I got rid of all my BBC Micro (etc.) stuff about twenty months ago ... probably a mistake (yet another), but there you go.

Hacking infusion pumps and the like just hasn't held the same appeal, somehow.

Meanwhile, here's a bit more (including a nice shot of the NewBrain). Notice those other "thirty years old" stories under "Related stories" as well.

How about this for a fifty year old classic?

Hint: check out the Readme first.

Here's something which may be of interest to some folk:-

Disk Rot!

It's sad to think of so much classic software - especially home-grown one-off's - heading towards the bin. Stuff stored on data cassette tapes has faired just as badly (or worse) of course.

Luckily most of the good commercially produced stuff has already been saved as images and poked into various places around the 'net. And thankfully ROM-based stuff still marches on (and has been "imaged" as well)!

Well, here's a real classic (and working, too)!

They reckon it was very reliable. Which was probably just as well ... imagine fault-finding amongst that lot!

Does anyone know if Dekatrons are stocked at Maplin's?

The Oric is thirty years old!

OK ... it's not really "Computers" - but hopefully all this is a thing of the past these days. Or is it?

There was an article on the Tv very recently about detector vans, they said that they were updating them for digital TVs but were keeping very quiet about the technology.
But surely the RF stage is very similar but just at a different frequency. So the vans may still be around somewhere.
You are supposed to have a licence for watching the BBC by any means including cable TV and on-line but how do they "detect" this sort of use?

Robert

Has anyone ever actually seen one of these vans in action?
Do they really exist except in BBC information films?

You can be sure that if "they" wanted to pursue "non-licence payers" these days, the work would be farmed out to Serco, Capitas, G4S (or some other such quasi-governmental "agency" of dubious competence).

As I may have mentioned before, I have not owned a TV set for many years (over 23 now, at least), and so have some experience of threatening letters, and all the rest.

Although Urban Legend (myths?) would have it that "snoops" are indeed about, it makes you wonder how they actually go about it. Listening at the door, perhaps?

Maybe they have someone rummaging through wheelie bins for discarded copies of the TV Times (or whatever it's known as these days). Who knows?

"Looking for TV aerials" is another I have heard about. But how can that be any good in blocks of flats, or indeed "dwellings in multiple occupancy"?

I'm pretty sure that the whole thing is just another example of frightening folk into coughing up the "Licence" fee. In other words:- scaremongering. Not that we would know anything about that on this forum, of course.