computer clocks

[Mary Fisher]

[Lurch]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:05:26 -0000, "Mary Fisher" strung together this:

[Andy Hall]

Christmas Eve I knew about, but I thought you could have pierogi with vegetables etc. - or are they called something else then?

I'd heard this from some Polish friends, although in connection with the months of the year, but also that in some regions (Silesia?) the number of dishes should be an odd number and also a spare empty place at the table to be able to invite a stranger...

... and as I'm given to understand the tradition of He-who-was-laid-in-a-manger as the bringer of gifts? Hence the kids needed to behave so that this would happen?

[Andy Hall]

I'd forgotten all about that nonsense. IIRC, it was often a case of loading stuff in the right, but non-obvious order so that it wouldn't crash but would work after a fashion. Certainly a house of cards.....

[Mary Fisher]

a) there were only four apostles - are you thinking of disciples?

b) there were neither apostles nor disciples at the nativity ...

c) we have pork pie (home made) and tomatoes (home grown) on Christmas Eve. Mince pies when we come back from church.

It's not an English tradition, just something I carried on from my childhood.

Why do I keep banging on bout home made stuff?

To try and justify it on a d-i-y group!

Mary p.s. nice description, I know quite a few Poles but have never heard any of this, thanks.

[John Rumm]

Left you speechless it seems ;-)

[John Rumm]

That was the one... On one occasion I even resorted to pulling a boot rom out of SCSI card to grab the extra 8k of contiguous upper memory space. That would allow QEMM to get another couple of drivers high with its "stealth" technology.

(SWMBO would sometimes say, tell me about the different types of memory in a PC... I would ask why, she would say I can't sleep!

Hmmm, well there is:

Base ram, upper memory blocks or hi ram, the high memory area, extended ram (XMS), expanded ram (EMS) (with window), then we have shadow ram, video ram, cache ram...... ZZZZzzzzzZZZZZ.....

[Owain]

"Mary Fisher" wrote | We'll be having home reared black turkey which we'll probably have to kill.

Probably.

They can be a bit unco-operative about sitting still in the roasting tin if you don't.

| > And the trifle. | No trifle. There aren't any children - yet - it will all be grown-up fare.

/Proper/ trifle is perfectly grown-up fare. Isn't it?

Owain

[Stefek Zaba]

You can indeed have veg-filled pierogi, and I'm sure some homes'll have those as one of the cornucopia of dishes. Just not part of my ma's usual repertoire mumbly-mumble years back!

Yes - the spare place for stranger is pretty well obligatory. Mind you, the only time we've had unexpected guests has been at Christmas lunch, when a good friend arrived with another adult and two young mouths - unexpected, but a pleasure to oblige/

Doubtless there are regional variations, but the one I grew up with involved St Nicolas coming quite early in December, dispensing little goodies; for the full-on version, accompanied by angels and a devil with pitchfork - devil encouraging kids to be Good Or Else. The conceit for the under-the-tree presents was consistent with this - it's "the Angel" who brings the presents, but if you're not good, you'll find a devil's switch (as in, beating-stick; not a single-pole-double-throw-toggle or any variation thereof) under the tree instead!

[Stefek Zaba]

Yes, of course - d'oh!

Since when did that make a difference to an excuse for a noshup? ;-)

Odd - usually you can't stop us gabbing on about Tradeeshons From Ze Homelant ;-)

[Stefek Zaba]

Oh yes. MS even helped us with a futility routine - MEMMAKER, wasn't it? - which would take you through a hopefully-finite set of reboots, during which it rewrote your CONFIG.SYS each time to load some things into base memory, some into ex[ten|pan]ded, not quite going through all of the (n-m)!.m! permutations, though sometimes it felt like it.

Hey, the memories are painful to me; on the "misery loves company" principle I don't see why anyone else who went through the pain should be allowed to continue to blank it out ;-)

Stefek

[Mike]

That was real computing ! Don't see why anybody should be allowed to miss out on it ;-)

And as for booting a PDP8 from the front panel switches.

[Huge]

And while you were doing this, I was sitting in front of a Xerox Star workstation with a MB of (flat) memory, an A3 screen, an ethernet connection (OK, it was XNS, not TCP/IP) to a laser printer and a GUI that in some ways is still better than Windows.

[Owain]

"Mike" wrote | That was real computing ! Don't see why anybody should be allowed | to miss out on it ;-) | And as for booting a PDP8 from the front panel switches.

Switches! Thee 'ad switches? When I were a lad we dreamt of switches. We were grateful for t'plugboard being invented.

Owain

[Bob Eager]

Not quite the same....but I can telnet into TSS/8 running on the emulator here...

[raden]

In message , Owain writes

You mean Ewenix ?

[raden]

In message , Mary Fisher writes

And you said you were certified sane ??

[Andy Hall]

It would be interesting to know how well(y) it boots......

[John Rumm]

Only if you have a little RAM to spare...

[Andy Hall]

They're flocking in now.....