Space Shuttle Grouting

[Rusty]

Why has NASA not enquired in the group how best to repair tile grouting. The astronauts could have been home days ago with the right advice.

rusty

[Christian McArdle]

I told them to use Ardex Flex FL, but did they listen? Bloody B&Q value adhesive and grout. You can blame NASA budget cuts.

Christian.

[Ian Stirling]

Licking your finger and applying along the seal is problematic though.

[Andrew Gabriel]

When I was out in the US probably a year or two ago, NASA was running adverts in an effort to obtain spares from peoples' old junk boxes to keep the shuttle going, because you can't go out and buy brand new 8" floppy drives anymore (that was one of the things they were specifically after).

It's easy to forget how far technology has moved on in the

25 years since it was launched (and even longer since the design started), although some of the systems on it have been modernised over the years.

[Paul Herber]

How quickly can you get here?

P.S. parking is a bit difficult at the moment and the local B&Q has just disappeared over the horizon.

[Alan]

In message , Rusty wrote

The correct stuff was sent up but the astronauts were out when Parcel Farce called. They now have to collect it form the nearest central depot, which on one of Saturn's moons.

[Owain]

They've got a hacksaw, so they've obviously been reading Drivel.

Owain

[David Lang]

a) It would have generated 27 replies, all of which disagreed with each other.

b) Another 32 replies would have just been humorous with no actual suggestions.

c) Doctor Drivel/Evil would have made a point, and no matter how sensible it was or wasn't, 43 people would have ripped the p*ss out of him.

d) Mary Fisher would have insisted they used organic filler made from chicken droppings :-)

e) The thread would eventually have changed to something about sticking ferrets to plasterboard.

Dave

[Arthur]

I bet the astronauts where glad when they fitted an inside loo :)

Arthur

[Tony Bryer]

"... Tubelines had recently stockpiled Pentium 133 microchips, used in the signal controls of the Jubilee line, and acquired a pile of 1970s computers using the internet for spares for the Northern line."

[Richard Conway]

I'm amazed that parts of the tube network are so advanced!

[Matt]

Does not compute, illegal stack overflow, pipe leakage in progress

[Andrew Gabriel]

As far as I know, the Baker Street control room is still full of GEC 4000 series minicomputers which do the train tracking and real-time timetabling for a couple of the lines. I used to visit them quite often when I worked for GEC Computers to help them out with technical support. These machines were probably all 1980's and early 1990's era. They had bought the software from British Rail who were running it in their own control room in Euston Tower in the 1970's, although British Rail stopped using the GEC machines sometime in the 1990's. Last time I was there was probably 1993 or 1994 (recovering a filesystem from a corrupted disk, ISTR).

I'm not sure what the reference to the 1970's computers would be. It could just be an inaccurate reference to GEC 4000 kit, but I suspect it's something earlier. The computers which drove the information boards locally were HP systems, which got their info from the GEC 4000 minicomputers. I don't recall now what sort of HP systems they were, but those might be the P133's that are being referred to.

Tube lines are a rather harsh environment, and actually very few minicomputers would work down there. We at GEC used to laugh each time someone else bid DEC minis, installed the first one, and found the computer crashed every time a train pulled out of the station.

[Andy Hall]

Considering the likely routing of the cabling and the general unsavoury (or even savoury) environment of the Tube, I guess that flushing of the cache would be needed too? ;-)

(Visions of the girl in Jurassic Park with all hell breaking loose around saying "This is a Unix system - I know this" and immediately delving 10 levels through the X Windows interface. Half the cinema audience groans while the other half wonders why).

"Broad-bosomed, bold, becalmed, benign stands Bal-Ham, four-square on the Northern Line"

etc.

[Andrew Gabriel]

There was no write cache in the OS (GEC's OS4000) to anything like the extent there is in unix. Metadata updates were completely interlocked, and data updates could cache one partially written file block, but the application had full control and could disable even that. The OS actually provided no way to shut itself down, as it was always safe to just turn off the power (subject to the customer's applications either being written to carefully to order their own data writes or being shutdown first).

Those machines almost never crashed on the production systems anyway. I don't recall for sure now, but London Underground probably ran a pair as main and hot standby, and another pair as cold main/standby/development/test.

They also used them as multi-user minicomputers for actually doing their software development.

At that time, no one used unix for process control applications.

[Andy Hall]

Except in Hollywood ;-)

[Andrew Gabriel]

In the UK, the GEC 4000's got used in quite a lot of films. The main reason was that we were in Elstree Way, Borehamwood, right next to the film studios. Directors would often organise shoots in our computer room, and staff would get yanked off their projects for a day or two to write some software to do things like make a row of 8 tape drives all turn their reels in synchronisation, VDU's to scroll extra slowly, etc.

The last filming I know of which used GEC 4000 kit was an episode of Red Dwarf IIRC, which had the front panel with rows of keyswitches and lights off a very old (1972) computer, which was supposed to look like a modern computer. Trouble was the more modern computers didn't have any switches or lights on them, so film directors weren't very interested in them;-)

I did save one of the GEC 4080 front panels with all its switches and lights, which is in a box somewhere. I made a little animated GIF of it some time ago...

've actually got a working GEC 4162 (c.1982), but it may go in the skip in the next year or so, as I've have no real use for it for the last 10 years.

[rjs]

A number of ex-colleagues at ICL recall with some glee sitting behind mag tape decks and flicking the test switch to make the spools wizz back and forth for some long forgotten TV programme. LOL

Richard

[Ian White]

panels explode at the slightest provocation.

[Richard Polhill]

[e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) wrote in news:42f0d292$0$38044$ [e-mail]:

Damn! I threw away a box of 8" drives last year.