Where can I buy a large analogue meter?

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. If you read about a mass shooting event with many wounded and few, if any, fatalities, the shooter(s) were black. If there were many fatalities usually the shooter(s) were white.

Mine are in the two short planks league. They are easily fooled into coming on by the very low winter sun or passing under a short underpass.

To be fair in automatic mode they are almost always on when I think they should be but are sometimes on because of their bad design and my high latitude. Very rarely they fail to come on when poor local visibility is the reason for switching them on rather than absolute light levels.

The question is what colour are the dead?

Usually some shade of brown... The other clue is if the news articles are very vague in describing the alleged shooter and don't run a mug shot. If the perp was white that's in the lede.

If the name appears to have been created by an illiterate trying to phonetically spell something you have another clue.

NEC V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath FPU which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel

Right, National was mostly analog. I was surprised to find TI bought National. I hadn't thought about either in a long time. I worked on a project that used the TMS9900. It's claim to fame was availability in a rad hard version. NEC seems to be rolling along.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn't believe in the PC market and the 8088 was the cheapest way to go. And here we are...

National did have its not quite a VAX on a chip NS32k series. Dec had its MicroVax 78032 (ISTR slightly later but better).

Zilog had its Z8000. I had the tricky job of unpicking a way out of that particular blind alley as one of my first jobs in industry. Olivetti M20 and certain of the dedicated word processors used it.

I worked on several using its smaller 9995 and bigger brother the 99k.

I didn't appreciate at the time just how good at interrupt handling and context switching it was until later when we tried to do the same real time tasks on a notionally faster Motorola 68k series CPU.

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

Same with the PS2 for the business market and that failed too.

But was quite adequate to see the PC take off spectacularly.

The main competitor at the time, the Apple II, had a similar horsepower cpu and the same plug in card approach.

And the AT was a more viable design.

I liked the Z8000 and still have a Captain Zilog t-shirt from a Zilog seminar. The story was Exxon owned Zilog and was in a pissing contest with IBM so the processor was never considered.

I had a 68000 development board and also thought that was a good prospect but 68008 parts weren't readily available. I was gun shy about Motorola anyway. Design one of their processors in and they would get an order for a billion pieces from the automotive industry and hang you out to dry. The early '80s were a preview of today with suppliers quoting one year lead times.

Then there was the iAPX 432 fiasco... I never had my hands on one of those; I don't think many did.

At least we don't have to compile with tiny, small, compact, medium, large, and huge libraries anymore.

As long as you have memorized those hieroglyphs. Eclipse comes with 50 icons. It takes a a month to memorize these and an hour a day to refresh. Then comes Blender, and imp and ... Strange fact about English is that the meaning of words change much. OTOH there seems not be a general accepted hieroglyphs for HELP!

There is not difficult to show commands in a list and to accept a first letter. No need to use the mouse.

You are forced to use the mouse past insane sequences of random characters, that are used in the url's. <SNIP>

The Chinese are literate, the USAians are not. We will see who wins.

Groetjes Albert

PDP15 backplanes were wire wrapped for a good reason. (square meters). wire wrap is about ten times more reliable then solder joints, and can more easily be corrected.

Groetjes Albert

They didn't try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a home computer. Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better graphics. Most makers understood the importance of that aspect.

PS2 was a blatant attempt at a FUD lockin and had the interesting effect of uniting all the other PC clone makers to generate a better ISA bus.

It really upset the scientific instrument makers who had their own series of dedicated daughter boards that plugged into IBM PCs. It even caused Intel to go on make an OEM 386 PC clone of its own for industrial and scientific users which ISTR still had some old style slots.

Mainly because no one was every fired for buying IBM.

And interestingly whilst selling an IBM AT to Russia was entirely legal at the time they came out selling a faster 8MHz Compaq clone was not! Amazing what having an inside track on the political system can do...

That is a separate issue to the silly claim that IBM didn't believe in the PC market.

Unsurprising that IBM couldn't compete on price. They couldn't with the original PC or AT either.

But because it was later, it was better than the Vic20 and C64 which both sold very well.

That's overstated on the uniting. DEC didn't go that route and did its own stupidities.

Yep.

Yes, and preceeded the IBM PC,

Not convinced that that was the reason for that.

The 5120 was a strange beast since it retained the 5100's APL capability with APL hieroglyphics on the keys, but also had BASIC. The idea was the

A year later the System/23 came out. It looked a lot like the 5120 but used an 8085 rather than the PALM 'microprocessor'. The PALM was actually a bunch of gate arrays running microcode. (Put All Logic in Microcode) which was how they emulated the System/360 to port APL.

All this obscure history had its impact on the 5150. Boca Raton wasn't completely in a bubble. System/34 BASIC went back to '77 and the System/23 design using a 8085 may have stacked the deck for Intel.

I'll admit that at the time, while I made my living with computers, when Joe Sixpack would ask me what they should buy and what they could do with it my answer was basically 'beats the s*it out of me.'

And after that, IBM woke up and smelt the coffee and changed its mind on that.

I wasn't really talking about icons. Just a GUI so you can use a menu, full of English words.

I do prefer English on a washing machine, because whatever moron decided a tumble dryer is a square and an iron is a triangle needs his head read.

Question mark in a circle.

Not sure what you're getting at. Windows makes it easy to find what you need.

I hope the USA dies soon. The whole world hates them. Maybe have a word with Putin?

ROTFPMSL!

That's the most f***ed up site ever. What's the difference between: Other race Unknown race Not Hispanic or Latino Unknown

Glad to hear it.