Profiteering or not.?

Oh yes, But we, in R&D, were allowed to make purchases outside that system

Golly., credit cards were not invented when I were in that situation guv. A computer was something there was only two of in the whole county.

Wide area networking was a 50 baud modem

No, in our case the R & D departments were separate accounting centres, and we could buy from the manufacturing stores or directly, as appropriate.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher
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Free markets have existed longer than governments.

"Me Ug, I got big fat deer, you give me daughter to f*ck, I give you leg roast?"

The main problem is that large companies will always look for ways to make the market as unfree as possible, and politicians can be (and routinely are, especially in the EU) employed to do this.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

However, the same was true of many things. The local High Street didn't offer much choice of different suppliers and the only way to compare prices was to go to another shopping area, which would be 15-30 minutes away, depending upon the one chosen.

Reply to
Colin Bignell

Ex-radar VCR517B with a green screen?

Reply to
gareth evans

Yeah, I think that's where I got to.

Yes. I develop and build under macOS, and build 64-bit versions for macOS (ARM and Intel), Linux, Windows, and the Pi (Arm, 32 bit). I'm using the Xojo IDE. What's nice is I can run VMs with Win-10 or Mint on my Mac and debug remotely to them from the Xojo IDE running under macOS, with the app running under the hosted OS in the VM. I can do the same with the Pi, though I have real hardware for that.

Yesterday I happened to have access to a real Win-11 machine and copied a Windows built version onto a stick and took that with me, so I could test the Win exe on real hardware. Runs the same, basically, albeit more slowly than I would have expected. Perhaps it's an old box.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Then they're known as 'lobbyists', and thus made respectable. All such activity by elected persons should be banned.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Er no. One scanned specialist magazines to see the adverts.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

So, if I wanted to buy, say, material to make curtains in 1953, which specialist magazine would you have recommended?

Reply to
Colin Bignell

Drapers weekly? Or the swatches in the drapers stores. No one actually stocked material. All the fabric shops had the same swatches and could get the same fabrics at the same price. What they stocked were the very few things that were guranteed fast sellers and anything unsold was banged out as remnants in the January Sales.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I know two curtain places, one quite close and one half an hour away, where they have a lot of different materials on the shelves. However, neither has a web site, so I would still need to visit both to compare prices.

Reply to
Colin Bignell

All my fabric retailers have closed down. There's a John Lewis 22 miles away that carries some stock, but even there that is only 10% of what they can get in for you, and the carpet and curtain store 10 miles away, has even less stock I buy all my material on line now. Most places will send you a free sample if you want to look and feel it

And if they wont, you go to someone who will...

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

and the Government's Chief Scientific Advisor thought that 5, in total, were all that the country needed.

Reply to
charles

Where experts are concerned, 'twas ever thus. But what HE though of as a computer, was not what a computer eventually became.

Guided missiles needed analogue computers that could take high G loading. Welcome to the 741 IC.

Onbaoird ship weapons computers needed to execute complex algorithms in real time yet be smaller than the ship itself. Hey ho RTL, DTL, ECL TTL and finally CMOS, NMOS, PMOS integrated circuits and the dawn of the mini computer.

Then Intels 'pocket calculator' 4004, showed the way into 8 bit microprocessors, the 6502 smashed the price barrier and computers in your pocket were the result.

Its been a wild ride.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

It isn't a moral issue.

A retailer who starts in business today or tomorrow will have to buy all their hypothetical curry stock at £1.50. They won't have any they can sell at less than (say) £2.

Explain why another shop has a "moral" duty to sell at £1.

The profit and loss account of a trading business (whether a corner shop or a national chain) is not calculated in the minute detail you suggest.

And it is standard practice to price goods at least partly on the basis of what it will cost to obtain replacement stocks.

Reply to
JNugent

Sorry, typo, RPM, no idea how it got so mangled.

Me too.

Me too.

Then you need to get out more.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Always charge what the market will stand. Bill

Reply to
wrights...

Never saw anyone using that for retail purchases.

BULLSHIT.

BULLSHIT.

Reply to
Rod Speed

It is actually a standard practice to price goods with a markup on what you paid for them.

Reply to
Rod Speed

They are family businesses, but, like a few other small shops in the area, I can't see them surviving unless they own the property. There was a big sell-off of properties in the area in the 1930s, to cover death duties on a large estate, so ownership could have been in the family since then.

There's a John Lewis 22 miles

Reply to
Colin Bignell

No, the facts remain that very few people make clothes any more, and by and large the only private purchases of fabrics are for curtain making and upholstering. So fabric sales have become an adjunct of interior decoration shops and carpet retailers. And these come with massive swatches to select the material that is never held in stock. And wallpaper swatches to match.

But these days its almost easier to browse online from seriously large wholesalers who will ship you yards of material and of course as many free samples as you want.

Internet killed the drapers shop. I have one shop that majors in sewing paraphernalia and they carry a limited stock of lining material and that is it.

I ordered all my stuff online.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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