Picture(s) of the day....

[NewcastleFalcon]

Rather than bog down the Pickled Egg Election Selection with interesting but irrelevant tangents....this came up when I was looking at youtube for the "Man Alive" theme tune.....

It was only 1977!!!



Regards Neil

[bobins]

Though a few years after the Tandy and PET - I've got these two doorstops sitting in the back room here waiting for me to deliver them to a couple of mates who are going to run them up

Own work

[Hell Razor5543]

My Mum used to use the Atari STm when she wrote her first books. Only when her publishers asked to change to a more widely recognised word processor package (the printers could manage pretty much any file architecture) did she get a PC (which I built her for Christmas, with Office 97).

I remember have to repair it once (the Atari, that is). Several times 5 keys would stop working (always the same 5 keys). She had sent it to be repaired several times, without success (OK, it was an intermittent fault, which is always a sod). I was over there for a few weeks (they were living in Germany), and she asked me to look at it. I examined the keyboard and found, on one ground line (that these keys shared, but with no other key), a slightly dirty solder join (grey rather than silver). I touched up the join with a soldering iron and a dab of solder, the join looked mirror shiny, and that fault never came back.

[CitroJim]

Ahh a ZX81 That was my first home computer!

Learned a lot from that one, including machine code programming....

[Peter.N.]

Iv'e still got one of those in the loft, I learnt my Morse on it.

Peter

[CitroJim]

Iv'e still got one of those in the loft, I learnt my Morse on it.

Ahh yes I remember that Morse tutor now and the pain of entering it into the thing and then saving it to tape Happy days...

It was written in machine code as I remember Peter...

I was originally taught morse by an old ships wireless officer... I also had a Datong tutor which in those days was a clever electronic box of tricks that would send random letters and numbers at a speed of your choice..

These days I have a little morse tutor that runs under Linux to maintain my speed...

[Peter.N.]

I thought it was amazing considering its processing power Jim, once you had loaded the programme by means of a tape recorder, you could tailor the speed and letter/number combination and when you had finished it displayed it all on the screen. Couldn't have wished for anything better. It got me through the test but now I have to listen to a repeater about three times before I can identify it.

Peter

[CitroJim]

Yes, the ZX81 was truly remarkable Peter. What you could do with it was limited only by your imagination...

What could be done in just 1K of RAM was astonishing. I had the 16K ram-pack on mine and that opened up entirely new vistas

[bobins]

My brother got a program he wrote on his ZX81 printed in Sinclair User magazine - I think he got £10 for it at the time. IIRC it was called 'Lights Out'

[NewcastleFalcon]

Over at the Pickled Egg, the Happy Hammond Goes Pop has just played a tune related to this


Public domain from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Telstar.jpg

They must have big TV's in Cornwall

"Arthur" at Goonhilly Earth Station

© Copyright Paul Loft and
licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Regards Neil

..and a special treat for pictures of the day....the song..what language is it?

[Hell Razor5543]

This was our first satellite that Great Britain launched (although, with the help of the USA, we had got others into orbit);

https://ukamsat.files.wordpress.com/201 ... .jpg?w=593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_%28satellite%29

[myglaren]

Telstar was a huge hit when I was one of them teenagers, in our local coffee bar.

I recall waiting for the first international broadcast using Telstar - introduced by Cliff Michelmore IIRC.

[NewcastleFalcon]

The first French one


Asterix Musee du Bourget P1020341 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], by Pline (Own work), from Wikimedia Commons

Regards Neil

[myglaren]

^Love the stripy jumper but it needs a beret and a string of onions to complete the picture

[bobins]

If you paint it green and remove those antenna, it could be one of them Citroen spheres