I have so many thoughts.  And memories.  And so much to write; whether anyone actually wants to listen (or read) is another matter.  And time is a one-dimensional "thing" but thoughts and memories head off into all sorts of directions - ideas, comments where I can go multiple ways, boring people, and yet only one can be taken in each moment.

I am - for the the first time in years - relieved to not feel a huge pressure of "I must do X" as I wake up; for sure I've a thousand things I want to do but only a few of them these days are in the committed "MUST" section and there is a bigger overlay on a Venn diagram with the "WANT TO" and "ENJOY" circles.

So much I don't know where to post - to avoid boring my audiences to the point of loosing them; stuff that falls into the "enjoy" and "want to" intersection and should be found a home.  "Nothing to do with public transport" you may say.  And you may be right - but yet that is another dimension, and the dimension we are being selective about here on the Coffee Shop.  I am posting this in "Introductions and Chat" an know that my friends here will let me stray; it's brief stray as in a few minutes I'll be gathering last minute papers and thoughts and headed out for a bus and a Taunton experience ...

I wrote - for a decade - a blog of technical articles called "The Horse's Mouth" with technical tips and other wanderings - and there's a resource (or rubbish tip?) of 4000 articles plus, including the occasional gem.  The interface is an old one that makes editing impractical, and reading laden with browser warnings about it being insecure, but I have got some early experiments with a new interface - a bit clunky, distorted - but yet starting at https://grahamellis.uk/writings/ and with coding (I still do some of that) which changes on-page enclosures to https from http.  The - default - article is of course a public transport post from Melksham ... which is that "want" and "enjoy" stuff. News in the default article was not good, but it does feel good looking back and noting how far we have gone.

I must go, though, and get ready for Taunton.  But I want to brain dump first where I stated this thought with weather forecasting and my technical job with Tektronix and travelling all over the UK to sort out software issues in some exiting fields - like weather forecasting ... https://grahamellis.uk/writings/hm1641.html

And - from looking around yesterday, fond old computer memories and I really need to thank people who have shared these pictures in the "retro computer" group that lead me off on another tangent yesterday.

 
I sometimes look at the book of the BBC TV series The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. I am sure it is on the web somewhere. Interesting to compare the then state of the art computing.

I have up in the attic one of the modems which you drop the telephone handset into. No plastic, wonderful wooden box! Lots of historic computing hardware in the memory.

Warning I think this thread could be a major diversion.

 

Used one of those back in my university days running SAS. You had to dial the computer centre line and get the phone down fast into the cradle once answered or you were deafened by the carrier warble tone.

An accident-prone mate of mine in the same place managed to bring the whole university main-frame down using one; to 'bend a pin' in the then parlance. He rang the help-line when everything stopped working explaining who he was and where he was connected from. Their main question to him was what the *** he had done!

 
I have also seen an old photograph (late 1960s ?) of a 2MB hard drive being loaded into the rear cargo door of a DC3 geophysics aircraft. It was loaded using a forklift truck and it only just fitted through the door.

It was huge! I reckon with 4MB of storage, the plane would have been unable to take off.

 

Which is roughly what happened to Nimrod AEW!

 

You could be right there.

I do remember one of those 4000 series terminals - and waiting for it to redraw. But it's an indistinct memory (like the output from those thermal printers). It must have been when I was a postgrad at Cambridge, though what pictures it was bought to draw I cannot recall. As this was in the speech group it may have been for drawing bits of the vocal tract, as modelled for synthesis. But if was me getting it to draw pictures it may have been the engineer's usual reaction to any new bit of kit -  what fun things can I get that to do?

You also mention (in the blog) Perkin Elmer, who took over Interdata to use their computers in big complex instruments like mass spectrometers, and renamed it. But I was using an Interdata M70 which we got about 1974, and a bit later we got an M80 and an M85. These were all microcoded machines, and the M85 gave users access to the micro-machine and a microcode memory. So, needing a real-time vector display someone built one, interfaced as part of this machine. That was definitely fun to program - I did the basics of a billiard table simulator: lines for the table and cue, circles for the balls, and model the physics of the ball/cue and ball/ball contacts!

In 1977 I joined a company with "microwave" in its name, so the Tek instruments I used were mostly spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes etc. The computer side was mostly from DEC or HP (Tektronix's big competitor). Having looked at what old stuff I can easily find, that's mainly DEC manuals and the like, but I do have some old Tek 4000 thermal printout out of a program! A bit dark, but it's not been in the light so it's still quite readable - as much as it ever was.

Your blog also mentions Tek offering APL keyboards; that I never came across. But I do remember an IBM luggable (the 5100, it seems) that was built to run APL, so it could have a built-in screen (which only had to be small). That was down to someone I knew who had a consultancy in London doing business computing in APL. It takes all kinds ...

One more oddity I had to use was the HP 9100A, called both a personal computer and a programmable scientific calculator. This was big (similar to the IBM 5100), and interfaced to peripherals like printers and plotters, and custom devices. So it was used for controlling laboratory equipment, i.e. as a computer. HP have a history page on it, which notes that buying a computer often needed senior management approval, while a calculator didn't. That was why we had one in a University department - it was easier to get grant funding for.

 
I guess that's a 4014, in the photo with its trousers down!

We had a 4010 - too small to be very useful, a couple of 4014s and a 4016 with it's massive 25 inch screen in EC&M at Rolls-Royce in the eighties. I can just about conjure up the special smell of the 4361 Hard Copy Device in action, if I try really hard. In their latter years, we had the terminals souped up to run at 9600 baud.

Kids today: they don't know they're born...

 

On a similar tack. Here's an image of Norwich City Council having a computer delivered in 1957. Thirteen (at least) men needed to get it into the building. The image above, from over 60 years later, is someone holding a device with more computing power than the 1950s behemoth.

 
More philosophically, there are few things more sad and obsolete than code written for a long-dead computer system. All that time and effort spent crafting clever ways of doing something with that limited hardware, and a few years later you could buy a box to do the same thing for a few pounds.

 
The other side of that coin being the software that does what it does with impeccable precision and ease, while the present day equivalent drags its sorry way across people's lives and work. I'm immediately thinking of Office 365 vs Windows 'Write' - I can't recall the sorry date that 'Write' was retired though.

Another issue with the stuff is the software that cuts a valley in a similar way to a river - aeons later and we all wonder why, say, the Avon gorge exists. I can't quite see where I'm going with this metaphor, mind...

Mark