I actually watched those crap shows. They were shown here in Australia.

Quote from: Bealman on September 12, 2015, 01:52:37 PM
I actually watched those crap shows. They were shown here in Australia.

Oh!!! You liked them then.... 
What were they about anyway?

I think they were a vehicle for selling the BBC machines.

My first experience with computers? How about this cool critter here which I built in 1970, but it's not with me now, and I really don't recall what happened to it..... a NOUGHTS & CROSSES MACHINE!!
[smg id=29042 type=preview align=center width=400]
... which cost me seven quid - all me pocket money!
[smg id=29043 type=preview align=center width=400]
Totally hard wired - forget Arduino!
[smg id=29044 type=preview align=center width=400]
.....with a great rat's nest of wiring behind it (a bit like under my layout)
[smg id=29046 type=preview align=center width=400]
.....from The Planet Instrument Company in Leeds - wonder if they still exist!
[smg id=29048 type=preview align=center width=400]

Quote from: Bealman on September 13, 2015, 04:51:09 AM

My first experience with computers? How about this cool critter here which I built in 1970, but it's not with me now, and I really don't recall what happened to it..... a NOUGHTS & CROSSES MACHINE!!

Nice to see real hardware... I still think, sometimes, that all this software stuff is a bit black magic!!
Are those the original bits of paper for your noughts and crosses machine that you've kept for all these years?

Yes indeed.... in the original envelope dated 20 March 1970.

I'm half thinking of building one again for a laugh... all those parts are still available - even the bulbs and MES holders!

Problem is I've discovered Arduino which I'm finding kinda addictive.

Quote from: Bealman on September 13, 2015, 08:29:33 AM
Yes indeed.... in the original envelope dated 20 March 1970.

I'm half thinking of building one again for a laugh... all those parts are still available - even the bulbs and MES holders!

Problem is I've discovered Arduino which I'm finding kinda addictive.

Wow!! What other interesting historic information have you got squirreled away there Bealman?

I built a thing that played NIM which utilised 3 'fairy light' bulbs which I procured from a 240V set that was wired in series. I combined them with three switches and an ex-post office bank of relays I got from a local surplus shop for a quid.

I ran the whole shabang off the same Triang  power unit that supplies part of my current layout!

I actually wrote a manual for it and took a photo of it. I know I have those here in Oz and am currently searching for them.

Stay tuned! 

George

1961 in the RAF an analogue bombing and navigation computer integrated with a radar system, decidedly analogue and mechanical in parts, including a triangle solver which took height from radar first ground returns converted to an analogue of 1 volt per 1000 feet, and slant range to target again derived from radar returns also 1V/1000' and used those values to drive servos positioning sliders on long linear potentiometers which were connected by a metal tape to position the slider on a third pot to give distance over the ground, plan range. Other bits of the system took inputs of airspeed and was able to compute wind speed and ground speed by manually correcting "drift" of the radar display.

That was designed back in the late 1940s early 50s for the V bombers.

When I left the RAF I worked for Plessey teaching engineers how to repair traffic controllers, the older ones used relays sand a few valves, I managed to avoid those, the mainstay were transistorised, and the newest used TTL chips. Area control for towns was just taking off using PDP 11s, then along came nicroprocessors, our first exposure was the 4004 and 4040, then the 8080 and 8086.

I bought a Colour Genie home computer mainly because it had a Z80 processor which used the 8080 instruction set with a few enhancements, started writing in basic and machine code, and due to this "expertise" got lumbered with teaching microprocessor techniques as well as basic electronics and digital techniques. I even went as far as writing a disassembler in a mix of basic and machine code,.

On the home front I moved on to an Amstrad 1512 which I upgraded with the addition of a 3'5" floppy drive and an extra 128K RAM, later upgraded to an Amstrad 1640 in which I fitted a 32Mb hard drive on an extension card; I discovered DR-DOS and used that in preference to MS-DOS, it was usually an issue ahead of MS-DOS which seemed to always be playing catch up. By the late 1980s I was no longer happy with the 8086 based machines and built my own 386; at the same time I was buillding a 25'x17' loft layout in N gauge.

Since then I have been following the typical upgrade route, and also getting a second machine for my late wife who had been a shift supervisor/operator on !BM  system 34 machines, had to teach her how to use a desktop. Finally went on line about 2001, dial up, sooooooooo sloooooooooooooow compared to nowadays, 56K as against 100M.

Now that is impressive. 

George

Twas in the days when computers fully occupied air conditions rooms
A firm of watch and clock manufacturers with the same name as a well known salt flavoured potato crisps decided to install one to control all their ordering and stock control.
My father had an count with them and returned a faulty item of stock he had received. He was credited with the sum of 4shillings and six pence which showed up on his next statement.
A month later the next statement arrived and showed another  credit of 4/9d making his credit 9/6d with each following statement adding a further 4/9d
Letters to the firm failed to cancel the error and the credit kept growing. In the end following errors in just about every customers account
Finally the firm went back to hand typed statements and the whole commuter was ripped out
Put me off buying/getting involved with computers for years

Quote from: Bealman on September 13, 2015, 04:51:09 AM
I think they were a vehicle for selling the BBC machines.

This is not the 'BBC computer' series of programs.  That OTT machine gets a mention but not as the main focus.  The archive is a set of programs from a variety of odd sources.

Allan.....

must have been when I worked in the Met Office at Bracknell in about 1963.

I didn't actually have any hands on on the computer, but the data we extracted from weather obs was input IIRC onto punch cards, and these in turn were used to produce punched tape which was then input into the computer, which consisted of loads of metal cabinets in a long room.

probably had the same computing power as my laptop, but we did manage one day, 5 day and 30 day forecasts, which through my rose coloured specs were more accurate than todays.

fed up with checking the forecast on line to be told its sunny, while watching the rain bouncing off the windows 

guess that's progress 

1963 would I believe have been a Ferranti Mercury at the met office. 5K of RAM, 20K of "disk" and probably less powerful than your fridge. It was replaced in 1965 with an English Electric KDF9 - which went up to a whopping 192K RAM !

When I was at school in the mid 1960s we had an arrangement with Imperial College. We wrote our Fortran programs and created the punched cards for the program and data. These were posted off to Imperial who ran the program and posted everything back to us including the reams of paper output. Worked well.

I meant to post the picture below earlier - but my 1st attempt at using MS Digital Editor post the W10 upgrade meant it would no longer work as it used to. However I now seem to have overcome the problem as the application is loading normally again, so I have put together a composite showing some of the Computer equipment I used to work with back in the 60's.

The 1901 was my 1st Mainframe experience and having written a Program for it in "PLAN" language I had to use a 80 column hand punch (as shown in the pic) to punch it up for feeding it into the machine to have it compiled so it could run.

I became quite an expert in using the handpunch (using 3 or 4 fingers at a time), before the next mainframe I used had paper tape as Input, and the data prep girls would then punch up my programs for me on one of their machines, and gradually COBOL replaced PLAN as the main programming language for "commercial" programs (with Fortan & Algol being used for more scientific programs).