Correction: The SONEAR observatory is in Oliveira (not Oliveria), Brazil.
Posts by Pete Maclean
9 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2007
City-obliterating asteroid screamed past Earth the other night – and boffins only clocked it just 26 hours beforehand
What is dead may never die: a new version of OS/2 just arrived
ArcaOS: operating system. Archaos: circus. ArcaOS: operating system. Archaos: circus. ArcaOS: operating system. Archaos: circus.
Well I would never call an operating system Archaos, sorry I mean Arcaos or rather ArcaOS. How the heck do you pronounce it anyway?
Posted by a veteran OS/2 aficionado and champion.
Tiger Moth: Old school flying without all those pesky flaps, brakes and instruments
Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)
I am hearing-impaired and find it hard to use a mobile phone. I also happen to only rarely have any need for a mobile. So I do not have one. I would however like very much to have a mobile device just for sending and receiving SMSes. There once was such a thing, called a Peek, but it seems to have disappeared and I can find nothing else like it.
Upstart's 'FLASH KILLER' chips pack a terabyte per tiny layer
So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Hulu's web TV coming to the UK
Green Winging it
As a US-resident Brit who enjoyed Green Wing, I rushed to Hulu when I heard it had the series available. This was my first experience of Hulu and it was a poor one. The quality of the image and audio they stream is okay but the quality of the streaming itself I found barely tolerable. There were numerous "buffering" pauses and finally, about half way through the first episode, it stalled and never resumed.
Remembering the CDC 6600
More memories
>Were the on-site engineers the same group that had to program the machines
>with all the punchcards? I hear -lots- of stories of a certain person dragging down
>a cart with a whole lot of punchcard boxes at a time for the programmers to run.
No, the CEs were not programmers. I actually have little notion of what they did -- but they did plenty of it. There were times when I had programs on huge decks of punch cards but I did most of my 6600 programming on Intercom, the interactive subsystem. I worked with SCOPE, KRONOS and NOS. Before my time there was another os called Chip (for Chippewa). I also remember PLATO.
Serial number 4
I was not around for the launch of the 6600 but I did work on the first one to be delivered to a customer. Something the article did not mention is that, in addition to plunking down millions to buy the computer, the customer had to pay heaps more for a team of on-site customer engineers to keep it running. It was a great machine to program; I wrote lots of assembly language for it. Those were the days!