* 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

Pete Maclean

Correction: The SONEAR observatory is in Oliveira (not Oliveria), Brazil.

What is dead may never die: a new version of OS/2 just arrived

Pete Maclean

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

Pete Maclean

Thanks for republishing this! Most enjoyable.

Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

Pete Maclean

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

Pete Maclean

If Crossbar started development only in 2010, how can they determine that retention would stretch to 20 years? Is there some kind of stressing that emulates 20 years of wear?

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Pete Maclean

The Blair Witch Project

Never have I felt I should get my money back more than after viewing this turkey in a cinema.

Hulu's web TV coming to the UK

Pete Maclean

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

Pete Maclean

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.

Pete Maclean

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!