It hasn't quite been a normal day (Edgar and I aren't feeling up to snuff), so no animal post today either. Honest, I will tomorrow.
Neat things about my car:
- the doors not only lock as you start driving, but they unlock when you remove the key after turning the car off
- the side mirrors are heated - it comes on with the rear window defroster
- it corners on a dime
- great shock absorption
The neatest thing about my car:
- it's mine!
HP joined the microcomputer craze in 1979 with their Series 80s computers. These were usual and actually more like an followup to their calculators. They utilized a custom 8-bit processor made by HP. It had nifty non-standard features. For one thing lots of registers (64 of them) and the system was designed to work with BCD just like a calculator. It supported natively 12 digits with exponents to 499 (IIRC). The first release (HP 85) used a built in tape drive. Again very unusual. When diskette support was released, they chose HP-IB (GP-IB or IEEE-488 nowdays) instrument bus.
This example was picked up at an University of Kentuck Surplus auction. It is an HP 86B with 3 memory cartridges and a ROM expansion cartridge. Hence its total RAM is 448K. Not bad for the early 80s. Too bad it only ran HP series 80s software. Also it would not run the HP 85 binaries! The HP series 80s computers were to some extent incompatible with each other. The series was discontinued in 1984.
EDIT: I believe the only thing I have used it for was as a calculator.
Monitor was bought at Goodwill
Memory expansion was by cartridges like many other systems of the time.
ROM expansion used this carrier with places for individual chips. Very much aimed at the engineer market.
ah, Brazil
a movie whose tagline should have been (but wasn't): Mistakes?
We don't make mistakes
yet we do. we do make mistakes, as in all bureaucracies, and someone will be found to blame.
Brazil is Terry Gilliam's dystopian vision of a not-too-far-future from a present that took an odd turn around the 1930's. there are many anachronisms and technical hybrids like old typewriters hooked up to tv screens and rotary telephones with amplifiers. the scenery and architecture are similarly affected: the public buildings pay hommage to 1930's German expressionism (think Metropolis), while apartments and other living spaces are oddly futuristic, with large numbers of exposed ducts everywhere.
the story references George Orwell's 1984 and Franz Kafka's The Trial. the unnamed government bureaucracy has made a mistake by eliminating a Mr. Buttle rather than Mr. Tuttle, who's believed to be a terrorist of some kind. a low-level employee of the Ministry of Information, Sam Lowry, is assigned to investigate. in this process, Lowry meets a neighbor of the widow Buttle, who is the same woman Lowry has been seeing in dreams. Lowry meets the renegade Tuttle...
...and things get complicated.
the world of Brazil, while different from ours, is not that different. consider a day at work in the Ministry of Information
Fuckity FUCK. I just tried to post and upload a video. I got the following existential error message from Vox:
"Sadly, your search couldn’t be completed. You could try again, but it still might not work. The world is a very unpredictable place. For this, we are truly sorry."That sounds very, um, Protestant.
What’s on your “to-do” list to prepare for the holidays? How will you use technology to help you get everything done?
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My transporter? Coming in VERY handy. And they said Star Trek technology was fantasy. Pshaw!