So...
Dodi Fayed was like the Spectrum. Much better, arrived a bit later but sadly prone to crashing at the worst possible time?
Back in 1981, two major events occurred in the UK. An awkward, troublesome, difficult-to-get-on-with contender captured the heart of an inexperienced young virgin: and in the same year, Prince Charles married Lady Di in the last major royal wedding to hit the UK. The frankly irritating yet inevitably famous (given the position …
Are you suggesting that prince William lives in a walled garden and has no little use in the real world?
You couldn't possibly be suggesting that he is a financial burden on those who use him and that he will cease to be attractive or amusing in a few years' time?
Have you found out prince William's views on flash yet or would that be akin to asking an iPad the same question?
.... Royal Family. The Daily Fascist (If you come from England you will know the paper I'm on about) love these buggers, along with the USA. I honestly can't see the attraction. The number of times I have had to walk past Buck Palace to get to work, because the Victoria line is down. Thinking I bet them buggers don't have to get up at 5am just to spend 2 hours commuting to some crappy office.
I can't understand the attraction of them, never have & never will...... I think I'm just bitter, twisted & to be honest a bit jealous.... I'm getting worse the closer to retirement age I get.
.... iPad. The Daily Fascist (If you come from England you will know the paper I'm on about) love these buggers, along with the USA. I honestly can't see the attraction. The number of times I have had to walk past the Apple store to get to work, because the Victoria line is down. Thinking I bet them buggers don't have to get up at 5am just to spend 2 hours commuting to some crappy office.
I can't understand the attraction of them, never have & never will...... I think I'm just bitter, twisted & to be honest a bit jealous.... I'm getting worse the closer to retirement age I get.
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Charles II came to the throne after Cromwell's death, so Cromwell had no opportunity to have any truck with his fawning minions. (If you're a rabid Jacobite, which I rather doubt from the tone of your post, you may claim he became Charles II as soon as Charles I was executed. But as he and any fawning minions were in France or Holland, the question of truck did not arise.)
You may be thinking of Charles I, but Cromwell was a fairly unimportant MP before the Civil War when his fawning minions were around. In any case, I don't think it was the fawning that was the problem. It was more the way in which some of the minions contrived to make it possible for Charles I to rule without Parliament.
I note that the Beeb has also used this line several times. What about Randy Andy and Fergie. I thought that was a fairly major bash and it was 5 years (1986) after Chas & Di (1981). I will accept that most of the others since then have been a lot lower key.
As someone on twitter said earlier - Kate Middleton = QILF
(Just waiting for the helicopter with the angry groom - you DON'T say to him "You and who's army?)
by the ability to get the IT angle in and enjoyed this article, but I'm sick of this wedding already.
Oh well, atleast El Reg hasn't gone over the top like the BBC News website has. I'm going to stop visiting if they don't calm down soon. I half expect their next article to be something on the reaction of the family dogs: "As it happened, in pictures".
"How much more fun for us all would it have been if Prince William had escaped his minders somehow, gone on an unauthorised adventure of some sort to the outrage of his grandma - and returned with a more mysterious princess from a more exotic background."
There are some pics on the BBC news site in which Ms Middleton looks rather like Koo Stark, Prince Andrew's ex, except with clothes on.
So perhaps William did get out of the walled garden?
Colin
was a useful stop-gap until Acorn delivered my BEEB (ordered on the first day of them accepting orders).
It didn't crash, as I took a Tandy keyboard, re-wired it (or actually re-painted the tracks on the membrane with silver paint) and connected it through a long ribbon cable, adding a power switch to the keyboard. Once I did this, it became quite stable, even with a Quicksilver pass through audio board (with sound modulator to the TV) between the '81 and the RAMpack. Never needed to touch the computer itself. No problems until my homebrew power supply blew it's bridge rectifier.
It was also interesting re-mapping the 1K internal RAM to another memory location when the RAMpack was attached, and putting a second 1K of static RAM under the keyboard connected on the ULA side of the bus isolating resistors, allowing me to change the IR register, which was used as the base address of the character table! Yay, programmable character set and (if you worked hard) bit-mapped graphics.
I actually tried writing a Battlezone variant, but it was just too slow in Slow mode.
Funny, I've just been called a hacker for a completely different reason by my colleague in the next desk. I wonder why.
I recently picked up a torrent of "The Computer Programme" ( 1982) with Chris Searle and Ian "MAC" MacNaught-Davis.
So many predictions were made in the show over 28 years ago and so many came true! 10 programmes covering BASIC programming on a BBC Micro and various reports about how computers will change our lives forever.
One quote from the show's main writer "All your information will be uploaded to an online network like Prestel(!) and this may not be a problem. Big Brother will exist and it's not so much a problem when he gets your information correct, but the problems will start when he gets it all wrong!"
Searle: "Video games consoles a harmless distraction now, but in the future they may well become the centre of the home entertainment centre along with your record collection and your video collection on laser-disc." Right medium, wrong size!
I vaguely remember the user manual of my Amstrad CPC 464 having a Q&A in it, including a question about why animations that could be shown on the computer were not to the same standard of a cartoon, even only moderately well animated.
The manual predicted that costs would come down and we would get computers that could handle better animation in future. I think there were other predictions in there that are now reality as well, but I paraphrased all of that, I don't have the manual to hand.
"Meanwhile we seem to have flogged this particular metaphor horse well past the point at which it stopped really going anywhere, so we'll desist."
It may have once been a horse, but by the end of the article you are still flogging the faint stain on the ground where said dead horse lay and was eaten by voracious badgers zipping in for quick nibbles between blows. Keep up the good work!
It is still fairly credible that Chas will get to be King for at least a few years between Brenda's departure and his own, so where does this metaphor stand then?
Dateline 2020: Due to long-running global component shortages and the collapse of all major UK cellcos (caused by the uncontrolled proliferation of data-hungry iPad apps probably), and the last decade's worsening solar activity knackering hi-end graphics cards worldwide (or something), the ZX81 becomes the "portable" computing device of choice once more. iPads' once-shiny tops now looking rather matte and liver-spotted, much like uncle Edward's..
Not sure where I was going with this really, but I like the idea of Sir Clive being in a position where Steve Jobs is obliged to kiss his ring.
And what is Harry? Might be that "Psion" mini-smartbook RegHardware previewed a year or so back: nice idea, probably more useful than the other two, but heritage clearly not what it's claimed to be?
and it was a gift in 6th grade [for err... not acing the 5th, but that's a diff story.]
In 1980s India, it didn't get bigger than this for us proles.
It was form factor of a keyboard, you could save games on an audio cassette recorder. Your TV was your monitor.. (yes, that means that any fine resolution graphics sucked]. Though there was hardly any OS.. you directly deal in assembly(using pokes) or typed your programs in sinclair basic.
It was fun - and I wasn't your nerdy pimpled spectacled kid at that time (I was a national level judoka .. though today I am a professional nerd, who looks like one as well). If nothing zx80 launched a career for me as a kernel programmer. Perhaps the iPADs and the slates will launch some careers of some future movie critics & bloggers too.. but I fail to get envious.
cheers to zx!
AC.
Paris, coz she has some Jade(d) Exes..
" Just as many ZX81 aficionados would ultimately wind up working in the miserable and soul-destroying IT industry"
Truely prophetic...
I'm so much better since leaving the industry...
Although, some of my best memories involved the inventions Sir Clive "sugar daddy" Sinclair.
Print USR1+USR1 anyone????
The difference between the ZX81 and the iPad is that the latter is designed as a "premium" product whereas the ZX81's design focus was clever cost saving, making it incredibly affordable (by the standards of its time)- far cheaper than almost any of the competition, which made its design limitations forgivable (though not, admittedly, the notorious RAMpack wobble).
If you simply go by inflation alone, rather than typical household income, the ZX81 is still slightly cheaper than the iPad, around £290.
As for the obvious comparison, well the iPad resurrects the flat keyboard that everyone hated on the ZX81. Does this mean we'll be seeing third-party replacement keyboards/cases for the iPad that look like this? (^_^)
http://www.kropotkin.co.uk/images/cgeuk05/fuller_zx81_kb.jpg
If an IPad only looks good when compared to a 21 year old product, that says it all.
But I'm confused as to what is meant to be the "superior" item here. Sure, compared today, an 2010 IPad manages to do better than a 1981 ZX81 - amazing.
But comparing them against what was available at the time, let's see. The ZX81 gave home computing for many, and led onto a great generation of home computers for millions. The IPad gives mobile computing, but that's _years_ old now (mobile Internet was all the rage in ooh, 2003, and we've had netbooks since 2007). You can also get far smaller mobile devices (e.g., phones), the IPad is like a 1980s brick in comparison.
The ZX81 was hated for its rubber keyboard, but the IPad doesn't even have one at all, instead having to use a screen with no feel of keys at all.
The ZX81 can be programmed. The IPad can only be programmed using a special Apple PC, and programs have to be approved by Apple, and you have to pay for that.
The IPad runs one program at once, the ZX81 - okay, fair enough, they're on the same level there.
The IPad is only really useful with Internet access, and widespread Internet access, mobile Internet and the web didn't exist in 1981, so that's unfair to compare.