Richard Parry Responds to my Email About Tarmacking Over the Towpaths

[Hudds Lad]

23 minutes ago, Jim Riley said:

Dress these up with clogs, corduroy trousers, collarless shirt and a cap. 

 

 

No waistcoat or neckerchief then? call yourself a boater  

Edited June 30, 2023 by Hudds Lad

[Tacet]

On 28/06/2023 at 09:48, IanD said:

 

Thanks for that, but the www didn't exist at all until 1991 --  so given that I was talking about 1981, how many of the p*ss-takers still think I could have logged onto a website and printed out a permit? 😉

 

Here are some clues for you:

-- no www until 1991

-- the first widely available web browsers emerged in 1993

-- Windows 3.0 (with browser) was released in 1990

-- IIRC we bought our first PC in the mid 80s, a Viglen 10MHz 80286 running GEM OS (pre-Windows)

-- Sinclair QL was introduced in 1984

-- printers in the early 80s were dot matrix or daisywheel, couldn't print out a card like that

 

In the1970s we had a ex-teleprinter (like a typewriter) somehow connected to a TRS 80.  It sort-of worked but needed to be in another room because it was that noisy.

 

We could only dream of dot matrix and daisywheel printers.

[magnetman]

I had a panasonic KXP1081 and a Citizen 120D in the late 80s. Both 9 pin dot matrix. Lovely machines with the paper feed system with holes down the side. 

 

Then the world was changed forever with the bubblejet and companies emerged just to rip people off for the ink. 

 

I don't think the old dot matrix printers can be made to work any more. Maybe they can. I specially liked the sound they made. All my secondary school homework was done on the Panasonic.  

[IanD]

1 hour ago, magnetman said:

I had a panasonic KXP1081 and a Citizen 120D in the late 80s. Both 9 pin dot matrix. Lovely machines with the paper feed system with holes down the side. 

 

Then the world was changed forever with the bubblejet and companies emerged just to rip people off for the ink. 

 

I don't think the old dot matrix printers can be made to work any more. Maybe they can. I specially liked the sound they made. All my secondary school homework was done on the Panasonic.  

 

We had a line printer at work (GEC Hirst) which absolutely chewed through that green-and-white-striped 132-column perforated paper, I don't know what was inside (drum/chain/band printer?) but it could get through an entire foot-high box of paper in very short order (a few minutes?).

 

As you'd find out if you accidentally tried to print out a relatively small file which was some non-ASCII format chock-full of line/page feeds, so you only got a few characters per page. One box of paper sometimes wasn't enough... 😞

Edited June 30, 2023 by IanD

[gatekrash]

6 hours ago, IanD said:

 

We had a line printer at work (GEC Hirst) which absolutely chewed through that green-and-white-striped 132-column perforated paper, I don't know what was inside (drum/chain/band printer?) but it could get through an entire foot-high box of paper in very short order (a few minutes?).

 

As you'd find out if you accidentally tried to print out a relatively small file which was some non-ASCII format chock-full of line/page feeds, so you only got a few characters per page. One box of paper sometimes wasn't enough... 😞

When I started work as a mainframe programmer back in the 80s we used to get our assembler code dumps back on the 132 column paper. You'd get one line of code wrong, load a register incorrectly or something, and the first you knew you'd got an error was an hour later when a 9 inch thick box of paper turned up at your desk. Would take an hour to work through the stack of paper to find which line was wrong, you'd correct it, recompile and resubmit the job and then another hour later another 9 inch thick stack of paper would arrive, repeat every day for a week or so.

 

The printers in the machine room were incredibly fast, given there were about 40 of us in the IT department and we were all generating vast amounts of printouts every day. Your estimate of a few minutes is right, it used to go through the thing almost at a blur.

 

Once finished with I used to donate the stacks of paper to a local school to use the back for drawing on, but we must have used miles of paper in a week. 

 

We never had much time for the 'newbies' who started learning COBOL, they were never real programmers, cos they never experienced the 'pleasure' of working through the entire contents of a mainframe's memory written out line for line in EBCDIC (the forerunner of ASCII)  and hexadecimal.

 

At home I had one of those thermal printers attached to a ZX Spectrum. They were great as long as you only wanted a shiny black and silver printout which was about 4 inches wide.

[Allan(nb Albert)]

As I recall, some of these early line printers were capable of 1,200 - 1,500 lines per minute. 

 

The BBC used to run a computerised Grand National fifty years ago in conjunction with a subsiduary of Barclays Bank.

 

I can still picture the late Peter O'Sullevan, wearing a hat and coat, standing on two boxes of fanfold paper providing the comentary as a Iine printer spewed paper

sounding like a machine gun.

[Ronaldo47]

i have some undated leaflets describing the LEO III computer and its peripherals. Its printer was  the "English Electric Leo Model 1040 High Speed  Line Printer" ,  with switch-selectable speeds of 500 or 1000 lines per minute, although only 40 of the available 55 characters was available at the 1000 speed.  Upper case letters only, 10 numbers, 19 symbols & punctuation marks ( basically, what you found on a standard typewriter, without  ?, @, or _ ,  but with both £ and $ symbols and a "10" character).

 

Dimensions (H/W/L) : Weight 

Printer: 3'1"/4'6"/2'6" : 500lb

Electronics cabinet 5'9"/4'1"/1'6.5" : 1300lb

Power consumption: 2.5kW

 

Not the sort of thing to stick on your desk!

 

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by Ronaldo47
typo

[Allan(nb Albert)]

[Ronaldo47]

Thanks very much for posting the dated photo, my leaflets have no illustrations or dates.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Ronaldo47

[Mike Todd]

5 hours ago, Allan(nb Albert) said:

Ah, I remember Kidsgrove in those  days well!

[LadyG]

LEO = Lyons Electronic Office if memory serves me right. Lyons tea rooms were very popular of course.

When I joined the Civil Service as a trainee we were shown the Computer which produced our salary calculations, white coats were worn, and there were tapes like an outsize tape recorder. The room had air conditioning, which was a novelty in those days

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by LadyG

[cuthound]

On 28/06/2023 at 13:41, ditchcrawler said:

Got mine from the Stop house, Braunston FOC some 22 years ago, even has a clear plastic wallet to attach it to the bike 

 

I vaguely recall getting a cycle permit and a licence for a canoe at the Stop

house in Braunston for my first canal holiday, from.UCC 50 years ago. 

 

IIRC the cycle permit was free and the canoe licence was 50p.

[Ronaldo47]

22 hours ago, LadyG said:

LEO = Lyons Electronic Office if memory serves me right. Lyons tea rooms were very popular of course.

When I joined the Civil Service as a trainee we were shown the Computer which produced our salary calculations, white coats were worn, and there were tapes like an outsize tape recorder. The room had air conditioning, which was a novelty in those days.

That reminds me that when I started work at Plessey in 1969, new entrants were given a tour of the site which included the accounts department, which was computerised. Data was entered using 80 column punch cards where characters are represented by pairs of rectangular holes at appropriate positions. As a check on data accuracy, each card was punched twice by different operators using different machines. One machine punched the top halves of each hole, the other punched the bottom halves.  A card reader machine checked that all holes were complete before processing the data, and rejected any card that was defective.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Ronaldo47
typo