What did you do today (2015)

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Just spotted this 'working model' of a Drummond Round-Bed Lathe, on ebay.

• I don't need it
• I haven't got room for it

There's 'Aversion Therapy' in action !!

MichaelG.

[Ken GillottParticipant @kengillott]

Are B9A valve bases still obtainable? I have some new valves I kept from 40 years ago I'd like to play with.

Ken

[Dave DanielsParticipant @davedaniels93256]

Posted by Ken Gillott on 01/04/2015 22:56:46:

Are B9A valve bases still obtainable? I have some new valves I kept from 40 years ago I'd like to play with.

Ken

 

 

Still get them several places .. eg: **LINK**

Only a few years since I dumped all my err 'stock' ??

ECLL800's, EF86, ECC83, EL34, KT66, 2D21 ( thyratron IIRC ), 25L6 and God only knows what else. Not much idea if they were good or dud. Once had a Mullard valve tester but all the programme card wotsits were for every damn valve in creation except the ones I had so that got heaved onto the WEEE heap at the local tip.

 

All that nostalgia gone forever ..  

 

Dave

 

Edited By Dave Daniels on 01/04/2015 23:12:21

[Rik ShawParticipant @rikshaw]

robjon34 – Nice bag of stuff for you there, well done!! Weather dire this last weekend so nothing to report bargainwise at this end but upcoming easter weekend weather looks more promising. Good hunting!

Rik

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Given that the camera memory is Flash not RAM I think a better analogy would be drum memory – one heck of a big drum.

Saw a couple of nice workshops going down the M25 this morning. About 12×24 fully assembled and on the back of lorries. Actually probably holiday chalets off to a south coast park but couldn't help wondering how I could get one popped into my garden.

Our village is very proud of its one small dim street lamp. It doesn't do much more than light the village stocks and the blasted BP garage a mile away gives more light.

[Speedy Builder5Participant @speedybuilder5]

Memory – the mind boggles – 40 years ago, we used 8k boards (8k bits) or 1,000 characters and the whole machine only had 32k. BUT, we ran interactive stock control for over 10,000 parts, Bills of materials, purchasing etc etc. The disc drives were only 25 Mb and year dates were just 2 digits. When we had a disk error, we 'patched' the bad area out and jumped over it to a new bit of empty disk.

About 50 years ago, we only had a 16K machine where all input was via paper tape, no disc storage, just magnetic reel to reel tape. There was a resident engineer(s) to keep it going, and it could only single task. The aircon room was bigger than the computer room which was about 100 square metres.

Good old days!!

[Oompa LumpaParticipant @oompalumpa34302]

I remember the very first Winchester 2 Megabyte hard drive's arrival, the answer to all my prayers. And my employers too I think as the development was so fast I was out of a job within twelve months and the hard drive was in the scrap heap. Solid State had arrived with a bang.

Last year marked twenty years I have been hosting my own webserver, I remember negotiating for my first 2Mb of webspace and whether or not that included the email. Now I host in a Cloud Instance and replicate across multiple instances hiding behind Cloudflare mostly. How things have changed and thanks to those folk with incredible vision or great luck. Or a combination of both.

graham.

[Stuart BridgerParticipant @stuartbridger82290]

I remember my first IT job, we had 5, 10 and 20MB hard disks, but most work was done on floppy drives (360 or 720KB). The Sales Director was quoted as saying "20MB, who on earth is ever going to fill up a 20MB drive, we can't sell those…" c. 1987. Not sure what the cost was at that time. Also remember about 1990 shipping UNIX servers with memory boards about the size of an A3 sheet of paper (VMEbus), 8, 16, 32 or (much later) 64MB, at 1000 pounds per MB. Happy days….

[KWILParticipant @kwil]

I can remember when we had an 8K drumstore hidden away in the bottom of the computer rack! My first PC had a 10Mb hard drive, I have still got it tucked away in astore, no idea if it still works!

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

We had the first digital loading computer in the company I worked for which entailed me going up the road in Miami around 1983 and spotting an FX602p in a shop window for 50 bucks and programming it up

A manual ship loading calculation which took 40 minutes on paper could be done in 2 mins tops with our 0.5kb computer

Got sent back up the road to buy one for the chief officer once he saw it in action

I sold mine around 1999 for 100 bananas on ebay, it still worked fine too

[OuBallieParticipant @ouballie]

Our district council has started switching our street lights off at the bewitching hour and back on at 0600h, all in the name of economy.

For the first time I can now see some of the stars, but I estimate less than 1% of what I could in SA, due to pollution.

Since being back in the UK, however, I haven't seen the Milky Way as it's something to behold, as is a sky covered in stars.

Geoff – How many people look to the sky at night and wonder?

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

I remember me and a mate with an Amstrad PCW and a 555 on the reset line, using my dad's heathkit scope on each bus line in turn to decode the first few instructions on boot up.

Ray (the genius part of the duo) was working on a new disk drive interface, having previously designed the microgem disk interface for it.

Neil

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

Brian, did you start your computing life at Bletchly Park? Had an Uncle that started there, last time I was in UK (1984), he showed me round his pet computer at British Nuclear Fuels, it was massive, and used 72 mm (I think) magnetic tapes reel to reel, they were waiting on it's replacement, a unit about 5ft square X 4ft high, today most peoples phone hase more computing power than those ones.

Camera Tripod to Camera thread is covered by ISO 1222:2010  1/4" 20TPI UNC, and 3/8" 16 TPI UNC, 1/4" preferred size.

Ian S C

Edited By Ian S C on 02/04/2015 10:57:46

[Mike PooleParticipant @mikepoole82104]

Since being back in the UK, however, I haven't seen the Milky Way as it's something to behold, as is a sky covered in stars.

Geoff – How many people look to the sky at night and wonder?

It is difficult to comprehend that space just goes on and on, thinking about it just makes me boggle. Best to get in the workshop, I think I understand most of what goes on in there.

Mike

Edited By Michael Poole on 02/04/2015 11:32:47

[JESParticipant @jes]

I was one of the engineers kept in the cupboard down the corridor for when the payroll came to a grinding halt. The payroll for Notts County Council seemed to go on all month with evening shif as well. Those were the days.

JES

[Mogens KildeParticipant @mogenskilde92996]

I've found that it has been a while since an update on my work of the 5 pcs. steam engines.

Today i finished the steam cylinder and steam chest part of the project, these latest parts where a rewarding complicated job to do on manual machinery.

/Mogens

[WindyParticipant @windy30762]

Had an interesting talk at P.E.E.M.S. by Richard Smith of http://www.smithwatkins.com about the science and manufacture of Trumpets.

The drawing of tapered brass tubes about 0.010" metal thickness and the very tight U bends they have to do on thin wall brass tube using Cerrobend.

How the bell at the end is just a flat piece of brass folded on itself soldered then opened out on a mandrel and finished on a spinning lathe.

Another manufacturer of Wind instruments bends larger diameter thin wall brass tube by flattening it then bending to the radius required it's put into a die and the flattened tube blown out by hydraulic pressure.

The slightest internal imperfection creates changes in the sound quality that is produced musicians can tell.

The quality of workmanship is fantastic and all the military bands in the UK use his trumpets.

Another case when there are things to learn from other disiplnes that could be of use in our hobby.

Paul

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Just popped into Wickes for a couple of bags of concrete.

A quick look at the drawn aluminium tube would suggest you can possibly pick out better ones by eye, only one or two out of about 10 were noticeably off-centre, but perhaps not thick enough wall?

Neil.

[Danny M2ZParticipant @dannym2z]

Posted by Michael Poole on 02/04/2015 11:26:37:

Geoff – How many people look to the sky at night and wonder

Total lunar eclipse here down under

[Brian O’ConnorParticipant @brianoconnor49474]

Posted by Ian S C on 02/04/2015 10:47:24:

Brian, did you start your computing life at Bletchly Park? Had an Uncle that started there, last time I was in UK (1984), he showed me round his pet computer at British Nuclear Fuels, it was massive, and used 72 mm (I think) magnetic tapes reel to reel, they were waiting on it's replacement, a unit about 5ft square X 4ft high, today most peoples phone hase more computing power than those ones.

Camera Tripod to Camera thread is covered by ISO 1222:2010 1/4" 20TPI UNC, and 3/8" 16 TPI UNC, 1/4" preferred size.

Ian S C

Edited By Ian S C on 02/04/2015 10:57:46

No Ian, I learnt about Eccles-Jordan flip-flops as an RAF apprentice at No 1 Radio School, Cranwell. It was many years later that I first worked on digital computers, up till then they had all been analogue. My first bit of programming was on a GP4-B, made by Link to drive their flight simulators. It had a drum instruction memory and 8K of core random access memory. 8K!!!

B

[jason udallParticipant @jasonudall57142]

8k….mmm about a filing cabinets worth…
One of the oldest cnc I ever worked on…had removable core memory…5″ x5″ x 14″..
Per K…
Nice thing was you could un ship -store- swap and run the program still infrom last time…bit like chunky usb thumb drives

[Colin HeseltineParticipant @colinheseltine48622]

I used to work for British Coal Computer centre in Cannock and the first IBM 360/50 mainframe I worked on had 512K of main memory. If we had a large job to run we added LCS (Large Core Storage) which gave the incredible amount of 256K additional storage. This was a unit about 6ft tall, 3ft wide and around IIRC 8ft long. It had glass sides and you could see each ferrite core (per bit) and the three wires which passed through it to give it is value 0 or 1). We used to typically run three jobs at once. A taper Gener (in around 25K) to put headers on tapes for IBM2400 tape drives, main processing job which was usually around 400-500K and whatever would fit in the remaining space. We had the first Optical character reader in the country which was used to read Mineworkers timesheets.

One advantage of working there was being able to get the 6ft high card tray cabinets and their steel trays (which held around 2000 punched cards) which I have used in the workshop for the last 25 years. Used to have great fun (NOT) putting some punch card jobs through they could be over 50 trays of 2000 cards for one job and if you dropped them it was a fun job sorting them back into order.

Fun days.

Colin

[Jesse Hancock 1Participant @jessehancock1]

This takes me back to 8bit PET personal computer and that wonderful thing called a Commodore. Half an hour to load a rubbish program of 32 K only to have it crash. PC's have moved on thank god.

[brickyParticipant @bricky]

Today I finished making some tapered bore gauges .They range from !/2" to 3/4" all made by milling.I thought that the 1/4" flat mild steel would distort and was pleasantly suprised by by the accurate results.I ground a round over on a centre drill and used this on one edge of the tapers and reversed the work to form the semi circular edge.I used a small horizontal stub miller for this with the work bolted to an angle plate.After completing all of the rounding I transfered the work to a vertical mill and set the largest piece to 85 degrees with a digital angle finder and milled flat.Using this first taper I mounted it on a spacer and the next piece on top making them parallel mill flat and repeated all.A pleasing days work and for a change no scrap for the bin

A good day

Frank

[DullnoteParticipant @dullnote]

Niel , I am sure you did not buy concrete in Wickes, did you not buy cement to make concrete.

Sorry one of my pet hates, as civil engineer, its just annoying.

Never mind Niel I am sure you will get me back, I once asked for a black and white printer catridge, which had same effect on the shop assistant.

Has anyone else asked for something knowing what they mean but asking for the wrong thing

[Author]

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