Dave Morriss @perloid@mastodon.sdf.org

@claudiom Yes, makes sense. I'm wary of too many 24/7 systems these days.

@claudiom True enough. I tend not to do that these days because of power consumption. I have a few Raspberry Pis that I run as servers or as controllers and they are cheaper to run (us retired peeps on pensions have to watch the pennies 😉 )

@claudiom We ended up using a PC and a KVM switch per 19 inch rack, with the PC running a terminal emulator. Being a university there was no shortage of old PCs as they got recycled out of labs (I still have a few in my attic, though a Pentium 4 isn't a lot of use these days!)

@claudiom We had labs full of these connected to our DEC VaxCluster in the 1980's/90's. I hoarded a few for use on Linux servers but someone (I think my boss) threw them out without discussing. I'd have grabbed some for myself if I'd known that would happen 😭

@claudiom You're right 😃 My son's a great music fan, so I often ask him for suggestions. Sometimes our tastes coincide. This old geezer should try and learn more from youngsters 😉

@claudiom I hardly listen to music. I'm sorry to say that I find about 90% of the music I own from the 60's, 70's and onward to be boring. I listen to a lot of classical music now but not on an MP3 player. My friend is a great fan of Genesis for example, but after following his recommendation after a few plays I'd had enough! My brain must be broken 😉

@claudiom I hate it when that happens. I have to wash dishes and prepare dinner with my own thoughts to keep me company!
I have 35 episodes, 1.5Gig, 1 day, 02 hours, 16 minutes, 11 seconds still to go 😉

@NYbill I really miss that distribution! I see from your later comment that you still have it on your EEEpc, well so do I 👍

@clacke Fixed.

Probably left over after the transition from the old (proprietary) comment system to our own.

@clacke Thanks! I rarely look at this page! Checking the code now, the database values are fine.

@tuturto @klaatu I'd have been stuck on why 49 is XLIX and not IL, which seems more logical, and is more compact, especially when 40 is XL. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems a teeny bit arbitrary 😉

@tuturto @klaatu This is nice. I would concluded something similar if I'd thought about it, but I never have. I might even be deluding myself about that!

I did try cheating though:
$ perl -e '
> use Math::Roman qw{roman};
> $yr = roman("2019");
> print "$yr\n"'
MMXIX

I'm just lazy I guess...

@klaatu So glad you found it useful! We both had fun doing the series and learnt a lot along the way. Thanks for your kind words 😃

@clacke @ghostdancer The DEC VAXcluster I managed from 1987 onwards had two consoles which were CP/M machines booted from floppies. That was my only experience of CP/M. https://h50146.www5.hpe.com/products/software/oe/openvms/history/digital/comp/images/large/vax8800.jpg

That's show 16, the last in the Gnu Awk #HPR series recorded on Mumble with my long-term co-host b-yeezi. It's been an interesting journey since July 2016.

@ghostdancer @clacke Yes indeed. The university I worked at here in Edinburgh is known for science and engineering, and BBC Micros were to be found in many labs controlling experiments or data gathering back in the 1980's and 90's.

@ghostdancer @clacke I nearly forgot; I bought the Z80 add-on for my BBC Micro, so I could get the best of both worlds. Have to admit that I didn't do a lot with it though.

@ghostdancer @clacke The BBC Micro absorbed me totally. We had them at work too. We also had the equipment to program and UV erase EEPROMs for the BBC. I broke out the connector for extra ROMs and installed a ZIF socket for it. We developed some of our own software (in collaboration with another University). They'd developed BBC KERMIT, a 6502 assembler, and a display system called FANFARE, all with some help from us. Fun times!

@clacke @ghostdancer I could never get on with BASIC when I first found it. I liked BBC BASIC and its predecessor Atom BASIC because they could drop down into 6502 assembler for one thing.
I had Forth on my BBC micro, and I bought a synthesiser for it, the Music 500, which ran Ample, a Forth derivative.

@clacke @ghostdancer Ha! I'm older than FORTRAN, I just discovered! Not as old as the Jacquard machine that controlled power looms with punched cards though 😉