Date : Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:12:29 +0200
From : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: BBC News - Retro computers on display to fans at
On 05/07/2010 16:08, F. Haroon wrote:
> How many RISC OS clones are sold now to safely say that some computers
> can still be programmed from switch on, with BBC BASIC VII or later?
Near zero, in the grand scheme of things? There's also the Psion
organiser which had OPL, but I don't think newer PDAs provide that sort
of functionality.
Anything running a Microsoft OS... well, if you discount how long
"switch on" actually is, you don't even get QuickBasic any more. They're
quite right that when the blue screen arrives, you are supposed to panic
and call an overpaid so-called professional [*]. Few kids program as a
passtime, about the limit of logical exercise is sudoku...
Best wishes,
Rick.
* - This isn't to disparage IT professionals, but the fewer nerds there
are, the more prices can go up, and the less chance there will be for
competition and correlation.
I've come across shocking quotes for things - example: a local library
(thankfully not the two I used to use!) forked out nearly three grand
for having their four computers networked and connected to their ADSL
box. Yes... two network cards (the other two had it on-board already), a
10baseT (yes, 10!) hub, and a bunch of cabling. The guy came in, spent a
day and a half fiddling inside the machines, it looked really
complicated to slide in an ethernet card. I told them they needed to get
a 100 megabit jobbie as if the ADSL is something like 16 and the network
is 10, duh, basic maths...
...to receive many excuses, ranging from "I don't know what I'm talking
about" to "I am not an official IT specialist so we cannot contract
you". What they mean is "It's a government contract and I'm not a
shyster" :-) but sadly the town purse stumped up the 3K, not Paris.
F'king idiots... and it gets worse, he's retained as the support guy.
Library girl refused to tell me his hourly rate. Probably too
embarrassed that they fell for it.
How did I get on the topic? She was complaining to herself that the
internet here always seemed so much slower than at home.
Another: a shop not so far from here sold a "softmodem" to two elderly
people trying to run XP on a 200MHz CPU. It worked, painfully, but there
was no way in hell you could run the DSP side of the modem in software
on that spec. No excuse, they took the entire machine to this shop. It
was there a week and a half, a totally useless card fitted, and the 1Gb
onboard suddenly became 512M onboard. Funny, that.
They didn't have the French to argue their case, so they returned the
modem for a 50% ("previously opened") refund, paid three-figures for the
work on the computer, and lost a chunk of memory, meaning XP was even
more painful. I *gave* them my old 28k8 Sportster until somebody else
bumped them up with a cute yellow 56K Olitech.
Moral? If programming was a way of life for the PSP crowd, there'd
surely be a kid around who knew about this sort of stuff? And enough of
them to keep the so-called professionals on their toes, for pretty much
what people think of me is I'm quiet, unemotional, and "do computers"
(heh, call me Yuki! ;-) ), yet what do I heard? "Oh, perhaps we should
have asked Rick". Note the PAST tense. <sigh>
We really need more children who can quote polygon-quality and
framebuffer resolution and *actually* know what that means, instead of
just parroting it from a magazine. Lara's breasts may look all the
perkier with more polygons, but.... Chuckie Egg....
--
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...