Date : Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:09:52 +0100
From : fragula@... (Fragula)
Subject: OT - Alphatronic - Was Re: Acorn Winchester
Alex Taylor wrote:
>>My uni had scads of them in use as terminals back in the day; the BBC micros
>>were far nicer to use! (and the NCD Xterms even better ;)
>>
>>
ISTR that the one I met came from Glamorgan Uni. It belonged to an
elderly chap retired from Glamorgan anyway. :-/
>
>Mine was the only one I've ever seen. Interesting to hear of somewhere
>that used them.
>
>
Well, I'm not sure about Glamorgan, but they certainly had a lot of good
old stuff, sadly all skipped now (as getting obsolete kit out of
Glamorgan was harder than getting a decent O.S. preinstalled on a new PC
in a mainstream chain of PC shops.) from an Altair 8800, ZX-81s, Beebs
(of course, but not that many), SuperBrains, TRS-80s, up to a big
DECsystem 20, VAX 6400, even a 12 processor 32016 based Sequent Balance
8000 (which is one of my "one that got away" stories, another is the
DG-Nova rackmount,) I'm sure i've missed many favorites, however.....
This elderly chap, who shall remain nameless, had written a book of
short stories covering around 101 files over 10 disks, on his "Royal
Alphatronic" (which actually may or may not be the same thing.. I've
heared vague rumblings of there being different things bearing the
"Alphatronic" name. And one day it decided not to work, a replacement
was not available (no ebay at the time) and nobody wanted to fix it.
So he eventually contacted another, somewhat younger, but
no-spring-chicken-chap (who as it happens, happens to be me...) who
claimed to be able to extract his files, a deal was struck, and the
files extracted and written to both 1.44M DOS floppies (what we now call
FAT!) Apple Mac GCR disks, and of course BBC Micro (both he and his
brother also owned beebs)
However, the Alphatronic files were of no use on PC, Mac or Beeb. So a
small program was written that extracted the text, swapped the
!"?$%^&*()_+-=#';][/., type chars arounc appropriately, reterminated the
lines with vaguely useable &0D chars, a bit of paragraphing, etc.
The resultant text files had to be checked for readability. It was
something that was obviously written with a lot of personal passion.
"too detailed".
:-O
"101 Tales of Sexual Bondage and Domination fantasy". LOL!
:-O
Don't know if it ever went to print, and hope to heaven I didn't get any
kind of mention in the credits.
But it goes to prove something that I've beleived for a long time.
A lot of university lecturers have a tendancy to be w-----s!
Cheers!
M.
P.S. sorry.. Back to topic now, I'll be good, honest.