Test Equipment Anonymous

Now that the warmer weather is here the migrating hummingbirds will soon arrive. In my area typically at the end of April and beginning of May. As you may or may not know hummingbirds are only found in North and South America and nowhere else. I assumed they were found throughout the tropics, but i...

They flap their wings at the astonishing rate of 50Hz to 80Hz. It is audible but doesn't sound like a transformer hum. More like a buzz. I can imagine the pressure increases linearly as the wing moves in one direction, and decreases linearly as it moves in the other. At the transition there could b...

About the same price as visiting the Roman baths in Bath. It does seem a bit steep. Stonehenge is an English Heritage site. To be fair these places require upkeep - curation, building maintenance, keeping down the weeds, security in some cases. If you are into visiting them, a year's membership of E...

Stanton Drew is more or less on the way back and should be well worth the detour if the weather's nice.

Stone circles are another of those things in the worth seeing but not worth going to see category.

Barry on 9th May. Is it within 60 miles? It's a micro rally, much smaller than W-s-M and definitely not worth a long trip. I may not bother. Dunstable Downs on 17th May is one of the biggest rallies of the year, sometimes better than Newbury, and there's a visit to TNMoC which can be fitted in after...

I watched about a minute. It sounds like the kind of AI slop, spun out of a vacuum, that Youtube is full of these days.

The comments are always worth reading. One is from a chap who worked on on that sort of gear for years, and he finds it completely unbelievable.

I do enjoy dangerous and exacting chemistry, when someone else is doing it.

Mine was definitely old school and was used to keep alive an SDRAM. The SDRAM would stay alive for several minutes with nothing connected anyway, so its demands were minuscule.

I'm sure you are right about modern super caps.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/X6Y0-2Y6zEw

I foolishly didn't dig further, figured it was a NiCd and didn't notice until after installing it that it is in fact NiMH. Of course to complicate things, this instrument is from HP's later "no schematics included" generation, so this will be a PITA. (And of course I also have since found...

In my limited experience, NiMH has a less tolerant charging regime than NiCd. It might be worth checking the charging regime and comparing that to the NiMH's spec. Definitely. Plenty of information on the WWW. IIRC NiCd is still approved of for emergency lighting. The better NiMH chargers monitor f...

In one of the comments the date of the video was pinned down to early 1992. It looks like a complete mixture of kit of various ages. I got the impression that once systems were set up for a project, they were left running for the life of the project, which could be years for deep space probes. They ...

Having been there twice, I can recommend this secret bunker, designated as a regional seat of government. It contains lots of hard information, in the form of exhibits and contemporary posters (and is thus the antithesis of my pet hate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_Shed ). https://www.hackgreen....

About 1985 the Amstrad PCW 8256 came out. Z80 based, no hdd, a floppy disc drive. Amstrad realised the application valuable to most home computer users was word processing. It had very good word processing software and it came with a printer. They were £399 as I recall and were a very versatile repl...

Typesetting was a problem well-heeled customers were prepared to pay for solutions to. There were alternatives to having compositors arranging movable type in frames; hot metal machines which could cast a complete line of type as dictated by a keyboard, then phototypesetting. When minicomputers and ...

What early 60s sci-fi film with a computer, would have been complete without a bank of tape drives with wildly spinning reels? The Elliott 803 had mag film, not mag tape - i.e. with sprocket holes down the edges. Elliott was in Borehamwood, which also had a the largest movie studio outside Hollywoo...

It was all horrible and a PITA. I don't feel the slightest bit of nostalgia for the days of cards, big spools of mag tape and computers, which had to sit in air conditioned rooms with a Halon drop in case there was a fire.

I never used paper tape. 3.25*7.4" so the 1" stack holding up to 11KB would be around 24 cubic inches. From what you say, paper tape holding 11KB would be 1100" - about 90 feet long. It would have to go on a spool. Then there was magnetic tape. 10" reels of ½" tape. In my de...

IIRC colossus was 5000cps, but continuous loop no start/stop. That was the highest speed they could attain without too much risk of the paper breaking. Colossus could go faster. The paper must have been a special grade. The ends had to be glued together to make the loop. I'm sure I read that when t...

Card feed rate would depend on the model of card reader. So anything from a few hundred to over 1,000 cards per minute. Dividing by 60 and multiplying by 80 gives a character per second rate of up to around 1,500. Dunno about baud rate. Up to 15,000? Data density is another interesting question. The...

I bought a copy of the wiring regulations, the Bible of wiring. It was quite obscure. Much of it was about some sort of water heater where the current passed directly through the water rather than using a heating element. I thought these things were too dangerous for serious consideration. It also w...

Spend much time sitting at a keypunch writing up test cases for MECL 10K array boards that were going into an interface tester for the under development 3081. The punched cards were inputted to an IBM 1130 computer. Results printed out on a 1403 chain printer. As I recall the 1130 had a massive 1ME...

I have a somewhat jaundiced view of museums in that stuff goes there to fester and degrade until all relevant knowledge has disappeared. And the same is true of the staff. I have corrected the Science Museum a number of times on their descriptions of BBC kit with no success. Most of the exhibits wo...

https://www.tnmoc.org/slide-rules-calculators Cabinet 1, exhibits A and B. Budget half a day, in the expectation you will want to return. I expect you will remember too many of the exhibits for comfort. It's one of the few places I leave a donation. TNMoC is well worth a visit. I feel obliged to vi...

Yes, most peoples' work on their houses is terrible. It was a real pleasure for me to tell this chap that I thought his work was excellent. Then there's electrical DIY. I had a great uncle whose electrical installations were - remarkable. In the living room there was a great big 15A socket, which w...

Given human estate agents choose to ignore even the most basic requirements when you are house hunting, the chances of setting up a "must have a stable temperature" filter is unlikely. It was bad enough coping with what Sue described to estate agent as my "special needs" (a larg...