<starts to miss shoes>

<Breathes a sigh of relief at the fact that new and interesting posts and threads are now once again easily visible.>

I think a big vote of thanks to JFf and whoever looks after our asylum is called for.

It is a shame that the {expletive deleted} who do this cannot be made to crawl over broken glass to reach a place where they can only use Amstrad word processors and no net connections.

Just to let you know, going to any of the links now polluting the other Ffora is a BAD IDEA.

WooooooooooooooooHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

---

Part time Quantum Elephant hollower

Oh Happy Day!

SM whats wrong with an Amstrad, at least they had a proper keyboard, unlike Clive's Computers! Even back then they were probably spamming BBSs.

Give me the Spectrum any day over the Amstrad! I admit that I fitted mine with a proper keyboard.The microdrives were flaky at best. The QL was nice, but too late.

I was referring to the PCW, whereas I guess that you are remembering the CPC, which except for its nasty 3 inch discs (so named because some misspelled "disk" and it would have cost to much to change -or so legend goes) was not too bad a machine.

The QL was the last Sinclair before the sale to Amstrad. Things were different back then strange disc formats, microdrives and cassette tapes. I used to have a tape Amstrad, a CPC464 - forever realigning tape heads.

Ah, glad we got that sorted out-
I got a new computer last month & was very sick a couple of weeks ago so I haven't even been able to lurk here...

How's tricks?

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Signature or shameless self-promotion?
You decide:

[www.myspace.com]

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There was an outbreak of mammoths!

A new computer and then got sick? Such things happen. Spam and viruses never fail.

You recuperated? Unheard of!

I've had a bad and painful week and I've been re-reading some old fforum posts to take my mind off... stuff. I usually apologise after a post, but I'll apologise in advance this time. Ramble mode on, and...

Quote:

Give me the Spectrum any day over the Amstrad

Why has nobody (that means me) mentioned the C=64? I bought my first one in 1982, and I still have it in working order.

And its 1541 Smart Drive, with the huge capacity 180k discs. I wrote 6510 machine code for the C=64 and when I bought my first NZ$20 180k disc I thought I had enough capacity to contain all the code I could write for the rest of my life. Huh. The machine I'm typing on now has... Bugger. I thought I knew. Hang on, I'll have to run [www.belarc.com].
5980.63 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
3506.28 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

Whoops. Just barely over 2 terabytes free. Time to add another drive.

O tempora! O Mores!

Why was it a smart drive, you ask? Aha, I answer, without the slightest trace of detectable condescension. The smartness was to do with the skillful way it preserved head alignment. You may recall that the floppy drive readers of that time (the 1980s) were very prone to losing accurate alignment very quickly. The 1541 was way ahead of the field in the way the head alignment was checked. "Huh," the head said. "I'm not quite sure just where I am at the moment. I know, I'll run head down as fast as I can towards that metal post over there. When I arrive (bang!) I'll know (bang!) where I am (bang!) and if I do it again (bang!) and again (bang!) and I bounce just the right amount (bang!) I'll know that I must be right at the post. Now I can go back to the right spot on the disc and load the last bit of that 8 bit sprite."

I feel like digressing. So I will. Instant gratification of wishes, that's what the Net is all about. I won't think about what I'm actually digressing from because I'm easily confused.

I used to be amazed at the sheer speed and accuracy of that drive head whirring around and reading all those ones and zeros without ever getting it wrong, but then one day I read the specs and methods of the drive and I became even amazeder. (I was very young, not even forty. But I had the body of a thirty-year-old, in the basement refrigerator. Ha ha, gotcha! The fridge was in the garage.)

It turned out that the drive said it was 40% accurate. What it meant was:

First of all, the drive never wrote a zero. All it wrote was ones.

Blip! I wrote a one.
No blip! I never wrote nuffink.

Firstly it turned each binary number into a ... I forget the word. It meant that there would never be more than two consecutive zeros in any number. Then...

As the head spun round... well, the head stayed in the same place. The disc spun around. The head moved from track to track.
As things spun, the disc controller kept counting the time taken. Little second bits. Milli? Micro? Pico? Don't remember. Can't be bothered working out. It would come across a little bit of magnetised disc. "Aha! Got a 1." Moving on... I should have had a one by now. Didn't get one. OK, that's a zero. Still counting... no blips. Aha! Got one. Reset the counter, keep on reading.

You see how the blips make a one, and the waiting time looking for a blip without finding one make a zero? The 40% I mentioned was the allowable time not to find a blip, meaning that the head had found a zero.
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And my USB3 drive transfers data at 600 megabytes per second.

My mind just boggles.

There just ain't nuffink wowier to say.

Sorry.

Well, there's the prize for resurrection of long chilled forum thread of the week!

I boggle that after all this time it's still easier to write things in Notepad(++) than on actual word processors. They're so cluttered with bits they make writing hard!

ES,

I agree.

Forget Word with its parasitic intrusive plans to make the writing of even a simple message impossible.

Somewhere I have disk with a set of programs that are not Microsoft but which produce compatible documents. When I replace my current computer I shall load this disk and be free for all time from Microsoft.

Goes off cackling at the thought and is finally interceptedby men in white coats with a specialised piece of clothing which one wears, for some reason, backwards.

I still use Word 97 (Word 8) and the VB6 behind it as my general purpose Word processor, despite the fact that I can boot to Office 2010 should I feel the need. I have a very soft spot (somewhere in my skull) for WordPerfect 5.1 and its very self-indulgent programming language, but I have yet (preens self with self-satisfied smirk (having misplaced curry-comb)) to meet the hoop through which I am unable to force Word 8 to jump. As in, it does what I want. Oh yeah. (performs convulsive pelvic thrust, misjudges distance from table, drinks Double Duff whilst timewarping (again))

I still use Notepad sometimes, Metapad much, much more often, and on occasion, EditPad.
Not going to give links; Google each to find more. I mean that. Do it. They're free. Each offers useful stuff. Very useful stuff. To me, that is. You? Meh. Suit yourself.

The next time Word shifts 'st' or 'th' into superscript when I don't want it to I'll have to feed it a Chinese dictionary and watch it crash and burn.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/22/2012 08:34PM by EgonSpengler.

[i]The next time Word shifts 'st' or 'th' into superscript when I don't want it to I'll have to feed it a Chinese dictionary and watch it crash and burn.[\i]

Or keep the dictionary and instead, turn off AutoCorrect.

[sup]Th[\sup]e later versions may have started calling it, "Hold my hand and fix things as I type," or some other condescending expression. but turn it off and you are back in the driver's seat.

I consider that the least practical of the two options. Actually a text editor is far more useful for typing anyway. A word processor is more useful for editing later on. That's what my Python tells me anyway.

Ahhh! and I just got my first quill pen and a bottle of squid ink!!!!

MistyCat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Why has nobody (that means me) mentioned the C=64?
> I bought my first one in 1982, and I still have it
> in working order.
-------------------------------------------------------


If that "C" stands for Commodore, I had one around that time-
hooked the keyboard up to the TV (which had a separate UHF dial)
& was driven crazy trying to get it to do anything...

Just curious, how can you tell if it's in working order?

Yes, the "C" and the "=" together represent the Commodore 64 Logo.

if you Google "C=64" (with those quotes) then most of the 40 million-odd hits should be to do with the Commodore 64.

how can you tell if it's in working order?

I'm assuming you see the screen Sorry, dial-uppers.:


I guess that to test you could type the line:

?1+1

then press Return. If you see a "2" on the next line, then at least something's working.

The very first thing I did every time I switched my C=64 on was to type;

poke 53280,0
poke 53281,0

Wow! I haven't done that for many, many years and I felt a slight shock when I didn't see a black screen.

Next step is the good old:

10 print "Hello, World." Press Return

run Press Return

<Wipes nostalgic tear from eye.>

If nothing works, here's a deep end into which to jump.