Do androids eat Upside Down cake?

[ColinJ]

877mb, over in a split second (these days)

(Pedant mode ON)
Yeahbut... 877 mb is eight billion times smaller than 877 MB, so that isn't much of a surprise!
(Pedant mode OFF)

I am currently in a fibre-free corner of Todmorden so I am stuck with 16 Mb/s broadband for now. My friends in neighbouring streets have fibre connections but there is something delaying connection here. I remember them surveying pipes in the street which they might have tried to send fibres along. Maybe one of them has collapsed?

 

[Jody]

That’s a lot of floppy disks!

lol. It's a standard for the older generation.

I still think of them in terms of floppy discs

 

[Jody]

877mb, over in a split second (these days)

Just downloaded an Android update via the airwaves rather than WIFI and 244MB took about 40 seconds

 

[fossyant]

(Pedant mode ON)
Yeahbut... 877 mb is eight billion times smaller than 877 MB, so that isn't much of a surprise!
(Pedant mode OFF)

I am currently in a fibre-free corner of Todmorden so I am stuck with 16 Mb/s broadband for now. My friends in neighbouring streets have fibre connections but there is something delaying connection here. I remember them surveying pipes in the street which they might have tried to send fibres along. Maybe one of them has collapsed?

Hah hah, got you, you still quoted MB's on your reply, not GB. Be worried if it was a 877 TB file - coming to a phone next year !

 

[ColinJ]

lol. It's a standard for the older generation.

I still think of them in terms of floppy discs

Youngster - my BBC Micro used cassette tapes! I remember spending 20+ minutes loading 'Castle of Riddles', only for the load to fail...

When I bought a floppy drive for it, that actually used the bigger floppy discs in floppy sleeves rather than the smaller floppies which had rigid plastic ones.

 

[Jody]

Youngster - my BBC Micro used cassette tapes! I remember spending 20+ minutes loading 'Castle of Riddles', only for the load to fail...

When I bought a floppy drive for it, that actually used the bigger floppy discs in floppy sleeves rather than the smaller floppies which had rigid plastic ones.

lol

I started on a ZX81. You don't need to remind me about the frustration of tapes not loading

Admittedly I was only about 5 or 6 and the ZX was my sisters.

Preferred the Atari 2600 as it just worked. I got a little (way) too addicted and my mum ended up banning me from ever owning a console

 

[grldtnr]

ALTOIDS? Them the super strong minty minty sweets.....
Come in a little tin, I keep my spare nuts, bolts, chain links in one ,keeps them minty fresh

 

[Dogtrousers]

Youngster - my BBC Micro used cassette tapes!

I trump you all with punch tape. When I was a student we had radiation detectors that printed out paper tape. Then we took it to the computing department where a bored postgrad would load it into usable files.

We also had Commodore Pets that used cassettes.

 

[Alex321]

Hah hah, got you, you still quoted MB's on your reply, not GB. Be worried if it was a 877 TB file - coming to a phone next year !

No, his point was the difference between mb (millibytes) and MB (megabytes), whatever a millibyte may be.

Pedantically, the case of that m/M makes a massive difference to scale. But given the context, it is fairly obvious what was meant, hence the pdant alert

 

[Alex321]

I trump you all with punch tape. When I was a student we had radiation detectors that printed out paper tape. Then we took it to the computing department where a bored postgrad would load it into usable files.

We also had Commodore Pets that used cassettes.

When I started work as a programmer, in 1981, we were still using trays of punched cards, with overnight compilation.

 

[Dogtrousers]

When I started work as a programmer, in 1981, we were still using trays of punched cards, with overnight compilation.

Yes, my punch tape experience was '81 or '82 To be fair the machines that produced it were, I think, very out of date at the time.

At the same time I was writing FORTRAN to handle the data on the tape pretty much in a normal way with a text editor on a terminal, no need for punch cards. Programs went into a queue for compilation/running and were back pretty sharpish (as printout IIRC)

 

[ColinJ]

No, his point was the difference between mb (millibytes) and MB (megabytes), whatever a millibyte may be.

Pedantically, the case of that m/M makes a massive difference to scale. But given the context, it is fairly obvious what was meant, hence the pdant alert

Er, as in bits rather than Bytes - 8 bits to the byte.

When I started work as a programmer, in 1981, we were still using trays of punched cards, with overnight compilation.

Yes, my punch tape experience was '81 or '82 To be fair the machines that produced it were, I think, very out of date at the time.

At the same time I was writing FORTRAN to handle the data on the tape pretty much in a normal way with a text editor on a terminal, no need for punch cards. Programs went into a queue for compilation/running and were back pretty sharpish (as printout IIRC)

I can trump that... Circa 1971!

We had access to Warwick university's computer but we had to physically take our Algol programs over there on cards which we had punched using a hand punch at school!

You really learn the meaning of 'slow' when you have to share a hand punch with 20 other pupils, wait a week to go over in the school minibus to hand your punched cards to the computer operators, then go back a week later to pick up the cards and a printout usually saying something like 'Syntax error, line 3'!

 

[lazybloke]

Youngster - my BBC Micro used cassette tapes! I remember spending 20+ minutes loading 'Castle of Riddles', only for the load to fail...

When I bought a floppy drive for it, that actually used the bigger floppy discs in floppy sleeves rather than the smaller floppies which had rigid plastic ones.

You forget Colin, the BBC Micro wouldn't fail when it misread data from tape.
It used checksums so would know of any such errors, and would immediately prompt you to rewind the tape a few seconds and try that block again. It was incredibly robust; and successfully completed the load, 99.9% of the time (unlike other computers of the era).


Alas it was slow, so like you I eventually fitted a 5.25" floppy drive. The connector had always been there underneath, but I had to get a DIY kit with the extra electronics and Acorn DDFS ROM chip. OMG, discs were so fast!

Had the Sideways RAM board too, but we've had enough geekery for a Friday afternoon. Suffice to say, the BBC Micro was an amazing computer.

 

[GuyBoden]

I trump you all with punch tape. When I was a student we had radiation detectors that printed out paper tape. Then we took it to the computing department where a bored postgrad would load it into usable files.

We also had Commodore Pets that used cassettes.

In the late 1970's, my uncle, a school Headmaster, had the first computer I had ever seen, I think it was a RM 380Z.

 

[lazybloke]

In the late 1970's, my uncle, a school Headmaster, had the first computer I had ever seen, I think it was a RM 380Z.

Had a few of those running in my secondary school computer studies class, 1982. I remember they ran CP/M and had green screens.We hated using them and mucked about on BBC Micros as much as possible.

There was also a ghastly blue and white ZX80 languishing on a shelf. Never saw anyone using that, i suspect it didn't work.