And they serve it with a frosty mug!

Morning all 27 here today. Brrrrr.

Noticed there are more "Mexican" varieties of common soda pops at the local grocery store now also.

I only drink soft drinks at the movie theater. Not too many choices available there.

I only drink soft drinks in copious amounts on days that end in Y...


Yes, I have a problem and I know it....

Yaaaawwwn! Getting over the hump is gunna be a struggle.

8 days and counting.

Morning ladies and gents.

Harold Smith is on his deathbed, knows the end is near

His nurse, his wife, his daughter and 2 sons, are with him.

So, he says to them:

"Bernie, I want you to take the Mayfair houses."

"Sybil, take the apartments over in Pall Mall ."

"Jamie, I want you to take the offices over in the City Centre."

"Sarah, my dear wife, please take all the residential buildings on the banks

of the Thames ."

The nurse is just blown away by all this, and as Harold slips away, she says ,

"Mrs. Smith, your husband must have been such a hard-working man to

have accumulated all this property".

Sarah replies, "Property? ... the arsehole had a paper route!"

Lu and I loved that joke, Rick. :D

Dad sent me that along with this one I thought was good.....
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1391558580.jpg

I am still downloading the big files. Working on one right now that is 1.46 Gig. It still just astonishes me what is possible in 2014. I so vividly remember when Seagate engineers came in with the first prototype one Gig hard drive. At the time I had a 32 Meg hard drive and that seems large. That one Gig drive was still a prototype and was going to go on sale in a few months for a couple of thousand bucks. One gig was a HUGE amount of storage and was just a dream for me. Now I can download files that big in just a few minutes and transport them with a bunch more on a tiny little thumb drive.

When the engineers came in with the sales department they brought one of the one gig drives they sold that was the size of a microwave oven. I think it had 14 inch platters. They also brought in enough floppies to store a gig. It was a huge stack. We photographed all of them together for their sales brochures. It was real cool to go into one of the clean rooms where they made the drives. I had to suit up in the full suit and they cleaned all the camera gear. I lugged a Sinar 4x5 view camera in there and shot pictures. I was soaking wet with sweat when I finished.

The 3.5 inch hard drive was the same size as drives today, but it held only on gig. Now they are multi-terabytes.

My first hard drive was a Dataframe 20. 20meg was the biggest hard drive you could get for a personal computer at the time, and it was not physically THAT big. Seem to remember paying around $600 for it used. They were $1099 new.

http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTM5NVgxMD...E1Q~~60_35.JPG

Connected to my 512 Mac with a 50 pin SCSI. So much better than running programs off 400K single sided 3.5" disks. Before getting the external hard drive I was thrilled to have an external 400K 3.5 drive so I didn't have to switch disks all the time, one for the program, on for files.

I took a basic programming class and used my brother's Apple II. It had a whole 16K of memory and files were loaded and saved on a cassette tape using an audio cassette recorder.

After college I bought my own computer, an Apple Iic. It had a built in 5.25in floppy drive and 300 baud modem but had to be connected to an external monitor. Either a TV or a 9 inch monochrome. I called it a typewriter that remembers. I was dragging it back and forth to work to manually code text for typesetting and send the files to the typesetter using the modem.

The first hard drive I ever maintained was made by Sperry Univac. It had a 10Meg fixed platter (that was regularly wiped with an alcohol swab to remove the dust that gathered on its surface) and a 10Meg removable platter. It sat in a 19" rack and when ever it needed maintenance (like a head alignment) it was placed into a frame (two man lift) and plugged into a purpose built assembly called the 'disk exerciser'. When it was set up to do an 'exercism' the whole assembly would walk across a work bench as the heads would fly back and forth across the platter reading and writing to the various tracks/cylinders. Funny as all fcuk to watch for the first time. Ah, memories of the early '90s. Yep, only 23 years ago.

A couple of years later I had the pleasure to work on DEC RM02s and the very flash RA81s. The RA81s were the first 'winchesters' that I ever worked on. A massive 480Meg.

My first personal hard drive was a 10 meg drive in my 4.77 Mhz Compaq luggable & DOS 2.1. I was reading all the computer magazines and found an article on how to get into the controller firmware with a Debug command. I reformatted the drive into a RLL compressed format and got 22 Megs of storage. The computer had twin 360K floppy drives. I could not store one high quality photo on 360K today.

When CDs first came out I lusted after a CD burner. I was on FIDO net back then and started looking for the best CD burner. Some bloke from Australia recommended an external SCSI Plextor 2X drive. It was over 1 grand but I managed to get the boss to buy one for the office. To have a huge 640 MB of storage was just wonderful. I could borrow it on the weekends.

my god, you guys are old!

What a great, kind, offer: Unfortunately, the car sold right after Sidney looked at it. Sidney did a great job - even the seller, Mike was impressed.

Such is life!

Bummer.

I was looking foreword to meeting you.

For sure in 2016 when Parade is in Pete's back yard.

22 this am.
Morning all.

Sweltering, it's 9°F with 20mph wind here. They say it feels like -8°F, ain't been outside yet today so feels like 72°F to me.

That is exactly twice as warm as we were. The wind chill was -5.

I hate February. I am glad it is a short month.

MorningSmileWavy

7 more working days to go :D

I'm off to the fart sack to disturb the missus. Hooroo