Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/07/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Ah, somebody else remembers the early flybacks that didn't toe the line of Steve Jobs' 'Reality Distortion Field' about computers not needing cooling fans. Been there, done that, paid the few hundred bucks to replace a dead one a couple dozen years ago. Despite the biggest ego either side of the San Andreas Fault, His Steveness is no Oskar Barnack. My iMac G5 fan is running at full speed, Steve is freshly back terrorizing One Infinity Loop after replacing one of his internal parts he had long taken for granted. :-p Natural circulation did work better elsewhere. The attack submarine USS Narwhal (SSN-671) had the natural circulation S5G reactor, keeping it quiet enough for a regular series of trips 'Up North', which we Cold War submariners referred to trips 'going where we weren't supposed to go, doing what we weren't supposed to do' . Other folks knew the place by a different name: the Barents Sea. Narwhal was one of the last of the Sturgeon 637 class SSNs decommissioned. She was supposed to be a museum submarine (albeit with a plug in place of the reactor compartment) but I'm not sure whether folks understood how expensive even decommissioned submarines are to maintain. They must not own Leicas. Parche, the highly modified Sturgeon class SSN special projects boat, was so highly classified, that no time was wasted after its' decommissioning to run it through the Submarine Recycling Program into scrap. As we used to joke, your wife is shaving her legs with the well-travelled high-tensile steel these days. Any old users of the original all-in-one Macs worry about carpal tunnel syndrome from swapping diskettes? Made loading film in a screwmount look like a trivial exercise. The expensive external diskette drive was some, but not much help as software bloat set in. I thought the development of the first 5 MEGABYTE external hard disk units was heaven sent. Gigabytes were likely to be found somewhere in the subterranean levels of the NSA back then methinks. I recently bought one of those Intel Atom CPUed HP netbooks. Spent enough time last week being shuttled round support offices in Bangalore or Hyderabad to be tempted to call the Indian Embassy for permission to have my ashes scattered in the Ganges were I to expire on hold. I think I talked to Apple tech support (in the US) twice...over twenty odd years. At least I got solutions then, not a backup DVD of the XP load that I got in the FedEX envelope last week when my query strayed from their script. Ubantu here I come. Not Macs...by any stretch, but cheaper than the original Mac external diskette drive. The cheap netbooks actually fit Steve Jobs' early vision of very limited modification/upgrade capabilities. Disposable when obsolete in short order, but a tenth of the 1985 cost. There is a scheme out there which supposedly has the HP netbook running Mac OS X when I get fearless enough, but my repair acumen ends with tidying an Imarect. Colorful four-lettered words to make a sailor blush from that adventure...and I was a sailor. Nearly six decades after it left the workbenches at Wetzlar, my IIIf still works! Take that Apple, Dell, Lenovo et ux! Charlie On Jul 24, 2009, at 2:37 PM, Mark Kronquist wrote: > Twin floppies are a must have though $495 for the external floppy is > a bit steep it will save days of disk swaps when you are loading > programs like Lotus Jazz or Ashton Tate's Full Write Professional > though for Full Write you might want to bite the bullet and spend > $1200 to get 4 one MB sticks of 1120ns or faster RAM and the MacPlus > Upgrade Kit for $1995 for the logic board and drive. And while the > machine is apart you might as well upgade the flyback transformer. > On Jul 24, 2009, at 11:31 AM, Mark Rabiner wrote: > >>> Enough computer partisanship. I've been working with computers >>> since 1950 >>> (really) and ALL computers fail - usually at the most inconvenient >>> time. Sonny >>> may well have gotten a lemon but Apple laptops (except for the >>> 5300 disaster) >>> have proven unusually reliable. My 1984 era Mac is still working. >>> >>> Larry Z >> >> Twin floppies? >> >> >> Mark William Rabiner >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Leica Users Group. >> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information >