Memory's a funny thing. I got my first Compuserve account around 1985 but I don't think it would connect to the Internet for email until a few years later. I know I could email my daughter when she went to college in '90 and I think that was about the time that Compuserve started to offer true, Internet email. Your address was your Compuserve number. Don't complain about 300 baud. In the late 60's I was working with room-sized computers that had modems working at 120 baud - or at least that's what I remember!

From the article: "Work on the bombe was handed to Alan Turing, who was developing a concept of a computing device, the Turing Machine, capable of performing rapid calculations. " Don't you just love technical writing in the media?

Me too - except mine's a 41c. I used it to check a set of printed financial tables that we were publishing at the time, and to navigate a small boat across the Atlantic (pre GPS). It's still going strong after what must be at least 30 years. Sadly my HP-80 died. That must have gone back to about 1972.

The problem was the hardware. Individuals couldn't afford a PDP 1. My first personal computer was an Apple II in 1981 and it cost $6,000, real money then. Universities had computers and the ones in science labs got used for all sorts of cool things.

The cards I remember were 80 columns. Generally you got one character per column. (6-bit characters to begin with and EBCDIC later on.) You could use them in a variety of 'binary' modes, which gives you a theoretical maximum of 80 x 12 = 960 bifs or 120 bytes. That was generally only used for run-time decks, not for programs or raw information.

There's a Web site for that! http://www.seeclickfix.com/citizens. Boston aleady uses it: http://m.seeclickfix.com/boston/recent

What I'd worry about is the effectiveness of the ads. I know they are there but I just don't see them. That's not the same for Google's search ads, which are often relevant to what I'm looking for, so I pay attention to them.

Thank you, thank you. I have spent many hours in two minute increments waiting for those drives to spin up and I never knew why it took so long :)

Really? Thomas Moore? Bishop Cranmer? Alan Turing? Thomas Becket?

+1

I'm more of a pedestrian than a driver, but I see people every day yaking on their cell phones while driving cars. I've learned to stay clear of them because they simply don't see me. There is no doubt in my mind that cell phone use should be banned from cars.

It didn't take that long. The NYT reported on November 10th that it was most likely an airplane; I heard an expert on NPR say it was a contrail on Tuesday, not long after the event.

Yes you can rewind and fast forward. There's a progress bat to show you where you are but the image doesn't change. That makes it harder to find a particular spot. There's also a delay after a ffwd/rewind operation while it buffers the appropriate part of the file. That said, I love the Roku.

For passwords: Roboforms
For family history, births, deaths dates of trips: Wiki (the whole extended family can maintain it)
For photographs: Adobe Lightroom (has wonderful database so you can actually find the pictures you are looking for)
For taxes: Turbo Tax

I made a set of APL fonts for the Apple II back in 1981, so that I could use the Apple as an APL terminal. Sadly, I no longer have the fonts or the Apple II.