Find a copy of the front page of the News Of The World that made the original allegations, and look at the first three words of the sentence printed at the bottom of the page. Then look into his aunt Unity's movements during the year before he was born. More than a co-incidence?

Telesoftware was ended in September 1989. It was mainly used to distribute educational software and utilities to BBC Micro users, although during the last year of the service they also transmitted PC software. The Telesoftware service was also used to distribute other content to schools, mainly satellite weather maps and text files containing teacher's notes covering the BBC's education programming. The Telesoftware service took up 20% of the overall bandwidth for the CEEFAX service carried on BBC2, and given that only a very small proportion of users ever used the service, it was decided to drop it. The end of the BBC schools computing scheme, the fact that the weather maps that the system distributed would no longer be made available free-of-charge, and the poor take-up of PC adaptors all contributed to making the closure inevitable.

At work we had an installation of Windows NT Server (3.5, perhaps) that came on floppies. There was over 40 of them. We had many other OS installations on floppy too. Banyan VINES (which we resold) had about two dozen, and as Banyan were compartively late in supporting CD media for installation, and even then didn't support IDE CD-ROM drives, many servers had to be installed and upgraded this way well up to the late 1990s. We had other operating systems on floppy, too, including several versions of OS/2, Netware and SCO Unix. Then there was that floppy installation of Slackware I made for in-house installation on test PCs, as most of our test boxes lacked CD drives.

Fix it yourself by hacking the drivers. I had to do that with the sound hardware fitted to an old PC of mine. The card worked fine, apart from the MIDI interface which I could never get to work. It turned out that the main sound controller chip had a slightly different model number to the ones listed in the source of the kernel driver, and the mechanism for setting the MIDI hardware base address and interrupt was somewhat different. One evening spent disassembling the hardware's DOS driver later, and I had a patch that added support. It eventually ended up in the kernel source tree (2.2 perhaps?), but the whole driver was purged from the kernel a long time ago.

Aren't you a bit old to have an imaginary friend?

The DOS version was somewhat quirky, too. I recall one of our customers having problems with WordPerfect 5.1 (or was it 6.0?) creating huge temporary files on network file volumes. Another had problems with print queue parameters getting mangled, as if WordPerfect was writing directly to the print buffer, bypassing the standard API calls.

In the Beatles case it was not a reluctance to release their catalogue in a downloadable format, but down to an exceeding complex set to legal issues over the rights to their catalogue. The group sued EMI over several issues, such as the low royalties paid during the beginning of their contract and the assortment of badly complied albums that appeared after the groups' EMI contract expired in 1976. When these cases were finally settled it granted the group full control as to what can and can't be issued worldwide, although EMI still owned the actual masters. Of course this settlement didn't anticipate downloadable content, and it was re-negotiation that significantly held things up.

During and prior to World War Two, all military aircraft were assigned serial numbers by the Air Ministry. These comprised of one letter followed by four digits unit that sequence was exhausted in 1940, afterwards the code changed to two letters followed by three numbers. These numbers were painted on the sides of aircraft on a vertical surface, usually the rear of the fuselage. Different groups of letters were assigned to each service (RAF, Royal Navy, and from 1942 the Army Air Corps), often prior to production. However to make production numbers seem higher than they actually were, ranges of serial numbers assigned to particular projects often contained gaps which remained unused. These were known as Blackout Blocks. For example serial numbers for one batch of Spitfires produced in 1939 had serial numbers that went P8640-P8679, P8690-P8729, P8740-P8759 and P8780-P8799 with the rest unissued.

I bought a good number of sound cards over that period.

I started with a cheap Soundblaster clone called the Thunderboard. It offered Adlib compatibility, which was enough for games music. The card was somewhat noisy when playing audio and not always compatible. It did, however, have native drivers with Windows 3.1 when that finally appeared.

The next card was an early wavetable card from Orchid. I wanted a Roland but couldn't afford one, so went for this thing instead. The card supported the GM sound set, but also roughly emulated a Roland device. It also emulated Adlib playback, but had severe compatibility issues when it came to playing back wave audio.

A few months later I acquired a Soundblaster PRO. Finally I had stereo PCM, but also updated the FM synthesis to OPL3. Finding games that supported OPL3 was tricky, but when they did appear the sound was phenomenal, with big 'farty' bass sounds.

Eventually my old PC became obsolete so I upgraded to something new. That came fitted with it's own adequate Soundblaster 16 clone from Opti, but went back to OPL2 for FM. It lacked any wavetable facilities onboard, but had a slot for a daughter-board that offered the feature. Unfortunately I could never find anything to fit that slot.

Then I picked up a Yamaha XG wavetable board that was probably the last in wavetable technology. The XG soundset added many more instruments to GM, together with a whole other set of parameters that could be tweaked. By then, of course, most games were abandoning external music sources, so it was only really used for other projects. I've still got this card at home, but lack anything with an ISA slot to fit it to.

I'm pretty sure I also picked up another cheap Soundblaster clone around this time too, as the card originally fitted into the PC wasn't compatible with the latest version of DirectX requited by one game. Again

One of the commercial accountancy software packages found in the UK prompts its user to make regular backups of the data to floppies for archiving purposes.

The strategy behind the game is to clear the playfield of all bar a handful of small asteroids, and then wait for the flying saucers to appear. If you're moving fairly quickly up or down the screen you can avoid the saucers with practice. As the game awards 1000 for the small saucers and a bonus life every 10,000 points it's a somewhat easy task to rack up many extra lives. Once the last asteroid was eliminated, the game would restart, increasing the number of large asteroids at the start up to a limit of around 12.

Early versions of the game were even easier as broken game logic resulted in an area of the screen that rendered the player immune to attacks. There wasn't even any means for making the game harder by setting the game's dip-switches - these only controlled the initial number of lives and other sundry settings such as language and coin count. Suffice to say experienced players could easily play the games for hours at a time.

Atari later released Asteroids Deluxe which was somewhat harder. This included a second type of saucer that split into components which homed in on the player, as well as amendments to other parts of the game logic.

There's no maximum as the score counter rolls over at 100,000. You need to have someone to manually keep track of the number of roll overs.

I remember being in an amusement arcade in Redcar, UK in the early 1980s, when someone was attempting an Asteroids record. He had an assistant with a clipboard to verify the roll-over count.

Intelligent LAN cards are nothing new. Back when 80386 processors were being used in servers, several manufacturers produced NICs with their own processor. The LAN protocol stack would be run partially on the NIC itself to reduce the load on main server. We had a Xenix server at work that used such a NIC.

As a matter-of-fact I've still got a similar designed serial card in my cupboard of spares. This used an 80186 to control 6 serial lines, leaving the main processor free to get on with other things.

I seriously doubt that there will be a VM capable of running this OS. The Altos 586 used an Intel 80186 processor, which was an 8086 with several external components (clock generator, interrupt controller, DMA controller etc.) integrated into the chip. Therefore the machine is not PC compatible as these bits of hardware will be accessed in a different mechanism compared to a standard PC.

The 80186 was typically used in embedded devices. A few non-PC compatible or semi-PC compatible machines did use it, most notably the Tandy 2000.

This takes me back....

Firstly, I'm sure that there were never 10MB IDE drives. The drive will either be ST506, ESDI or possibly even SCSI.

Secondly Xenix would create several filesystems within the Xenix partition, using its own separate partition table. As far as I'm aware no mechanism to read these tables was ever added to the Linux kernel.