Ah, I remember sixbit. The PDP-11 had another one called RAD50, which was 50 octal, which fit three alphanumeric characters into a 16 bit word. I had to encode my high school's attendance rolls into RAD50 to get them to fit on one RT-11 floppy disk.

Straightforward commands. Case insensitive. Gets the job done. All words limited to six characters, because that's the longest word a person should have to type.

Back in my day, computers would fail for no explicable reason.

Or, more likely, your hand would brush against the RESET key that was prominently featured on the keyboard right below RETURN.

Underwater robotics is all about advancing the state of the art. A machine that lived six years was reaching obsolescence. I'm sure that the boys in the back room will have fun building its successor. (I have helped to build a few underwater robots for competitions, and it's always a joy to start work on the next one.)

This case turns the usual defense procurement bugaboo on its head.

I seem to recall from my BIOS writing days with CP/M, that the 8" drives had twice the data rate of the 5" drives. They also spun faster, 360 RPM vs 300 RPM. The 8" IBM format was soft sectored 26 sectors of 128 bytes, and the 5" used 16 sectors of 128 bytes or something like that. too many numbers to remember.

At any rate, the four 8" floppies that I still have in my meager collection are all different, for different CPUs, OSes, languages, different sector formats, etc. The closest I came to inter-system compatibility was to write a CP/M floppy reading program for the PDP-11.

Many useful items that one could build require some metal bits in addition to 3D printed parts. I've recently encountered this situation when trying to make a little gizmo with motor drive. Small gears, shafts and so forth are very hard to come by. Have you considered starting an ancillary industry that provides the sorts of things that the company Small Parts used to offer, before Amazon killed them?

Don't these things sell a bit more slowly than MS predicts?

Yes, it was a USB flash drive with a firmware update.

I work on a telescope whose Siemens PLC is so old that it has a PROM in a 40 pin DIP package for firmware updates. Not that we've touched the firmware in 20 years. After all, it works. And it ought to work for another 20 years, as long as we replace the dried-out aluminum electrolytic capacitors regularly.

I have no degree, but in 35 years I've never had to be selected from a pool of candidates. What's it like to have to compete for a job?

I worked my way through college at the school, building exotic computer systems for grad student research projects. I noticed one day that I was learning a lot more in the job than in the classes.

Now, 30 year later, and after 20 years in industry, I work at the same university, building electronics for telescopes. I suppose I could have gotten further with a degree, but not much further. At my performance reviews, I ask my boss to please not promote me to management.

There is some room left in the suitcase. They could have fit more battery packs in there - especially if they are Li-ion so as to not weigh a ton. Also, they could have provided some folding solar panels (it's not clear form the article if they are included or not).

What are you talking about? Tetris is not violent. Mindless, yes.

Because playing Solitaire on my phone is the sum total of my gaming experience these days.

Story: I walked into the Detroit airport a couple years ago while wearing the Video Coat. The nice TSA people marked my entire family's boarding passes SSSS. They inspected us thoroughly, including the eight 5 AH Chinese LiPo battery packs used to power the coat. These are the no-protection-board version with the factory connectors that let you plug two batteries together like BIG 9V batteries. They will happily put out 100 amps.

Had we been 'the type', we could have started four fires in the cabin that day.

Ancient? My oldest cell phone is from 1985. Ten pounds of aluminum, lead-acid battery and first-generation circuitry.

I never got service for it, but I did mod one of its brothers to be the uplink transmitter for my unlicensed radio station fifteen years ago.