I have an RS/6000 box that runs AIX. A few years ago I reinstalled AIX on it using an external CD-ROM drive over a serial console. One of the Microchannel cards in it has the Power1 Chipset. It also has Microchannel SCSI and various other I/O cards on it. It's not joke hardware running OS/2 with an x86 processor. It's the real thing, not a run-to-proprietary-becuz-we-had-to PC clone.

It's totally different from IBM shoveling their 'IBM PC' business onto proprietary hardware and x86 on a microchannel buss design. They did that with the 'PC' to run away from the ISA buss which they had lost control of. They could have gone EISA, they could have done any number of other things. They chose to run off onto a proprietary path because they were afraid of the competition.

You weren't supposed to use it like a '101 Electronics Projects' cookbook.

I've never used anything but the first edition. It did become a 'rockstar' book, and it's possible later editions went south.

It's a 'survey' book similar to taking a 'survey' course in any topic.

It may be sometimes slightly overpraised. Hacks aren't sneered at here on Slashdot, btw.

What do you recommend? It's a book targeted at non-electronics people, i.e. scientists who need a good survey course in applied electronics for practical use in the lab. There aren't many other books like it.

The staff at HP a generation earlier, you know... the people who actually made HP what it was, not the people who climbed on in the 70s... would not have carried on like that.

Have you ever thought that maybe Bill and Dave having gone away was the cause of HP crumbling, and not whomever happened to be at the helm during the dissolution.

I love my HP calculators and even the Omnibook 300 which was probably the last really nice piece of hardware the Corvalis Division came out with. But times had changed. My Tektronix 465M scope is a beautiful piece of gear and the 547 mainframe before it a stunning technical achivement. But those days are over. Tech equipment cannot be the works of art that it was back in the cold war era when gear was designed to last a century. General Radio is over. H-P is over.

Don't blame it on people like Carly. She was just the corporate type who happened to take the seat at that point in history. You come off like misogynist assholes to regular people if you try.

Bill and Dave were smarter than that. You'd really disappoint them if they knew you were invoking their name the way you are.

Agilent is better off without the crappy consumer electronics. Laser and Ink Jet printers became commodities. The old H-P was dead no matter who took charge. Hillary could have become the H-P CEO and it wouldn't have gone differently.

Visicalc was available only on the Apple II for about the first year it existed. Businessmen would go into the fledgling new Personal Computer shops and say "Can you sell me a Visicalc."

That was actually the origin of Apple's initial success as a company: the exclusive marketing deal with Visicalc. Anything else about the 'origins of Apple' is a myth. They're really lucky they were able to get past that, because when Visicalc became available on the new IBM PC nobody wanted Apple hardware anymore.

Black tape is considered 'bush league' by any clueful technican/engineer/geek. Anywhere you use it, you should have planned ahead and used heat shrink tubing.

It even says the above (almost a verbatim quote on the 'bush league' part) in the first edition of Horowitz & Hill.

(if you don't know of H&H's book, turn in your geek card. You can get it back after you've bought and read your copy of the book)

You mean that the pilot rendered the co-pilot unconscious, re-set the height on the autopilot, then theatrically knocked on the door to make it sound like he was locked out?

No, actually Waldo snuck in and knocked the co-pilot out. But since there's no video or even a framecapture photo, we can't look for and find Waldo.

But the truth will come out eventually, when people finally give up on finding 'Waldo' in all the future 'Where's Waldo' pictures.

We can all play nice on the edge of the playground, while the bullies fight in the middle. I bought one of the 'Arduino Uno' clone boards on eBay a few years ago. It was really really cheap. It had a sticker on it that could be peeled off and beneath it was a counterfeit Arduino logo/brandmarking.

I have also bought 'real' Arduinos, but for my sort of usage the real point in the first place was buying one of the socketed through-hole versions. A tube of the processors is really cheap and the 'Arduino board' is usable as a development bed for the raw chip.

Maybe they need to come out with the 'Microchannel' version and make it work best with the new 'OS/2' version of their software, since the buss spec is out of their control now.

Also, a snowblower doesn't leave an inch of sheer ice on your driveway.

Heck, we can start by banning 1000 microfahrad 500 volt capacitors.

Nobody needs that many joules.

We made flame throwers in scout camp. You just spray the mosquito repellant at the campfire.

Why worry? Call 911 and the police will be along in a half hour or so to tag the bodies.

When does dirt ship on pallets? In little plastic bags?

Dirt is delivered with a dump truck. Though, I suppose if you live in a suburb or urban hellhole this is not true.

I'll take a tax-cut and spend Republican if it means more surplus office furniture in the District of Columbia. Really, we need to auction a LOT of surplus office furniture there. Think of the impact on the carbon footprint if there are 70% fewer bureaucrats commuting there every day.