Thanks for the info.

And yet, apart from the TI-57/58/59, TI calculators were generally seen amongst my peer group as "clunky" (the cheap 'n' nasty TI-30 really didn't help this when put up against the likes of the Casio FX-120), whereas the Commodore scientifics were seen as cool. Amazing what badge engineering can do...

Very true. Commodore had some awesome (for the time) calculators in the mid-to-late 70s. I still remember one my maths teacher owned that had more buttons on it than the mind could comfortably conceive (this was a cool thing when I was 12).

For some reason though, when the market moved from LED/VFD calculators to LCD ones, Commodore just seemed to vanish, presumably preferring to concentrate on the PET/VIC/C64.

You can now! ;-p

Yup, back in the mid-80s I worked for a firm that wrote EPoS software for petrol filling stations (gas stations). There was a whole extra feature set that could be enabled simply by programming a special character (might just have been an "@" sign, I forget) into one of the programmable setup fields, and we charged quite a bit for it.

Our field-service engineers got so embarrassed at this (as did those of us in the software department with a conscience), that if time allowed they'd often open the box up and pretend to fiddle inside, maybe faking an EPROM change, to do it.

Eventually one or two site managers got wise, and the word spread as to what the secret was, and everyone was getting it for free, so we had to make it so it really WAS an EPROM change...

In a word, yes.

I gather that Facebook's implementation of XMPP is non-standard, which is why I thought that Pidgin had to use a plug-in rather than / as well as its standard XMPP module. Someone else on this thread mentions this here.

Absolutely agreed. In the UK it was Fidonet BBSes in the early 90s, then as the internet rose it was IRC and a lot of ICQ, but once MSN Messenger got going in 1999/2000 that was it, everyone used it, everyone had it, apart from a minority (say, around 25%?) who used Yahoo Messenger, but at least half of those had MSN as well. And that's still the case when it comes to non-Facebook-chat messengers.

I have spoken to literally hundreds of people (not just geeks) online over the last 20 years, many in the UK, but some in the US and Australasia too, and I've only ever met someone with AIM once, back in 2000. It was just unheard of over here.

Incidentally, you can talk Facebook Chat directly with a Pidgin plug-in, which is very useful.

Exactly. Where I'd been living until recently, we'd always been a Playstation family until that point, and we'd been holding out for the PS3, however when the news came about the UK PS3s lack of backward compatibility, we thought "fine, if they want to do that, we might as well move over to the competition", and we did. Nice one, Sony. Always a good idea to thoroughly piss off your existing loyal customer base.

Anyway, given all the shit they've got up to since (the DRM rootkit, the PS3 de-Linuxing, etc.), I'm glad we changed. They now deserve to lose.

That's pretty unfair on the Z80, too. To get anywhere near that figure, you'd have to take your basic 1MHz Z80, and have it continually execute the longest possible instructions, which were rarely used and took up 23 T-states (clock cycles) - that would give you 43,478ips.

In practice, most Z80 instructions executed in the range 4 to 13 clock cycles, and just about every Z80 I ever met back in the day was the 4MHz part, so you're talking between 300k and a million instructions per second. So more like a thousand times faster than poor old EDSAC.

(Nowadays of course, the modern Z80 clones/cores run the basic instructions in just 1 clock cycle.)

Yup, I was caught by something similar myself. It gets even more fun when you get to the other end of the year and you find out there's a day with 25 hours in it. :-) This led to one app I worked on declaring that October had 32 days in one particular menu, because a previous programmer on the project had subtracted the time_t() of 1st October from the time_t() of 1st November, then divided by 86400 to get the number of days in the month, then rounded up for some reason (probably because six months earlier he'd spotted that April only had 29 days, and rather than find out why, he just fudged it, the so-and-so!).

This was partly due to the Microsoft C V5 library (yes, it was that long ago, early 90s) handling DST stupidly; the same module in the V6 library fixed the problem. However we couldn't upgrade the whole library as it would have bust our memory requirements and caused other, now long forgotten problems, so we shut our eyes, crossed our fingers, and substituted V5's time module with the V6 version and, thank God, it worked perfectly without trashing everything.

We also rewrote our own code to do stuff a bit more cleverly than that. And at least we tested. Which is more than Apple seemed to have done. I wrote Y2K-aware time-handling code back in the mid-80s for some filling station EPOS machines, which damn well worked 15 years later, because I'd tested it.

To get back to the subject line, this is why I still use a real alarm clock, only using my mobile's alarm as extra backup for important things like catching flights. I've written enough time code to know how difficult it can be to get it done truly correctly, but you really would have thought Apple would have the knack by now.