It's not quite clear what you're trying to say here. Who do you mean by "the people operating the computer"? If you mean the senior management in the post office then fine, yes, they should be held accountable. The people actually entering the information though had no choice or control at all. What happened was they entered all their transactions during the course of the day and then the system said they should have £N in the till, and in fact they had only £N - X in the till. The P.O. accused them of stealing the £X, and they had absolutely no way of demonstrating that they hadn't.

What boggles the mind is that the software must have been developed by people who had absolutely no experience of accounting systems. It shouldn't be possible for massive discrepancies like this to creep in. Everything must add up. If money was apparently disappearing from the shops, then it should have been mysteriously accumulating somewhere else. Basic double-entry book keeping procedures would have prevented all of this.

The very first time I built my own computer from bits the man in the shop said he'd do the actual installation of the CPU in the motherboard to make sure the settings were right. (This was in the days before CPUs needed heatsinks.)

I did all the rest and the computer worked fine for about 6 months, then became unreliable. Having replaced most things I came to the conclusion that the fault lay in the CPU and so ordered a new one. When I went to install it I discovered the problem - he'd set the voltage jumpers wrong for the original CPU. So - the only bit which he did to make sure it was done right, he did wrong.

Blue LEDs are ridiculously over-used. Presumably because they were last to the party manufacturers think they're terribly cool and stick unnecessary ones everywhere, and as you say they disrupt sleep.

Let's start a "Campaign for sensible LED usage" and press for the return of red and green ones (nicely dimmed).

Yes, you might very well be able to get your files back from a flash drive (as I said) but there is also a significant probability that you won't - hence why they're not suitable for the kind of backups you need to rely on.

A copy on a flash drive is not a backup (although it might just save your bacon). Flash drives are far too unreliable for any kind of serious backup strategy.

Unless a backup system is fully automatic, backups simply won't happen.

Well, it's how everywhere used to be - well, almost. There weren't time zones as such, certainly not stepped at 15 minute intervals or anything like it. Everywhere had its own local time, calculated by observation from when the sun was at its zenith, and set on sun dials. Mechanical clocks took their time from that. There was also far less dependence on clock time. To use, 6pm in the summer is the "same time" as 6pm in the winter (ignoring DST issues) but before the imposition of standardised time the view would have been far more that dusk in the summer was the same time as dusk in the winter. Dawn and dusk were just much further apart in the summer.

A bit of a misrepresentation. It would be well nigh impossible to create a timetable without a fixed frame of reference against which to create it. It wasn't that they didn't like it - it was kind of a necessity. True enough though that the railways drove the standardisation of time - at least on land. Standardisation of time at sea was also very important, and must have happened earlier because it's vital for accurate navigation.

The author (mytek) made an 8-bit motherboard ... and then he made another one that fits into the XL disk drive chassis (so it fits with the rest of the XL/XE time peripherals).

To coin a phrase: “I wish I had mod-points” - orange man is indeed bad. Let’s see if this goes down too...

And before anyone complains, yes I'm sorry I spelled licence in the English way rather than the American one. Apostrophes however work the same for both the English and the Americans.

Why does one Texas driver have 27.7 million licence records?

High demand caused a slow download? How very 1990s. Haven't Apple heard of BitTorrent?

Adrian Kennard - https://www.revk.uk/ - was that you?

Really? Who are these "most people"? What are they planning to do with this startling performance?

What most people really want is just a stable connection providing reliable performance. As with home broadband, anything above about 40 Mbps is not going to be noticed. For what one actually does with a phone, 10 Mbps is ample.

You mean there's a lot of gaming happens deep underground below Japan?