I had a copy of that as well - I forget whether it was a Christmas gift or if I bought it. The demos were neat, but I was lacking in ideas when I had time to play with it, and the Apple didn't go to college with me.
But if I were going to do some "from the ground up, using first principles, with nobody else's libraries" embedded work, Forth would certainly be something I'd consider.
You and me both, and that became a cycle with each new generation of technology. I remember that FidoNet (and Usenet, for that matter) had a lot of that ham radio ethos, with commercial messages most unwelcome. But once the internet got too big, Usenet drowned in spam. It was too easy to crapflood newsgroups into oblivion, and once the politicians started grandstanding, ISPs wasted no time nuking their NNTP servers.
> Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones.
This reflects on another problem: the sorry state of journalism and willingness to turn press releases into news. That story ran in a wide variety of media outlets, and a Google News search of "children landline phones" turns up a bunch of these.
It turns out that these articles were really ads for "Tin Can," a VoIP phone for kids. Not really a landline at all, it's seriously nerfed, and I'd assume that if it's SIP, it's locked to their service, or else it's their own proprietary protocol. Not really a surprise, given that real landlines are almost extinct, and expensive where available.
One of my old builds was a Phenom II X2 550 Black, where I found that I could either overclock it, or unlock two more cores, but not both. I chose the cores, and it ran that way for a long time. That was one of the best bang-for-the-buck deals I ever ran into for a CPU.
Keep in mind it goes further than that. US customary volume units don't match up with British ones.
One British gallon is about 4.5 liters, where a US gallon is about 3.8. Quarts, pints, and cups follow, but fluid ounces are another thing. A US gallon is divided into 128 fl. oz., while a British gallon is 160. This results in a US fluid ounce of about 29.6 ml, vs. 28.4 ml for the British one, and also affects teaspoons and tablespoons.
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml. The metric tablespoons already used in Europe were probably close enough to half an Imperial fluid ounce for it not to matter for most purposes.
My kids' baby bottles were labelled with measurements in metric (30 ml increments) and in both US and Imperial fluid ounces. The cans of formula were supplied with scoops for measuring the powder, which were also somewhere close to 2 tablespoons/one fluid ounce (use one scoop per 30 ml of water). There are dire warnings about not varying the concentration from the recommended amount, but I assume that it's not really that precise within 1-2% - more about not varying by 10-20%. My kids seem to have survived, anyway.
Strictly, UK teaspoons are 5 ml and tablespoons 15 ml.
Well there's a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting to go down. I knew that Australian tablespoons (20 mL) were significantly different from US tablespoons. I didn't know that UK tablespoons were a whole different beast (14.2 mL), nor did I realize US tablespoons aren't quite 15 mL, and in fact my tablespoon measures are marked 15 mL. 15 mL is handily 1/16 of a US cup so it's easy enough to translate to 1/4 cup (4 tsbsp) and 1/3 cup (5 tbsp).
Also, premade mixes are a godsend if you or a family member needs a gluten-free diet. I haven't (yet) noticed any shrinkflation, but I've certainly noticed that the King Arthur gluten-free muffin mix is noticeably more generous than any of the others I've tried.
And in addition, DEC made its name in the 1960s by selling computers at unprecedented low prices. A complete PDP-8/S system was quoted at $25000 in 1965 [0], equivalent to over a quarter of a million dollars today, for a computer that barely had an instruction set. These days we can buy supercomputers for five of today's dollars.
When my dad's old Sony KV-25XBR bit the dust, he replaced it with a 32" Toshiba flat-screen CRT. That thing was a chunk indeed.
In my opinion, even though it was really quite a good set, you're absolutely right about NTSC looking horrible on big screens. From day one I noticed that the scan lines very much made it look like watching through very fine Venetian blinds.
Upscaling NTSC and putting it on a big flat panel isn't really so great either.
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