digitalsankhara

Same! Also built external peripherals for my ZX81.

Like it!

After drinking the ale, the FORTH person says "bye".

Then a FORTH person walks into the same bar...

"cold temperature ale drink"

to which the bartender replies "go you here". The janitor smiles as no sweeping required on a clean stack.

It's interesting that today Radio China International is everywhere on shortwave.

Totally agree. Thought about this myself, as a way of having true community radio. A simple hobby broadcast license of low cost might be pooled to cover copyright music only to prevent the types raids of seen on pirate stations (leaving aside what politics can be read into that enforcement). Maybe that would not be such an issue these days, but anyway, there is a lot of Creative Commons content out there.

I love listening to the North Sea pirates on medium wave. So diverse and ecletic!

You covered all the points I was going to make. As part of the pre-internet generation that grew up with radio and a ham radio operator since my school years this is second nature and common sense to me.

It is interesting that governments have long recognised the power of shortwave such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it. In wartime, ham radio is usually made illegal. The recipient of a broadcast cannot be detected (save some very local factors - meters range) which is why governments around the world still use shortwave number stations to transmit coded instructions to spies.

I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address, and maybe just lazy or engineering too. Agree, very short sighted.

Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).

A medium wave/shortwave transmitter is the ultimate in post apocalyptic film memes!

Is not the height that gets me, it is the edges!

I do some personal work in MacOS 9 on a MacBook Pismo and use the standard Platinum sounds at a low sound level. I personally find the little click and chirp soundtrack quite useful as audio feedback. Though if I were to do this in the office, for the sake of my personal safety, I think I would wear headphones!

I am old. And fashioned. "a b * c +" rules! :-)

For you maybe, otherwise a very broad sweeping statement.

I spent a fair bit of my career in that sort of environment writing embedded software on MSDOS. Have fond memories of that but I wonder if I re-created that today would I be able to mentally cope? Might be the technology equivalent of becoming a monk in remote Tibet with the same needed commitment and rewards.

A younger self used to look forward to the latest (paper) shareware catalogue arriving by (snail) mail, posting back the order form and waiting for the floppies to arrive. True story :-)

To be fair I think MacOS classic (i.e. MacOS 9 et.al) was well thought out and usable IMHO.

There can only be one OS/2 :-)