On 26/07/2015, at 5:54, James Knott <[email protected]> wrote: > Did they have slide rules way back then? ;-) Yep, they were still using slide rules when I joined the Royal Navy in 1959 (No that is not a mistake!)
The first computers I wrote about, as a technical author in 1969, was the "Energy Management Analogue Computer" (EMAC) and the "Crosswind Control Computer" for the USAF -- C5A Galaxy aircraft. Followed by computers for "Concorde" with the "English-French Consortium". Analogue computers (which people dispute were computers) did not use any software, so if you wished to change a parameter you probably needed to replace a couple of resistors and capacitors, change the input to a feedback loop, etc. These computers had the equivalent of "For" and "While" loops, maths functions, such as X + Y (through AND gates). Most operations, including the mechanical read-out updates were done by "triggering" a transistor -- hence we got the 0 or 1 output. Been working with software since -- still creating databases using LibreOffice Base connected to MySQL servers, creating WEB sites using HTML5, etc. Not sure when this "retirement" thing is supposed to take place ;-) By the way I am a Pom, but have been living in New Zealand for the past 43 years. Yea there do seem to be a lot of "old farts" on this list ;-) Tony Bray [email protected] MacBook Pro 15 inch Mid 2009 Mac OS X 10.9.5. LibreOffice 4.4.3, Coda 2 and a whole lot more. Also runs Ubuntu 14.04 desktop using Parallels Acer 15 inch laptop, 4 GB RAM Ubuntu 14.04 desktop, LibreOffice 4.3.? , BlueFish, MySQL server, MySQL workbench. Mainly used as backup to HP server and for testing. HP 15 laptop as server Ubuntu 14.04 server, Apache2, PHP 5.5, MySQL server, MySQL workbench, Firefox, Chrome -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
