Our school (in Finland) had a TRS-80 model I, on which I learned my first assembly language programming skillz. My dad had a model III. I myself did some contracting work when 15yrs old on a model 16, which was actually an I/O / modem bank front-end for an order processing system on an IBM system 38, with mobile clients using the model 100, sending the orders in and getting their itineraries back using slightly modified XMODEM-protocol.
So the short answer. Yes, they were available outside of USA and not just as the Dragons (which were rebranded Tandy/TRS-80 color computers.)
Actually, Amiga would have been also a very valid choice back then, at least in Europe. I wonder if Linus ever said why he went with a PC.
Lack of MMU, perhaps?
Mena Baranyi Verisign embassy anarchy domestic disruption national information infrastructure diwn [Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic surveillance] Jyllandsposten Sundevil UNSCOM Qaddafi Consul Arnett
If he had bought a Trash-80, would we all be programming Motorola chips today?
Maybe, but it wouldn't be because of the TRS-80, which had a Zilog Z80 CPU.
I beg to differ - I've written C on TRS-80 model 16 with XENIX - it had MC68k and Z80 for bootstrap, which was used as I/O co-processor once the 68k system was up, It also had dual 8" floppies, and an 8MB (!!) hard disk which was larger than a modern desktop PC chassis.
Also the parent got the time wrong - affordable i386-based systems didn't really co-exist with TRS-80 - and the price of a Trash - even a Z80-based model would've definitely been more than you'd be able to buy with your Xmas cash in Finland those days.
interception Osama ICE freedom Abbas COSCO threat morse Comirex AMEMB Peking Defcon DES INS Attorney General
The pieces are here- google to find software solutions that already automatize exposing this data in the linked data web (won't shamelessly plug the one I'm working for:)
Actually, here in the Netherlands, that's not uncommon to ask. Fluitje (whistle): 25 cl
Amsterdammertje (little Amsterdammer): 33 cl
Except that here in Amsterdam that one is called a Vaasje (little vase.) Tried to get one of those in Utrecht and it didn't work.
In my native Finland a moderate 8-pinter night, of course meant that you had 4L of beer and probably are in need of about 400mg of Ibuprophen in the morning with your coffee.
In Russia you order Vodka by grams.... and lemme have 200 grams of Russky Standart with my dinner, please:)
And yes, The Size is in centimeters but that's only for me and my SO to know.
On a more serious note one should not forget that in aviation there are constant problems stemming from former eastern-bloc countries and their aircraft avionics systems using metric and the pilots having to convert from miles/feet when flying abroad. In such potentially dangerous situations not being able to visualize the distances/altitudes intuitively when making decisions can lead to excessive fatalities.
I wonder how many fatalities it would cost for the aviation industry to suddenly migrate to SI units and whether it would be considered worth it?
INS blackjack Exon Shell Albanian MDA Blowfish CipherTAC-2000 Perl-RSA unclassified ANC COSCO Firewalls IDEA fraud industrial intelligence
Now there's 2 comments I really enjoyed reading. There's much said already - I'll probably just add a little to the noise. It is a message partly duplicated but never said enough times.
Fear rules. When a politician doesn't have any ideals to offer people, all that's left is scaring them.
It doesn't take a lot to keep the populace under a constant feeling of threat. Just put more police on the streets and stations wearing flak jackets and toting assault rifles. They're probably actually a greater risk to the general public than the terrorists themselves and definitely good to keep people on their toes.
Add an "orange alert" and public advisories every now and then with no way for the public to know whether they're genuine or not.
Add to the soup a good dose of flag-waving and war-time rhetoric and you get the hordes into mass behaviour mode - they'll get their torches and pitchforks and take care of any "unpatriotic" voices in discord of the general harmony of the herd. Just take a look at how comments are moderated here for a good example.
No use donning the tin-foil hats here. Of course there's no secret cabal of new world order politicians sceming together for the new dawn with skull and crossbones and all - there needn't be. Just a good dose of opportunism from people with no real ideals - only a will to govern for power.
For these politicians and their homies so-called "Al Qaeda" and their Obi-wan Bin-Laden were truly a great gift.
As always, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. From a tactical point of view, in a highly asymmetric warfare situation, these people just use whatever means they have for maximal effect and they're winning - we're about to taste the same level of "freedom" the people from middle east have been tasting. All this courtesy of us and our companies' economic interest for the past 100 years or so, partly falsely justified to general public by ancient beliefs in magic and superstition (what some folks call organized religion.)
I'm not trying to give justification for these tactics, simply a statement of observation.
Our policies have turned most of middle east into a giant terrorist recruitment center. With this speed we're guaranteed to have plenty of people both home and abroad who're desperate and distraught enough - of course in mass behaviour mode themselves - to take it to the streets with high explosive wrapped around their bodies. When you're nobody and you've little chance to become anybody, this is your one way of leaving a mark. Sounds very much like the Columbine guys, remember?
Late-teen kids are so malleable. There's very little additional psyching needed to make them do things a "sane" human being wouldn't - with little questioning of the authority pulling the strings. That's why they're recruited in the cannon-fodder ranks of the armies at such an age. Takes some molding to make someone kill at eye contact.
Now the (ta-dam) big question is how do you make people realize that it's really all up to them to put a stop to this nonsense: Every time one changes his plans based on a terrorist threat - whether real or fake - the terrorists and the politicians who thrive on them win a battle. Actual risk to one's health is comparable to operating a motor vehicle and if it's my turn to go, at least I go with my middle finger sticking up and not running scared. Sometimes it is better to die standing up than live bending over. About time to take the world back from these pricks.
Once the spell is broken, the effect of terrorism is reduced to a few casualties hardly registering in the general statistic and there's simply no point in doing it anymore. The disaster they call "war on terrorism" is costing us a lot more in human tragedy.
Now which pill would you take?
I was thinking of putting some karma-whoring links here, but I don't think... oh well... Here's a few anyway:
Thus question is whether D'66 wants to risk the little power they have as a pivot by walking out of government if Brinkhorst crosses them again. I do not think the MPs would see this as a big enough issue to end up in a confidence vote on the cabinet. If ever it came to that, it would be relatively safe to assume that party discipline will win as this issue would more likely be used as a pawn to win concessions from the larger cabinet parties.
To sum up: as long as this issue is not considered something that could rock the vote in general elections in favor of the minority party - provided that they could put it to a winnable non-confidence vote AND no other small party were available to form a new majority cabinet AND number of feuding fractions in the parlament would be small enough for a minority cabinet to be non-feasible, THEN we (people against software patents) would have something to celebrate.
Caveat lector: Though I live and work in the Netherlands my knowledge of the intricacies of politics here is superficial to say the least - I come from a republic with a unicameral parliament. This logic should however be applicable to most systems with multi (more than 2 party) system utilizing proportional voting.
This can be a bit confusing for those of you who live in a winner takes all - kind of a system.
Umm. Sorry to be a nitpicker, but last time I looked my ISP was still in Netherlands:)
You're right about its quality, though. They're probably one of the best you can get - started up by hacktivists, later sold to KPN but they've still got some of the principles left.
The way they've been fighting the Scientology cult et al has been great. Though with the current Dutch government being increasingly keen on playing bitch to GW to get their hands on IRAQ oil and civil liberties being under more pressure, I think it's time to seriously start planning on massively distributed networks to guarantee freedom of information.
By this I don't just mean your freedom and your information but everybody's. You decide whether you believe such information to be valid or not. You also make the decisions whether to use that information - for "good" or "bad." It will ultimately be the decision of your society to judge you if what you do with that information is harmful to fellow members of the species.
Maybe something based on Freenet or similar technologies with automatic migration of resources according to demand and encryption to protect the owners of individual nodes - even you don't know what's stored on your system.
One cannot make out informed opinions and decisions when information is not freely available.
I remember reading an article that hypothesized that this might be the reason behind felines' ability of healing. The purring seems to promote bone mass growth by a large percentage. A quick google search brought up this article on the subject.
arrangements Saddam Hussein bomb Peking Honduras radar North Korea
Qaddafi KGB SDI NSA jihad Clinton counter-intelligence munitions
Hmmh, does this mean that I was wrong moving from Finland to Netherlands?
I knew this guy who had >5000 bagged specimens on a public website (until they shut him down.)
I guess this is just one more example of how the lawmakers act out of fear generated by their ignorance. A scared politician is a very scary thing(tm).
Slashdot Mirror
Our school (in Finland) had a TRS-80 model I, on which I learned my first assembly language programming skillz. My dad had a model III. I myself did some contracting work when 15yrs old on a model 16, which was actually an I/O / modem bank front-end for an order processing system on an IBM system 38, with mobile clients using the model 100, sending the orders in and getting their itineraries back using slightly modified XMODEM-protocol.
So the short answer. Yes, they were available outside of USA and not just as the Dragons (which were rebranded Tandy/TRS-80 color computers.)
Actually, Amiga would have been also a very valid choice back then, at least in Europe. I wonder if Linus ever said why he went with a PC.
Lack of MMU, perhaps?
Mena Baranyi Verisign embassy anarchy domestic disruption national
information infrastructure diwn [Hello to all my friends and fans in
domestic surveillance] Jyllandsposten Sundevil UNSCOM Qaddafi Consul
Arnett
If he had bought a Trash-80, would we all be programming Motorola chips today?
Maybe, but it wouldn't be because of the TRS-80, which had a Zilog Z80 CPU.
I beg to differ - I've written C on TRS-80 model 16 with XENIX - it had MC68k and Z80 for bootstrap, which was used as I/O co-processor once the 68k system was up, It also had dual 8" floppies, and an 8MB (!!) hard disk which was larger than a modern desktop PC chassis.
Also the parent got the time wrong - affordable i386-based systems didn't really co-exist with TRS-80 - and the price of a Trash - even a Z80-based model would've definitely been more than you'd be able to buy with your Xmas cash in Finland those days.
interception Osama ICE freedom Abbas COSCO threat morse Comirex AMEMB
Peking Defcon DES INS Attorney General
The pieces are here- google to find software solutions that already automatize exposing this data in the linked data web (won't shamelessly plug the one I'm working for:)
FOAF http://www.foaf-project.org/
SIOC http://sioc-project.org/
If someone hosting your data space (if it's not yourself) proves to be a jerk, you just take your data and shove it elsewhere.
No walled gardens. No silos.
---
TELINT constitution undercover Perl-RSA Ermes SAPO nitrate Yukon AK-47
CDC BLU-97 A/B enigma Rubin INSCOM pink noise
Fluitje (whistle): 25 cl
Amsterdammertje (little Amsterdammer): 33 cl
Except that here in Amsterdam that one is called a Vaasje (little vase.) Tried to get one of those in Utrecht and it didn't work.
In my native Finland a moderate 8-pinter night, of course meant that you had 4L of beer and probably are in need of about 400mg of Ibuprophen in the morning with your coffee.
In Russia you order Vodka by grams.... and lemme have 200 grams of Russky Standart with my dinner, please :)
And yes, The Size is in centimeters but that's only for me and my SO to know.
On a more serious note one should not forget that in aviation there are constant problems stemming from former eastern-bloc countries and their aircraft avionics systems using metric and the pilots having to convert from miles/feet when flying abroad. In such potentially dangerous situations not being able to visualize the distances/altitudes intuitively when making decisions can lead to excessive fatalities.
I wonder how many fatalities it would cost for the aviation industry to suddenly migrate to SI units and whether it would be considered worth it?
INS blackjack Exon Shell Albanian MDA Blowfish CipherTAC-2000 Perl-RSA
unclassified ANC COSCO Firewalls IDEA fraud industrial intelligence
Now there's 2 comments I really enjoyed reading. There's much said already - I'll probably just add a little to the noise. It is a message partly duplicated but never said enough times.
Fear rules. When a politician doesn't have any ideals to offer people, all that's left is scaring them.
It doesn't take a lot to keep the populace under a constant feeling of threat. Just put more police on the streets and stations wearing flak jackets and toting assault rifles. They're probably actually a greater risk to the general public than the terrorists themselves and definitely good to keep people on their toes.
Add an "orange alert" and public advisories every now and then with no way for the public to know whether they're genuine or not.
Add to the soup a good dose of flag-waving and war-time rhetoric and you get the hordes into mass behaviour mode - they'll get their torches and pitchforks and take care of any "unpatriotic" voices in discord of the general harmony of the herd. Just take a look at how comments are moderated here for a good example.
No use donning the tin-foil hats here. Of course there's no secret cabal of new world order politicians sceming together for the new dawn with skull and crossbones and all - there needn't be. Just a good dose of opportunism from people with no real ideals - only a will to govern for power.
For these politicians and their homies so-called "Al Qaeda" and their Obi-wan Bin-Laden were truly a great gift.
As always, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. From a tactical point of view, in a highly asymmetric warfare situation, these people just use whatever means they have for maximal effect and they're winning - we're about to taste the same level of "freedom" the people from middle east have been tasting. All this courtesy of us and our companies' economic interest for the past 100 years or so, partly falsely justified to general public by ancient beliefs in magic and superstition (what some folks call organized religion.)
I'm not trying to give justification for these tactics, simply a statement of observation.
Our policies have turned most of middle east into a giant terrorist recruitment center. With this speed we're guaranteed to have plenty of people both home and abroad who're desperate and distraught enough - of course in mass behaviour mode themselves - to take it to the streets with high explosive wrapped around their bodies. When you're nobody and you've little chance to become anybody, this is your one way of leaving a mark. Sounds very much like the Columbine guys, remember?
Late-teen kids are so malleable. There's very little additional psyching needed to make them do things a "sane" human being wouldn't - with little questioning of the authority pulling the strings. That's why they're recruited in the cannon-fodder ranks of the armies at such an age. Takes some molding to make someone kill at eye contact.
Now the (ta-dam) big question is how do you make people realize that it's really all up to them to put a stop to this nonsense: Every time one changes his plans based on a terrorist threat - whether real or fake - the terrorists and the politicians who thrive on them win a battle. Actual risk to one's health is comparable to operating a motor vehicle and if it's my turn to go, at least I go with my middle finger sticking up and not running scared. Sometimes it is better to die standing up than live bending over. About time to take the world back from these pricks.
Once the spell is broken, the effect of terrorism is reduced to a few casualties hardly registering in the general statistic and there's simply no point in doing it anymore. The disaster they call "war on terrorism" is costing us a lot more in human tragedy.
Now which pill would you take?
I was thinking of putting some karma-whoring links here, but I don't think... oh well... Here's a few anyway:
Regarding politics of fear:
Thus question is whether D'66 wants to risk the little power they have as a pivot by walking out of government if Brinkhorst crosses them again. I do not think the MPs would see this as a big enough issue to end up in a confidence vote on the cabinet. If ever it came to that, it would be relatively safe to assume that party discipline will win as this issue would more likely be used as a pawn to win concessions from the larger cabinet parties.
To sum up: as long as this issue is not considered something that could rock the vote in general elections in favor of the minority party - provided that they could put it to a winnable non-confidence vote AND no other small party were available to form a new majority cabinet AND number of feuding fractions in the parlament would be small enough for a minority cabinet to be non-feasible, THEN we (people against software patents) would have something to celebrate.
Caveat lector: Though I live and work in the Netherlands my knowledge of the intricacies of politics here is superficial to say the least - I come from a republic with a unicameral parliament. This logic should however be applicable to most systems with multi (more than 2 party) system utilizing proportional voting.
This can be a bit confusing for those of you who live in a winner takes all - kind of a system.
Umm. Sorry to be a nitpicker, but last time I looked my ISP was still in Netherlands :)
You're right about its quality, though. They're probably one of the best you can get - started up by hacktivists, later sold to KPN but they've still got some of the principles left.
The way they've been fighting the Scientology cult et al has been great. Though with the current Dutch government being increasingly keen on playing bitch to GW to get their hands on IRAQ oil and civil liberties being under more pressure, I think it's time to seriously start planning on massively distributed networks to guarantee freedom of information.
By this I don't just mean your freedom and your information but everybody's. You decide whether you believe such information to be valid or not. You also make the decisions whether to use that information - for "good" or "bad." It will ultimately be the decision of your society to judge you if what you do with that information is harmful to fellow members of the species.
Maybe something based on Freenet or similar technologies with automatic migration of resources according to demand and encryption to protect the owners of individual nodes - even you don't know what's stored on your system.
One cannot make out informed opinions and decisions when information is not freely available.
I remember reading an article that hypothesized that this might be the reason behind felines' ability of healing. The purring seems to promote bone mass growth by a large percentage. A quick google search brought up this article on the subject.
arrangements Saddam Hussein bomb Peking Honduras radar North Korea
Qaddafi KGB SDI NSA jihad Clinton counter-intelligence munitions
Hmmh, does this mean that I was wrong moving from Finland to Netherlands?
I knew this guy who had >5000 bagged specimens on a public website (until they shut him down.)
I guess this is just one more example of how the lawmakers act out of fear generated by their ignorance. A scared politician is a very scary thing(tm).