Oolite Bulletins

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Joining this very late but I'm guessing the book title which started this thread off is what has now been turned into the Channel 5 series starting on Friday 20th June as mentioned elsewhere in Outworld https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=4709 - will be taping that.

Yes! I saw the trailers for that for the first time today, and that was my exact thought: "Ah, so they've turned 'Backroom Boys' into a TV series". Next thought: "Must find a blank tape"

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I was told by my uni lecturer while doing "Smalltalk" (allegedly the first proper OO language) that the guys who created it invented "Windows" (as a concept of class inheritance and the mouse simply to move between their new GUI easily. - Can't find any proof of it anywhere though.

The man you need to check out (I say 'man'; in computer science, he's more of a living god) is Alan Kay. This is another guy whose story is fully told in 'The Dream Machine'.

@JohnnyBoy - whereabouts in Cleveland (the county which no longer exists) are you from? I grew up in Hartlepool (although I've never hung any sort of primate).

@DaddyHoggy - I'm in Redcar . I was born in Middlesbrough but grew up in West Sussex. I came back to Teesside 6 years ago, but I'm now starting to look for the exit - the south beckons.

@ JB - As you can see from my profile I'm based in the South now, did a year in Industry (Physics degree from Sunderland) at Rutherford Appleton Labs and when I failed to get a job in the North I cam back down here - that was 14 years ago now...

@DaddyHoggy - The Thames Valley is a good place to be; I have a friend who lives in Bracknell.

I was back in Sussex last month to attend a wedding, and I didn't realise how much I missed the South . The good news is that house prices are starting to return to earth, so now might be a good time to plan the journey back....

As they're now saying "Come on down, the price is right", or is it "Right. The price is down. Come on,"

JohnnyBoy wrote:

@DaddyHoggy - The Thames Valley is a good place to be; I have a friend who lives in Bracknell.

Would that be just down the road in Broadmoor? <twitch,twitch>

Did it became a thread about Britain's geography? Ah, well, there's another one that was recently hijacked by Dr. Who, so why not?

@Cmdr M - sorry my fault - notice JBoy was from my old neck of the woods.

Anyway, still don't know when B&B are on TV, except I know its not this week (27th).

I'll post as soon as I do know.

There we go - back on topic!

Tonight's episode was about the Advanced Passenger Train.

Another story where the Brits come up with some incredible new technology that's light years ahead of anything else in the world, penny-pinching prevents it from being developed properly, the 'budget' version is released to the world and promptly slaughtered by journalists/politicians, and the whole project is dropped.

And of course, the ironic epilogue is the part where the Americans/Germans/Japanese/French/Italians turn our British-invented technology into a useable product and sell it back to us for billions of quid.

Next week is Britain's contribution to the space race - that is, sadly, more of the same. Budget and lack of foresight kills of brilliance at a single stroke.

A British politician didn't see the need/point of satellites and so cancelled all space exploration and experimentation.