Scor­pio News

it dawned. What earthly use was a memory that you could write to but not read from. So I read on. It was quite an amusing spoof, and its uses included ‘Post Mortem Memory (Missile Systems)’ and a ‘Terminal Bit Bucket’. It even included various performance graphs, including a plot of the ‘number of pins remaining’ against the ‘number of socket insertions’. When you’ve repaired as many Nascoms as I have, you realise that the guys who drew up that particular data sheet knew their stuff. You’d be surprised how many 36 legged Z80’s there were at the time.

Great British Post Office

Murphy isn’t the only one to have Laws to himself. As we all know, the Great British Post Office is a Law unto itself. There was the occasion where a Nascom 2 was returned for repair by post. There was no trace of damage to the box, the packing was entirely adequate and yet the pcb was neatly snapped in half. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to snap a piece of glass fibre printed circuit board the size of a Nascom board, it ain’t easy, or rather, it’s damn near impossible (at least to do it neatly). Now the Post Office had their own theories about what happened, and to honest, so did I. None-the-less, if it wasn’t an immutable working of one of the Great Post Office Laws, it only shows the heights of frustration owning a Nascom could endow.

Defeatist Advertising

Dave’s Law of Defeatist Advertising goes to prove that no matter what you say in the ads, someone or something will prove you wrong. A nice example of this occurred just after disk head cleaning kits became fashionable (and expensive). Now I’ve always wondered about the efficacy of disk head cleaners. The structure of the disks themselves leads to self cleaning and the design of the heads ensures that there are no head gaps to get clogged. Still, this doesn’t stop the entrepreneurial types trying to flog us something we don’t need.

Almost immediately after a flood of free sample of disk head cleaners, a Gemini came in for service. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but the owners though it needed as 10,000 mile service anyway. Who are we to refuse money. Well we opened it up and found the whole works covered with about a 3mm thick layer of cement dust. It was everywhere, and apart from disclosing interesting patterns, indicating the air flow through the machine, it left us with the job of getting rid of it. Close examination of the drives indicated they were in as mucky a state as the rest of it, except the heads, they were pristine clean. So much for head cleaners. We found out subsequently that the machine lived in a small shack in the bottom of a cement works where it kept tally of the number of lorry loads of cement which came and went.