Trivia and other useless but interesting items

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

The Rover Company was the company first involved in developing jet engines in Britain, working with Frank Whittle and his company Power Jets from 1940. Following friction with Whittle, partly because they redesigned his engine (with Air Ministry approval) without telling him, Rover organised a deal with Rolls Royce to swap their jet engine activities for the contract and equipment to build Meteor Tank engines.

The first operational RR jet engine was the Welland, based on Whittles design, with some input from Rover, was the first engine to power the Gloster Meteor in 1943, but was later replaced by the Rover designed and RR developed Derwent.

Rover used their knowledge gained in this exercise to produce prototype turbine powered cars in 1949-50.

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Attachment 151403

The Rover Company produced a large number of gas turbine fire pumps for warships.

One in every 23,000 men is a murderer.

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

One in every 23,000 men is a murderer.

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how many users on this forum?

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Originally Posted by Eevo

how many users on this forum?

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19099


phew, that was close.

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Originally Posted by Tote

One for all the old school computer nerds. To explain, a VAX was a minicomputer that was made by Digital Equipment Corporation (whom I may have worked for once). This is an old yarn but a pretty good one, I'll leave you to google the significance of the date at the end of the yarn.

VAXen, My Children, Just Don't Belong In Some Places
Usenet Apocrypha

[deletia]
It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987. VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places.


Regards,
Tote

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I was a VMS (later OpenVMS) system administrator, VAX and Alpha, for over 20 years. In that time I even learnt how f$fao() worked..[bigsmile]

I remember that date QUITE well. I was the system administrator VMS Systems at the ASX at the time and can well remember the transaction queue at the peak of trading.

I saw the very first Alpha AXP 1GHz CPU installed (Monash Uni) and the first Alpha with 1GB of memory (Monash again). The first Australian TB storage array was installed at BHP IT for the OpenVMS cluster.

When I was at school there was a serious nerdy student (but nice bloke) called Mark who had access to the Latrobe Uni computer in the early 70's.

The only productive thing I remember this computer doing was to make printouts of a naked woman sitting on a stool over several joined pages, all in 1's and 0's.

DL

In 1885 the firm of Starley and Sutton introduced the 'Rover Safety Bicycle', the ancestor of today's bicycle. By the end of the nineteenth centurey the company had changed its name to the 'Rover Cycle Company', and in turn changing to the Rover company after they started to make motorcycles, then cars. Merging with Leyland in 1967, the current Landrover company is essentially the direct descendant of Starley and Sutton.

World Wide Web was created by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee in 1989

Some smarty pants where using the precursor playing cmd line star trek in the early 1980s on ARPANET which was purely TCP/IP after the 1970s.

GUIs or what you look at on any computer device is really just allowing you to do simply what some old buggers did or still do via MS-DOS is a command line [biggrin]

The old blokes would have been looking at carpet in those days, compared with lino these days.

DL