Fun with CP/M

You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔 🍟

Enjoy! https://cpm.retrogamecoders.com

#tallship #OS

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Big BOOM 💥 a few minutes ago. I was staring off toward the south and into the sky when I saw the huge flash; 180° off into the horizon, from my comfy chair on the back patio.

One thousand one, one thousand two, thousand three, one thousand four, thous...... 💥 BOOM ❕❕❕

So, geez. Pretty fricken' loud for that distance. Not as far away as the harbor itself, so maybe some crystal methodists dispatched themselves to Valhalla.

In the olden days I'd hit up Twitter coz it was the best for "just happened", local events. People actually understood that kind of democratized power, to disseminate information his before it was possible to even enter a news cycle.

X? It's certainly better than it was before #Elon, but lost had been that hyper local community vibe that made real time distribution such a beautiful possibility in a non commercial distribution channel. I suspect that things will heavily coalesce between spontaneous local... Hubs, for lack of a better term, in a global search enabled environment (again), after this current madness constricting almost all other information through the next couple of weeks.

But then again, this is Los Angeles. Land of 💥 boom and doom (and I mean that in the most real sense). It's almost a bloodsport and aspects do exist where you can place wagers in some pretty heinous categories. I'm just being matter of fact here.I grew up here.

Shit happens around here. It always has. 💥 Booms aren't really anything new around here lolz.

I remember a particular big BOOM 💥 I was standing in the living room one afternoon at my buddy's 'luxury apartment' (The Willow Tree, in Torrance, on PCH, next door to my highschool).

I was stoned out of my mind (on weed, teenager, duh!) and I was facing a sliding glass door (open) mostly occluded by drapes, when suddenly, the drapes activity flew up from the carpeted floor, half way to the ceiling.

Then, as they softly fell back towards their positions in front of the glass in the sliding glass doors themselves, spanning I dunno, 12' maybe, they began violently rattling like a motherfucker! I thought both huge panes were going to shatter, like just eight feet in front of me, standing there like the stoned idiot I was.

I dunno recall exactly how many seconds had passed, at least 8 or 9 I figure but memories actually get warped over time, blyet I've always known distinctly, and I recall, instinctively, that it was an obscene amount of seconds passing before the BOOM 💥 was to be followed by those drape lifting gusts of wind hitting me in the face.

And it was the biggest BOOM 💥 that I had ever witnessed, still to this day; and the Port of Los Angeles maybe six or more Miles behind me, when a big ass ship (a really big ass ship) in the harbor was vaporized, lives indelibly within my very Carcass - I shall never, ever, EVER forget that.

Well that's all I really wanted to share. But I would like to ask everyone to take just a moment, no matter what country you're in/from, to reflect with thanks for all the men and women in uniform serving our countries so our children can sleep all comfy and shit at night, with their little Teddy Bears, autobots, ninja turtles, or Peter Rabbits.

Peace be to all, bitches 🤘 🤠🤘 Truly 🙂

#tallship #observations #musings #please_boost You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

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Ruh Roh❕

When you break the #Google with a legitimate question but #Skynet's AI is too busy searching for #Sarah_Connor to notice that it's been 17 minutes and still hasn't timed out, lolz 🤘💀🤘

#tallship #AltaVista #Inktomi #DMOZ #Curly #AskJeeves #GNUhoo #Bing #GigaBlast #InfoSeek and other dead horses. You no can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

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Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.

Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?

Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?

#FOSS #DOS, get it? I was rather amused. Anyway, Here it is.

#tallship #Microsoft h/t to: @[email protected] You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

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STS-1: The first launch of the Space Shuttle - Columbia, with astronauts Robert Crippen and John Young crewing on 12 April 1981: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/launch-of-sts-1-from-ksc-complex-39

This was not, "The First Space Shuttle". Enterprise was the first space shuttle, enshrined on the Intrepid Museum at Pier 86 in Hell's Kitchen.

Enterprise was deployed into service on 17 September 1976 without engines or a heat shield in order to test shuttle transport, re-entry, landing and runway taxiing. Originally and eventually twice intended to be retrofitted for launch duty those subsequent plans were scrubbed because there was a slight design change during the construction of Columbia, so Challenger was constructed from later versions of test article components from the Columbia build.

Enterprise, it's namesake itself an homage to the various vessels named U.S.S. Enterprise; NCC-1701 of Star Trek fame, CVN-65 the very first nuclear powered carrier, and of course CV-6 - The "Big E", responsible for having downed a thousand planes, and destroying 300 ships in WWII.

USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 in 1966

USS Enterprise, CVN-65 - the world's first nuclear powered aircraft carrier

"The Big E", as CV6, perhaps the most famous of all the incarnations of the USS Enterprise are, and the most decorated ship of WWII

The Second time Enterprise received the nod for retrofit it was to replace Challenger following her demise, but Endeavor was built instead from again, leftovers.

At 59 seconds, Challenger was go at throttle up, then children and their parents all around the world stopped breathing

The crew of Challenger for mission STS-51L

The incident in this article by NASA is about the first flight, not the first Space Shuttle, as saying so is disingenuous and misleading. Only after a long career was Enterprise retcon'd into prototype status, as it had been designed to always be an orbiter.

STS-1 was the first manned space shuttle launch, with two astronauts aboard - mission commander Robert Young and pilot Robert Crippen, who would make the approach and bring down Columbia onto the runway at Edwards Air Force base in manual deadstick fashion instead of allowing the autopilot computer software to land the spaceship.

Robert L. Crippen manually landing Columbia at Edwards AFB on 14 April 1981.

An interesting fact about the mission that is hardly ever mentioned, but was a very significant source of anxiety and relative uncertainty at the time was that even though Columbia was designed to land by automatic computer controlled software re-entry procedures (aka autopilot), when it eventually did re-enter the atmosphere it was determined on approach of Edwards Air Force Base in California that pilot Robert L. Crippen would manually pilot the spacecraft upon runway approach and subsequently land the space shuttle manually, by hand, without computer assistance.

Also not widely known is the very public existence of a second series of space shuttles, very similar in most respects, and almost identical in many, that were designed <cough, cough>, and built by the Soviet Union - Yup, they worked really well, and they've been keeping them in hangers for almost 40 years in prisine condition.

It takes a lot of care to maintain a fleet of Baran spacecraft.
Russians have bee really good about the upkeep of their Baran space craft, they've even gone so far as to always maintain a backup in case one is scrubbed for a mission at the last minute, with just the right amount of bird guano as a light protective coating.

What happened to that Russian fleet of space shuttles? They sucked, no surprise, bigtime, and only one was ever launched. After that, they were litterally abandoned in their hangers. They even built the world's largest plane to fly these puppies around all over and show them off.

An Antonov AN-225, the worlds largest plane in the world until the Russians destroyed it during the first couple of days of their war against Ukraine. PIggybacked on top is the Baran spacecraft itself.

There have been many subsequent space endeavors by many countries since the United States' space shuttle program, but the experience and information gathered and learned in the process of all the STS series of missions continues to fuel and guide the continuing NASA missions in a way that other space programs could in no way achieve.

So on this day, the 14th of April, the 43rd annivesary of the 1st flight of the space shuttle, take just a moment to ponder what all of the great acheivements were of the 20th century, and how are attitudes have changed with the advent of new technologies, as we're harnessed with new information and understanding of the world we live in. For example, as you'll note, astronauts Young and Crippen are just casually strolling away from Columbia and heading for their shuttle ride and a shower. No Quarantine, like all of the Apollo astronauts returning from the moon had to endure, and for whatever reason, there was actually a computer onboard Columbia that was responsible for automatically taking over the controls of the spacecraft during descent at Mach 25, then acuiring and navigating the landing path, even the landing itself.

John Young and Robert L. Crippen disembarking Columbia after successfully touching down on April 14th, 1981

We can do anything if we put our heads together in cooperation as a team. And let's not forget that Margaret Hamilton put two men on the moon in 1969 with a total of 8k of memory, okay? I'll have more on that in another story.

• Margaret Hamilton in 1995 - the world's first Software Engineer, by the way ;)*

Enjoy!

#tallship #Enterprise #NASA #Space_Shuttle @tallship_ @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I can haz #Cheezburgerz? 🍔

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