@holdenweb @cstross @jguillaumes @jlargentaye

Oh, and Andrew McCann was my tutor when I was at Leeds Computational Science, so I assume you knew him fairly well if you were working on SPITBOL.

He was genuinely the only person in that department I got along with, and he was pretty honest with me and told me I should just pack up and leave because it wasn't the right environment for me, personality-wise.

Eventually, he left instead, and I stayed on and slogged through the final year to get a 3rd (the most I could get at that point because I was planning on leaving in my 2nd year and had done nothing, passing my exams was kind of a shock and made me have to rethink). I then got a postgrad placement at Leicester in a place that was the right environment for me, personality-wise.

Amusingly, though, when I left Leicester I went back to Leeds to run systems for another department, and they had to deal with me as a peer. The only person who coped well with that change was Ted Appleby over in Mech Eng. We stayed friends for years, and he gave me a load of SUN, VAX, and SGI stuff for my museum into the early 2000s. These pics were from a 2005 pickup, so he was still there then.

I am going way off topic, but it's an excuse to post pics of old junk :D

#Retrocomputing #museum #SUN #SGI #VAX #LittleIron #Leeds #LeedsUniversity f

@cstross @jguillaumes @jlargentaye

Leeds University kept some of its DECSystem-10 stuff, or it had last time I was there in 2005.

It's funny it had 60 serial lines. I was the only user of it for the last 3 years, I was on it the day it shut down as well - That was the first DECSystem 10 I was on that was killed with just me on it, UK.AC.SX.KL10 was the second.

#Leeds #LeedsUniversity

@engineeringstephen it's raining and I crashed into a parked car riding home drunk last night and slept most of the evening where I landed, before going home then staggering in this morning to deal with a bunch of people whining that one of the VAXstations got turned off yesterday by someone looking for a light switch and now their batch jobs which had been running for 6 weeks all have to be restarted, and did they write 2 extra minutes of code to save their state? Noooo course they didn't. So now they all hate me even though as I said, I was drunk and it looked like a light switch, so it was hardly my fault... And I blamed the cleaners anyway. I need another jug of coffee and 3 hours at the Fenton for dinner. Anyone coming or am I on my own?

#morning #leeds #universityofleeds #LeedsUniversity

Aaah I could get back into this 80s life! 😁