The older you get the faster time flies by; this has been an unusual summer. The month of July had a low of 38 to a high of 98 and then Saturday August 16th was a late afternoon storm with 2 inches of rain in an hour and a half and a total of 4.3 inches in about 7 hours. No problems at my house but there were quite a few with water in their basements.
Monday evening Masako, my non-technical wife, got uptight thinking the VCR had died when it failed to run a borrowed tape recorded in Japan. What Had happened was that the batteries in the remote control had become exhausted. I got it going with the controls on the front of the VCR. I then checked an AAA battery I had and while it wasn’t a new one it still had some voltage left. I used it with the battery with the highest voltage and it worked until I bought two new AAA batteries for the remote control. The Japanese run their TV programs differently. For the most part they will run all the advertisements for the program in one block of time. Another is that the soap operas only run for one year and then they start a new story line.
All my moaning about what to store in the EPROMs for the Z88 was solved when I was at a garage sale last weekend. There were these plastic boxes with a black foam insert for a nickel each, the boxes will hold two EPROMs and the foam cut to keep the EPROMs from sliding around in the box. I think that the boxes that are used to store trading (business) cards are about the right size to hold two EPROMs stacked on the other. That would be neater and cleaner to transport the EPROMs or to store them on a shelf.
It is summertime and there has been little activity with the T/S in my household. Between honey-do projects and the trips to shop for Masako’s trip to Japan in September, I had less time to play with my T/S stuff. Of course I did do some things with the Z88 and the power requirements. I did take a look at some of the stuff stored in the garage which generated the list of stuff I have to get out of the garage and the house.
About Masako’s trip to her home land: It is surprising how much can be saved by changing departure dates. By going 15 days later, a savings of $365 is made. Of course the travel agents and the airlines will not tell you these things but if you know you can get the information.
I have harped about there being no stepping stone to get started in computing like the T/S computers but the little board computer called STAMP just might be one. But it looks like the programming is too much like IBM. Microsoft is trying to get all the market, there is no easy way to get started with IBM.
How long will the T/S computers be used? Well, if the automobiles are an indication it is possible for them to be in use by a very few a hundred years from now. This is automobile country and specifically those made in Indiana. On the streets here you occasionally see a Model T Ford being driven. So if you are working with a T/S computer and feel maybe that you are alone, yes maybe so but not that alone! It is just that a lot are not advertising their presence. For some of us it is just a matter of the T/S computers doing what we want them to do and not wanting to LEARN a new operating system and/or paying out that much money for the new system. So I plan to keep on with my trusty TS-2068 for as long as I can. 0/0