Dick wrote: Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:10 am
You could have got à lot more luggage on board, it doesnt look like you were trying
Ive just done à 520km trip to see wifeys parents mostly motorway and very dull.. seats got uncomfortable after the first hundred miles or so.. do you have this problem ?
I had a better shot at loading up on the way home as you'll see in a second!
The seat in this aren't bad actually. I think this dates from just before VW switched to making their seats from concrete. They're not like the armchairs in the Xantia and your behind does get a little flat after a few hours, but they're absolutely fine between the sorts of run you should do before taking a break.
-- -- --
Sadly all good things have to come to an end, and that meant that on Monday morning we had to pack up and head home after saying our goodbyes. Hopefully this time "See you all next year!" actually means it!
It's been a great weekend and we're all sad to have to turn back to the harsh realities of normal boring day to day life again.
Hard to believe that we have seen our event grow from filling only half of this hotel...
To filling it...to filling it *and* all of the surrounding ones in Livingston which became our constraining factor for a couple of years (though we were seriously struggling for event space too in 2018 and 19), and have now moved here...
The main function room is massive. Max capacity of the one in the old hotel was around 300, this one can hold 800+.
About a third of the room, including the main stage is behind me in that photo. The other huge plus for the AV guys here over our old venue is that they're finally able to properly set up the audio gear. The old function room was a very long, narrow and low room which made setting the audio up an absolute nightmare. Especially given the line arrays really want to be 15-20' up...and the room was only about 10' high. So it was always a huge compromise, trying to get it vaguely right throughout without creating a sonic death ray at any one spot. Now they've got a proper stage and overhead rigging to work with...the difference is staggering. Music actually sounds like music...overall volume levels I reckon were lower, but it felt so much more powerful as it's properly equalised.
Which was especially important given we had a concert on Saturday evening, by
Drums & Roses no less. A group I'd had on my "I bet they'd be fun to see" list for years, never expected them to pop up at an event I was already at. The word epic fits. Oh, and loud. Very, very loud...even with earplugs to drop the dB level a bit, my ears were still ringing afterwards.
If you ever get a chance to see them, I thoroughly recommend it.
Being our first year in a new venue it was always going to be a bit nerve wracking, especially with a relatively high energy event moving into a four star hotel like this. The old venue loved us, and essentially handed us the keys on a silver platter and gave us free reign to do whatever we liked - so there was a certain amount of crossing our fingers and hoping everyone played by the rules this year. Especially given everyone here hasn't likely seen everyone else since 2019...
Well it sounds like we made a pretty good impression. Even if we did run the bar out of Tenent's (twice) and Guinness on the Friday evening. They saw takings of over £10K through the weekend in the main bar alone, never mind the restaurant etc. There was only one kerfuffle over the weekend with some people having a massive loud party in one room...which when investigated turned out to be a resident who was nothing to do with our event whatsoever.
Fingers crossed this means they'll welcome us back next year, even if we did confuse the heck out of a lot of their usual customers. Maybe turn the heating down a couple of degrees too, that was my main gripe. The whole building was roasting. Oh, and have the most stupidly laid out and unusably narrow bathtubs known to human kind.
If there could not be a Simply Red and James Blunt concert on next door on two days we're there that would be great too. Though I guess that's what you get in the hotel that's physically attached to the SECC.
For the trip back home we decided to simplify things and just chucked everything in the Caddy. This made things way simpler than trying to work out what would/would not fit in the Audi, especially as the hotel doesn't have a really good loading area. So not having to juggle two cars made life easier.
No bother fitting everything even without any real optimisation.
When we filled up for the trip home I ran the numbers for the trip north, which came back at 46.5MPG. I'm pretty happy with that.
On the return trip though, in spite of having more cargo on board and me emphatically not hanging about she did even better on fuel. Showing a good 1/3 a tank left when we got home...reckon there was a usable 400 mile range there.
Running the numbers when I fuelled up the following morning the figures came back at 50.2mpg, which is really good I reckon for a 20 year old 100K mile van. I was hoping for high 40s but never expected us to break the 50mpg barrier. That equates to 48.4mpg over the whole run both ways.
I'm absolutely staggered by how happy the Caddy is on the motorway. Cruises far more happily than it has any right to.
Long trips do a lot to form your opinions of a car I reckon and this one has definitely made me like this one even more than I already did. Really does drive nicely...and the above photo helps show just how *useful* it is, but without a lot of the baggage that comes with a full size van. Fits under heigh barriers and is no harder to park than any car.
Really think this one might be a proper keeper.
A little distraction to keep me from being too grumpy about the return to the humdrum grey normality of every day life arrived back the morning after we did. Especially as we're isolating ourselves until we've had clear LFT results a full seven days after our return from the event as a precaution.
Inside that case was this brick of a machine.
This is a Compucorp 324G Scientist. A scientific calculator with the ability to record and playback user programs dating from...wait for it...1971. Compucorp were well ahead of the curve on a lot of counts, and I feel are one of the more tragic names to be lost in the huge contraction in the market in the late 70s, they really made some very interesting and ahead of their time machines. This one however is my favourite, and I've been after one for well over twenty years. Until last weekend I've never seen one pop up on eBay UK. One or two a year in the US, but never before seen one over here, so I pounced the moment I spotted it.
Most of the photos of these give precisely zero sense of scale, looking like a slightly bulky calculator. Let's get a hand in shot to correct that assumption. This thing is a beast.
Both in surface area and in depth...
That size isn't due to wasted space either, there are five boards in there (including the keypad) to provide all that functionality.
Sadly this has a few issues. All due to the rechargeable batteries having leaked. The battery compartment in particular was in a right state.
Upon closer inspection there was good news and bad news.
The good news was that the PCBs seem to have survived pretty much unscathed. A little tarnishing on the lower one and a bunch of corrosion on the aluminium block that the backplane is clamped together by, but no eaten traces or anything.
Likewise the high voltage transformer for the display seemed to have survived without any damage I can see.
If that was dead it would probably be the end of the road.
It's really quite well packed in there.
Sadly there was one casualty caused by the corrosion due to the battery leakage, and it's going to be a pain to replace.
There's a little metal tab at each side of the display to provide some bracing, unfortunately that has rusted. In doing do it's pushed the two glass panels apart until the frit seal between them failed.
This is a neon based gas discharge display - the direct forerunner to the neon gas plasma displays used on laptops in the 80s and 90s. A Burroughs Panaplax BR16252 in this case.
Ironically if this was a Nixie display it would be easier to sort probably...while expensive they are (relatively) easy to find. These things comparatively had a short market life and weren't anywhere near as widely used as LED seven segment displays were just around the corner and VFDs were already quite widely used by then. So they're a heck of a lot less common, especially in higher digit counts like the 16 this has. 10-12 digit displays with larger digits are more commonplace and were probably the ones produced for the longest, being a common choice for the score readouts on pinball machines. Sure they were used elsewhere, but aside from calculators and one bit of test equipment I've never seen one in the wild anywhere else.
That one bit of test equipment is a Crypton Motorscope 335...photo below for reference of how they should look when working.
The symbols/letters to the right are just incandescent lamps behind masks, the Panaplax display is just the three digits and +/- indicators.
So finding one of those is going to be a right old challenge. Obviously the calculator is a static exhibit until such point as a new display turns up.
While it was apart I took the opportunity to give the case a good clean which has helped a lot. It's actually in really good shape externally save for a bit of yellowing and tarnishing of the aluminium plate on the underside.
Most I've seen are missing the display filter/shade as the hinge pins for it are really fragile, so nice to see it's intact here.
As a final shot for scale, here it is alongside a normal computer keyboard.
Sadly the one sticker didn't survive the cleaning process despite me being careful. It was so filthy though that full immersion and scrubbing was necessary - water ended up the colour of black tea. The labels though may offer some hints as to where it originally saw use.
Wouldn't have surprised me if this was originally leased rather than bought by the user. These things were Expensive when new. The price at launch in 1971 was $795 - that equates to around £5,500 today. So a pretty serious workstation PC setup - which is a fairly reasonable comparison really.
I do wonder what year the last shop who had "Calculator specialists" as their main claim to fame disappeared...
Afraid there won't be any further updates on this one possibly aside from a final photo with it reunited with the carry case when I've cleaned that up for a while. Time to set up a saved search for that display in the hope a new old stock one turns up in a dusty store room somewhere.
Am I disappointed? A little, as I really like having working exhibits. Still happy to have finally got hold of one though. Does remind me that I still need to properly fault find that Anita 1211...the other Panaplax display equipped calculator I have. That's got a display problem too, but I think that's down to a dodgy driver transistor or three rather than a fault with the panel itself as it's missing segments - however it's the same segments on every digit, so I reckon with how the display is multiplexed that makes the most sense.
This is meant to be showing 1 2 3 4 and so on.
Had hoped to find a schematic (or a component layout diagram which for this job would have been equally useful) for it but haven't had any luck so far so will just have to take a stab at it at some point. Other than that this one does appear to work properly at least.
