Author Topic: Good books about the moon landings hoax?  (Read 341716 times)

Offline JayUtah

  • Neptune
  • ****
  • Posts: 3787
    • Clavius
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #660 on: September 25, 2014, 08:11:11 PM »
There was only one generally available computer-based accounting system until the mid-1970s -- 9PAC.  Everything before then was written purely in-house, and generally required IBM equipment.  9PAC also required IBM "big iron."  It would be the large, heavy computer Burns thought would have to go on a spacecraft.

Granted this may just be an editing error.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Bob B.

  • Jupiter
  • ***
  • Posts: 819
  • Bob the Excel Guru™
    • Rocket & Space Technology
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #661 on: September 25, 2014, 08:16:08 PM »
I wonder if he wasn't perhaps working on some earlier version and maybe misremembering what it was called.  I'm only a half-centenarian and often times my memory has similar glitches.

I remember using the original BASIC in the mid-70s.  According to Wikipedia it first appeared in 1964.  It looks like other forms (BASICA, GW-BASIC) appeared in the early 80s, with QuickBasic being introduced in 1985.

Offline Tanalia

  • Venus
  • **
  • Posts: 52
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #662 on: September 25, 2014, 08:51:10 PM »
Urban dictionary definitions are questionable, at best.  The etymologies are unreliable and are likely to be made up, retrofit type.  Such as the shortening of a phrase by making an acronym. I've read that practice started only 60 or so years ago.   So its no surprise on the first.  I always assumed "Pom" had something to do with potatoes, from French, but pomegranate seems a good possibility.

Actually, one of the tests I have for any new book of etymology is to look up "posh" and see if they claim it's an acronym.  If they do, they've done shoddy research and I don't get the book.  Much before "radar," and the best assumption is that it isn't an acronym.  Heck, the word "acronym" dates to 1943!

This is the importance of verifying research, of course.  To tie it back to the actual discussion at hand, it isn't enough to just claim something to be true.  If anyone could produce even one document that used the expression "Prisoner of Mother England," that folk etymology might be accurate.  However, the only references are explanations of where the term came from, not evidence the expression was ever used.  You can't just state a thing and have legitimate researchers believe it, no matter what field you're in.  Or obviously you can, because that claim appears an awful lot.  But you shouldn't be able to!
I thought I had added a note on this topic but I guess the computer ate it...

The derivation I had heard for this was the use of rhyming slang -- the wiki article mentions the pommy variant.

Offline JayUtah

  • Neptune
  • ****
  • Posts: 3787
    • Clavius
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #663 on: September 25, 2014, 08:54:18 PM »
I remember using the original BASIC in the mid-70s.  According to Wikipedia it first appeared in 1964.  It looks like other forms (BASICA, GW-BASIC) appeared in the early 80s, with QuickBasic being introduced in 1985.

I took a compiler design class from the guy who invented Tiny Basic.  I remember doing a few silly things in GW-BASIC, but almost all my programming at the time was being done in Fortran.  You know, the language for engineers with real problems.  ;D
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Bob B.

  • Jupiter
  • ***
  • Posts: 819
  • Bob the Excel Guru™
    • Rocket & Space Technology
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #664 on: September 26, 2014, 12:00:13 AM »
I took a compiler design class from the guy who invented Tiny Basic.  I remember doing a few silly things in GW-BASIC, but almost all my programming at the time was being done in Fortran.  You know, the language for engineers with real problems.  ;D

Yeah, I did Fortran in college - using punch cards (c.1977).  I played around with QuickBASIC quite a bit in the 90s, mostly writing astronomy programs.  I still occasionally use one or two of those old programs (QuickBASIC runs in XP Mode).  Today I can usually accomplish what I need to using Excel.

Offline smartcooky

  • Uranus
  • ****
  • Posts: 1959
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #665 on: September 26, 2014, 12:10:07 AM »
Actually, one of the tests I have for any new book of etymology is to look up "posh" and see if they claim it's an acronym.  If they do, they've done shoddy research and I don't get the book.

Yep. contrary to popular belief, it does not come from "Port Out, Starboard Home". That was made up after the fact.

My father told me that the term "Posh" came the surname of a character in Punch magazine near the end of the 19th century. The character was the type of person known as a "swell", a pompous person of elevated social standing.


"Posh" started off being used as a noun, with such people being referred to as "a posh" e.g.

"That David Smith is such a posh"

but gradually, the "a" was dropped, and posh became an adjective

"That David Smith is so posh"

If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong.

Offline smartcooky

  • Uranus
  • ****
  • Posts: 1959
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #666 on: September 26, 2014, 02:43:37 AM »
I took a compiler design class from the guy who invented Tiny Basic.  I remember doing a few silly things in GW-BASIC, but almost all my programming at the time was being done in Fortran.  You know, the language for engineers with real problems.  ;D

Yeah, I did Fortran in college - using punch cards (c.1977).  I played around with QuickBASIC quite a bit in the 90s, mostly writing astronomy programs.  I still occasionally use one or two of those old programs (QuickBASIC runs in XP Mode).  Today I can usually accomplish what I need to using Excel.

I also did a little bit of Fortran programming at school but by the 1980's I was right into Apple computers. All this talk of BASIC has reminded me of something that I was involved in during the 1980s, so with the indulgence of members, I would like to go off topic and tell a story...

In late 1986, I started writing a BASIC program for the Canterbury Astronomical Society (of which I was a member). It was for recording photometric data using a DOS 3.3 equipped Apple ][+, and it was based on an idea by Russell Genet, an astronomer well known at that time for his robot telescopes.

What we had was a Philips photomultiplier tube in a housing with a current to frequency converter (IF) at the Cassegrain focus of a 14½" telescope at West Melton, just outside Christchurch. The output of the IF was fed to a 6522 interface card (by John Bell manufacturing) plugged into peripheral slot 7. What this essentially did was to turn the Apple ][+ into a recording frequency counter. The signal would integrate for 700 milliseconds out of each second, and during the other 300 milliseconds the data, together with date and time data and UBV filter information, was dumped in the form of a hexadecimal 16 byte "word" into a dedicated section of the "massive" 32K RAM. This integration subroutine would loop a number of times (I can't remember how long for, but I think it was about five or ten minutes) then the whole section of filled RAM was dumped onto a 5¼ floppy disk, the RAM would be cleared and the whole process started again.

We started off our testing by gathering data for light curves for a couple well known variable stars; RR Centauri, a W Ursae Majoris type star, a low-mass contact eclipsing binary, and RY Sagittarius, an R Corona Borealis type intrinsic variable The the original plan when the system was up and running was to provide photometric data of variable stars for a couple of Physics students at Canterbury University, but that plan was about to change.

The night of February 24, 1987 is one I will never forget. There were two of us in the observatory. We had the 14½" Cassegrain on one of the two stars (I cant remember which) when the telephone rang. Graham answered it, and I could hear him getting excited as he wrote down what was obviously an RA & Dec. He said "Cooky, we need to re-point the telescope. Some Chilean astronomers have discovered a supernova in the LMC." This was not as easy as it sounds. This telescope did not have setting circles. Pointing was achieved by pulling out the 1981 edition of Will Tirion's Sky Atlas 2000, and locating stars near where you wanted to point the telescope.

The problem we faced is that we were looking for a star field on the chart, trying to match it with what we could see through the finder telescope (a 4" refractor attached to the side of the big one), and trying to identify a star in the field of view that wasn't on the star chart. Initially, this did not seem as if it would be easy. Tirion's Sky Atlas goes down to +8 mag, but the 4" refractor shows down to at least +13. That means there were literally hundreds of stars in the field that were not on the chart. However, it didn't take us long to find it, there was this 3rd - 4th magnitude in the field where there was none on the chart among a group of about five stars which were. We were gathering photometric data on SN1987a within about 40 minutes of the phone call.

That pattern of half a dozen stars was going to become very familiar for the next few months.
If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong.

Offline Bryanpoprobson

  • Jupiter
  • ***
  • Posts: 823
  • Another Clown
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #667 on: September 26, 2014, 03:02:09 AM »
In the 80's I used to run a training course on programming machine code and basic fault finding. I've looked everywhere for the kit I used (for nostalgia reasons). It consisted of a briefcase encased Microprocessor with some LED's and a Four digit Count display, it was called MicroLab Up (as I recall, but my memory may be wrong on this). I just wondered if anybody remembers the kits full name, or better still where I might lay my hands on one?
By programming the (Motorola 68000?) processor you could make the LED's and counters do tasks, play games etc.
"Wise men speak because they have something to say!" "Fools speak, because they have to say something!" (Plato)

Offline smartcooky

  • Uranus
  • ****
  • Posts: 1959
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #668 on: September 26, 2014, 03:20:43 AM »
In the 80's I used to run a training course on programming machine code and basic fault finding. I've looked everywhere for the kit I used (for nostalgia reasons). It consisted of a briefcase encased Microprocessor with some LED's and a Four digit Count display, it was called MicroLab Up (as I recall, but my memory may be wrong on this). I just wondered if anybody remembers the kits full name, or better still where I might lay my hands on one?
By programming the (Motorola 68000?) processor you could make the LED's and counters do tasks, play games etc.


Yep, We used one of those at No. 2 Technical Training School. It's an HP5036 Microlab and it had an Intel8085 chip.



http://hacksomethingtonight.blogspot.co.nz/2010/08/hp-5036a-microprocessor-lab.html
« Last Edit: September 26, 2014, 03:27:52 AM by smartcooky »
If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong.

Offline Bryanpoprobson

  • Jupiter
  • ***
  • Posts: 823
  • Another Clown
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #669 on: September 26, 2014, 03:27:19 AM »
Yep, We used one of those at No. 2 Technical Training School. It's an HP5036 Microlab and it had an Intel8085 chip

http://hacksomethingtonight.blogspot.co.nz/2010/08/hp-5036a-microprocessor-lab.html

That was the cookie, thank you for that.. :)
"Wise men speak because they have something to say!" "Fools speak, because they have to say something!" (Plato)

Offline Bryanpoprobson

  • Jupiter
  • ***
  • Posts: 823
  • Another Clown
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #670 on: September 26, 2014, 03:31:04 AM »
2 for sale on ebay over $300 with shipping, I'l put my nostalgia on hold. :)
"Wise men speak because they have something to say!" "Fools speak, because they have to say something!" (Plato)

Offline nomuse

  • Jupiter
  • ***
  • Posts: 859
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #671 on: September 26, 2014, 03:53:49 AM »

...We started off our testing by gathering data for light curves for a couple well known variable stars; RR Centauri...

That's great. I'm actually trying to dream up a portable version of that (using 2001-2006 technology) for an SG1 fanfic I've been tinkering with when I get really bored.

Offline Dr_Orpheus

  • Venus
  • **
  • Posts: 76
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #672 on: September 26, 2014, 09:42:40 AM »
Maybe someone should compile a list of all the questions that Jockndoris has ignored so far on this thread.

Offline gwiz

  • Mars
  • ***
  • Posts: 335
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #673 on: September 26, 2014, 10:34:05 AM »
I remember using the original BASIC in the mid-70s.  According to Wikipedia it first appeared in 1964.  It looks like other forms (BASICA, GW-BASIC) appeared in the early 80s, with QuickBasic being introduced in 1985.
I think it was in the late 1960s that we got an ICL 1903 and started Fortran programming, before that we were using a variety of languages, including machine code, on a Ferranti Pegasus.  BASIC was the language of choice for the DEC mini computers that arrived in the 1970s, then back to Fortran for the wide variety of machines available in the 1980s, everything from VAX minis to supercomputers.  I started to get my teeth into  C in the 1990s, but by that time most of the programming was done by specialist teams, leaving the research and design staff to get on with proper work.
Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind - Terry Pratchett
...the ascent module ... took off like a rocket - Moon Man

Offline JayUtah

  • Neptune
  • ****
  • Posts: 3787
    • Clavius
Re: Good books about the moon landings hoax?
« Reply #674 on: September 26, 2014, 12:36:00 PM »
Maybe someone should compile a list of all the questions that Jockndoris has ignored so far on this thread.

It's called "the thread."
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams