This is funny and very clever

Originally posted by dhfan
If you really want to play silly b*****s, you could try the relevant bits from a TR3 or TR4!

Hmmm , that would definately give me the edge over my mates at the road runs !!! , and it would still look original . I did have a Fordson Super Major with a Turbocharged Perkins 6 cylinder diesel , good fun but a bit wobbly in the corners.

If you really want to play silly b*****s, you could try the relevant bits from a TR3 or TR4!

Both my everyday Fergies have the 2 litre Standard engine in them – nearly the same as the one in the Standard Vanguard , but the Fergie only revs to 2000rpm , I’ve ofter wondered what the Standard Vanguard camshaft and carb would do if fitted to a Fergie ???.

I’m impressed!
Yes, Ginetta G26 which I’ve now had for 12 years.
Engine’s a 2 litre Pinto, mildly breathed on. Gas-flowed and ported, Piper fast road cam, four-branch, Lumenition,K&N filter but standard carb for tractability.

A Fergie would be nice but I don’t want to live in the shed.

Originally posted by dhfan
Alastair

As you say, the DeLorean was basically a kit car.

I daren’t get involved with even looking at ground equipment, though I do keep wondering what I could use a Fergie for.

I have enough trouble with general junk and cars.

Attached is not mine, mine’s going back on the road in a week or two.
There’s another one coming in the next month or so as well.

Good job we’re not married, otherwise I might not be for long!

Wow , is that a Ginetta ?? , nice car , what engine is in yours ??.
If you are ever looking for a Fergie I basically collect junk and have a couple of palletised Fergies, I hate seeing them lying rusting in farmers fields so I generally carry a battery , jump leads , points , condenser , plugs and a gallon of petrol and if I can fire them up I buy them – I usually give them away for the price of the diesel it takes to deliver them .
Strange how women never appreciate the worth of junk and cars , I generally class myself as a young version of Fred Dibnah without the good looks.

Alastair

As you say, the DeLorean was basically a kit car.

I daren’t get involved with even looking at ground equipment, though I do keep wondering what I could use a Fergie for.

I have enough trouble with general junk and cars.

Attached is not mine, mine’s going back on the road in a week or two.
There’s another one coming in the next month or so as well.

Good job we’re not married, otherwise I might not be for long!

Originally posted by dhfan
The entire bodyshell was fibreglass, built by Lotus and only clad in stainless. I think you’ll find the engine/box were Renault.

I stand corrected Ken , the basic shell is tubular steel clad in fibreglass – designed and built by Lotus , the engine is the same as the one in the Renault GTA , a lot of the suspension is robbed from Renault too , along with a lot of the interior . I wonder how much of the car was actually manufactured in Northern Ireland ??.

Thanks for the info about the RAF ground equipment book , it’s a sad hobby I know but I can’t afford an aeroplane so it’s the closest I’ll get to aviation for now !!.

Originally posted by Merlin3945
First service at 1 hundred thousand mile cant be bad with guaranteed part replacement cant be bad. I have watched afew programmes about this and personally I agree with the rumour that he was framed. Imagine how much british business would have lost if these cars lived up to their reputation. Not the most pretty car in the world but I would still have one.

That was the problem – John DeLorean made a lot of promises and never kept up to them , even a set of plugs won’t last 100,000km and I’ve never heard of an oil which can go 100,000km without needing changed , the only claim to fame the De Lorean has is that it was the car used in ” Back to the Future” , he most certainly wasn’t framed the Government even tried to cover the Tax Fraud up to try and prevent any public backlash , he only paid back £250,000 of the millions he was given to set the company up , served a minimal sentence and is living a comfortable retirement at present .
There are two DeLorean’s near to where my parents live , (Blackridge, West Lothian) the guy has one which is roadworthy and the other one is his spares car , not a bad looking car , and sounds good too , same guy has a Lamborghini , not a bad hobby if you can afford it !!!

Originally posted by ageorge
the cars themselves are nothing special – except for the fact that they were made from stainless steel , they bought in an American engine /gearbox unit and built the rest from other car manufacturers parts bins.

The entire bodyshell was fibreglass, built by Lotus and only clad in stainless. I think you’ll find the engine/box were Renault.

Originally posted by ageorge
The cars themselves are nothing special – except for the fact that they were made from stainless steel , they bought in an American engine /gearbox unit and built the rest from other car manufacturers parts bins.

First service at 1 hundred thousand mile cant be bad with guaranteed part replacement cant be bad. I have watched afew programmes about this and personally I agree with the rumour that he was framed. Imagine how much british business would have lost if these cars lived up to their reputation. Not the most pretty car in the world but I would still have one.

Originally posted by Arthur
Actually, V2000 was effectively killed by it’s inventor Philips (who did manage to set the standard for CD’s shortly after) when they refused to give licenses to pornography distributors. When porn was only available on Beta and VHS, the V2000 system was lost.

I still have a Panasonic V2000 I used until fairly recently , after numerous minor repairs it has finally bitten the dust at the age of 23 years , not bad for a clunky big bugger ( with the remote control on the end of a 20ft length of wire ) . RCA Columbia and Warner stopped producing for the V2000 market in 1984 and they killed Betamax 2 years later . Phillips kept the V2000 in production until 1985 and it was still used until the late 90’s in some CCTV camera systems.

Originally posted by ageorge
Good point about VCR’s though , but remember V2000 , it was better than both Beta or VHS but eventually the JVC marketing pushed out the Sony betamax and the Phillips V2000 systems .

Actually, V2000 was effectively killed by it’s inventor Philips (who did manage to set the standard for CD’s shortly after) when they refused to give licenses to pornography distributors. When porn was only available on Beta and VHS, the V2000 system was lost.

Originally posted by Merlin3945
Does anyone remember betamax video players. These were better than the VHS format but VHS flooded the market and betamax flopped because they didnt get the same marketing.

Was it the same for DeLorien cars. These were better more reliable and longer lasting cars but would have put a lot of other cars out of business so the were disappeared.

sound familar. All done by greater marketing and better businessmen.

No DeLorean cars went bust as the MD pocketed the British Government money which was supposed to go towards the DeLorean plant in Northern Ireland ,said MD was charged with Tax Evasion , jailed for a short time but very little of the money was recovered , the cars themselves are nothing special – except for the fact that they were made from stainless steel , they bought in an American engine /gearbox unit and built the rest from other car manufacturers parts bins.
Good point about VCR’s though , but remember V2000 , it was better than both Beta or VHS but eventually the JVC marketing pushed out the Sony betamax and the Phillips V2000 systems .

I heard Kildall went golfing, but same result anyway so who cares.

When Micro$oft got the contract, they went out and bought QDOS, standing for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Delete Q and replace with MS, tell everybody it stands for Disc Operating System and wait for the money to pour in. He even managed to get IBM to do any development work necessary but agree that it belonged to Microsoft.

I used DR DOS 6 until the first Pentium class processors appeared.
Full operating system, task switching, GUI and networking came on 2 floppies.
Whats XP, 1.1/2 Gig or so?

It should be mentioned that IBM first approached Gary Kildall the designer of the CP/M OS to make their pc OS but Gary who was into private aviation at the time decided to go flying instead, and that was the end of that. Many say that DOS is a cheap hacker copy of of CP/M. These are some of the OS inovations of Gary Kildall:

– He introduced operating systems with preemptive multitasking and windowing capabilities and menu-driven user interfaces.

– Through DRI, he created the first diskette track buffering schemes, read-ahead algorithms, file directory caches, and RAM disk emulators.

– In the 1980s, through DRI, he introduced a binary recompiler.

– Kildall defined the first programming language and wrote the first compiler specifically for microprocessors.

– He created the first microprocessor disk operating system, which eventually sold a quarter million copies.

– He created the first computer interface for video disks to allow automatic nonlinear playback, presaging today’s interactive multimedia.

– He developed the file system and data structures for the first consumer CD-ROM.

– He created the first successful open-system architecture by segregating system-specific hardware interfaces in a set of BIOS routines, making the whole third-party software industry possible.

Does anyone remember betamax video players. These were better than the VHS format but VHS flooded the market and betamax flopped because they didnt get the same marketing.

Was it the same for DeLorien cars. These were better more reliable and longer lasting cars but would have put a lot of other cars out of business so the were disappeared.

sound familar. All done by greater marketing and better businessmen.

Couldn’t have said it better than Garry when it comes to Microsoft. When it comes to Bill Gates, i’m sure Vortex will understand the parrallel with Isaac Newton. Yes, i agree that Bill Gates is a smart businessman. But he’s a butthole as well.

Oh, and i do not oppose free trade. If it was applied consistently, the world’s wealth would be spread far more even then it is now. Alas, the country which presents itself as the great protagonist of free trade is actually a country with one with the most restrictive trade policies. Both to punish unfavourable governments (Cuba), but also in an attempt to keep it’s increasingly hollow economy (Trade deficit 6% and rising… of every 17 dollars spend in the US, one is borrowed from Europe, Japan or Arabia… one of the great effects from Reaganomics).

And as far as MSDOS well, there are BMW’s and there are Toyota’s but Toyota dosn’t put ‘BMW’ logos on their cars do they, so your China story dosn’t wash.

I know i’m going completely off-topic, but if you replace BMW in your above sentence with Mercedes… Ever heard of the car brand Lexus? They are simply knocked-down Mercedeses built by Toyota, to create a posh car with a more expensive name then that one of the company which brought us the Corolla and the Starlet. The trick worked extremely well, i actually think there are people who believe a Lexus is a cool snobby car and a decent replacement for a Mercedes S or a Lincoln…

Have it your way guys. I think most here pretty much know the Microsoft history as well as you do (minus the personal slant you put on it) but thanks anyway. Some of you comments actually confirm my points about Bill’s business skills.

Regards

Sauron

Ummm, Sauron, I think you need a little history lesson… do you actually know what happened?

A company called IBM which both then and now makes and made the vast majority of its income from mainframe or mini computers sales decided to tap into what was then a very small enthusiast based personal computer market. They didn’t expect to make much money so the IBM department that worked on the project didn’t have much in the way of resources.

The major contribution by IBM was that they weren’t greedy like Apple or Microsoft. This was largely because they lacked the vision to realise how popular personal computers would become and that in many cases today that PC have become so powerful that a whole network can be made of PCs with large PC servers to replace the old setup where there was one large mainframe computer that had dumb terminals attached to it that were little more than keyboards and monitors for the mainframe.

Because they weren’t greedy they merely made a standard and allowed other companies to make the parts… that is why PCs are called “IBM compatible”… ie they meet IBMs design standard.

Apple on the other hand copyright all hardware so that most things you get for apples are “Apple” products. Great for compatibility… bad for choice… ie as long as a printer meets the IBM standard then you can connect it to almost any IBM compatible PC. (you might need a card like a scsi or a free usb port etc etc).

IBM went to Bill Gates to get him to write an OS for their new computer. Bill told them he could but that another chap had a better OS ready to go. They went to see this other chap who wasn’t at home (and talked to his wife who told them to leave) and so they went back to Bill and he basically took the other guys OS, changed it a little and “Sold” it to IBM. Every machine with MSDOS sold earned MS $50 US dollars.

His business savy was much more impressive than his computer skills.

Later after realising that graphical user interfaces were the best way to make computers more widely usable, but not being able to directly copy the MacOS Bill hired an exApple employee who developed the GUI system the Apple uses and windows was born.

“Gee! Garry and Arthur both trumpeting the merits of free and fair trade!”

Why should we oppose that?

The most brutal weapon the US has at its disposal has and will always be the trade sanction… when was the last time a communist country used that type of weapon? Impoverishing a whole nation just to get revenge on a government that doesn’t do as it is told… the opposite of what their military has been trying to achieve with precision guided weapons and non lethal weapons.

Sauron, you have an extremely selective memory.

DR-DOS was vastly superior to MS-DOS, but Microsoft’s “dubious” business practices killed it.
Such as charging for a licence for every PC a company made, whatever operating system was installed, announcing MS-DOS 5 before they’d even thought about writing it because DR was so much better, spreading lies and misinformation about DR, deliberately nobbling Windows 3.1 so it wouldn’t work with DR DOS…
They sent BeOS broke a couple of years back by forbidding a dual boot system which had been agreed with a couple of manufacturers.
It was IBM’s stupidity that gave Microsoft it’s original licence to print money when they thought they’d only sell a couple of thousand PCs, world-wide.
Microsoft have nothing to worry about now, most people buy the best justice they can, Gates and Co bought the entire US government.