This day in history

[Richard Frost]

1384 Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland, despite being a woman
1492 Christopher Columbus' fleet anchors at "Fernandina" (Long Island, Bahamas)
1579 Francis Drake sights land in the Philippines after crossing the Pacific Ocean aboard the Golden Hind
1775 Portland, Maine burned by British
1834 Much of the ancient structures of the Palace of Westminster (parliament) in London is burnt down
1901 Baron Hayashi of Japan begins negotiations in London to make an alliance with the British and strengthen Japan's position against Russians
1946 10 Nazi leaders are hanged as war criminals after Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Alfred Jodl. Hermann Goering on trial at the Nuremberg Trials. He would later be sentenced to death, but committed suicide the night before his sentence was to be carried out.
1972 2 members of the Official Irish Republican Army are shot dead by the British Army in County Tyrone
1972 A Protestant youth member (15) of the Ulster Defence Association, and a UDA member (26) are run over by British Army vehicles during riots in east Belfast
1973 Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla elected Pope John Paul II
1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, wins Nobel Peace Prize
1993 Anti-Nazi riot breaks out in Welling in Kent, after police stop protesters approaching British National Party headquarters
1993 IRA bomb attack on fish & chips restaurant in Belfast, 10 killed
1998 Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a Spanish warrant requesting his extradition on murder charges
2018 Chairman of China's Xinjiang’s government defends its detention camps for Uighur Muslims saying they provided “vocational education and training”
2018 Man Booker Prize is won by Anna Burns' "Milkman", the first winner from Northern Ireland
2018 Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies knowledge of the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi according to President Trump

[Chadwick]

1384 Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland, despite being a woman
1492 Christopher Columbus' fleet anchors at "Fernandina" (Long Island, Bahamas)
1579 Francis Drake sights land in the Philippines after crossing the Pacific Ocean aboard the Golden Hind
1775 Portland, Maine burned by British
1834 Much of the ancient structures of the Palace of Westminster (parliament) in London is burnt down
1901 Baron Hayashi of Japan begins negotiations in London to make an alliance with the British and strengthen Japan's position against Russians
1946 10 Nazi leaders are hanged as war criminals after Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Alfred Jodl. Hermann Goering on trial at the Nuremberg Trials. He would later be sentenced to death, but committed suicide the night before his sentence was to be carried out.
1972 2 members of the Official Irish Republican Army are shot dead by the British Army in County Tyrone
1972 A Protestant youth member (15) of the Ulster Defence Association, and a UDA member (26) are run over by British Army vehicles during riots in east Belfast
1973 Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla elected Pope John Paul II
1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, wins Nobel Peace Prize
1993 Anti-Nazi riot breaks out in Welling in Kent, after police stop protesters approaching British National Party headquarters
1993 IRA bomb attack on fish & chips restaurant in Belfast, 10 killed
1998 Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a Spanish warrant requesting his extradition on murder charges
2018 Chairman of China's Xinjiang’s government defends its detention camps for Uighur Muslims saying they provided “vocational education and training”
2018 Man Booker Prize is won by Anna Burns' "Milkman", the first winner from Northern Ireland
2018 Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies knowledge of the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi according to President Trump

Blimey. I spent most of today on the sofa.

[macliam]

1384 Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland, despite being a woman
1492 Christopher Columbus' fleet anchors at "Fernandina" (Long Island, Bahamas)
1579 Francis Drake sights land in the Philippines after crossing the Pacific Ocean aboard the Golden Hind
1775 Portland, Maine burned by British
1834 Much of the ancient structures of the Palace of Westminster (parliament) in London is burnt down
1901 Baron Hayashi of Japan begins negotiations in London to make an alliance with the British and strengthen Japan's position against Russians
1946 10 Nazi leaders are hanged as war criminals after Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Alfred Jodl. Hermann Goering on trial at the Nuremberg Trials. He would later be sentenced to death, but committed suicide the night before his sentence was to be carried out.
1972 2 members of the Official Irish Republican Army are shot dead by the British Army in County Tyrone
1972 A Protestant youth member (15) of the Ulster Defence Association, and a UDA member (26) are run over by British Army vehicles during riots in east Belfast
1973 Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla elected Pope John Paul II
1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, wins Nobel Peace Prize
1993 Anti-Nazi riot breaks out in Welling in Kent, after police stop protesters approaching British National Party headquarters
1993 IRA bomb attack on fish & chips restaurant in Belfast, 10 killed
1998 Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a Spanish warrant requesting his extradition on murder charges
2018 Chairman of China's Xinjiang’s government defends its detention camps for Uighur Muslims saying they provided “vocational education and training”
2018 Man Booker Prize is won by Anna Burns' "Milkman", the first winner from Northern Ireland
2018 Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies knowledge of the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi according to President Trump

Blimey. I spent most of today on the sofa.

1827 - Cavan-born General Thomas, Baron von Brady, of the Austrian army, dies in Vienna
1854 - Oscar Wilde, playwright, novelist and essayist is born in Dublin
1890 - Michael Collins is born in Clonakilty, Co. Cork

[Richard Frost]

VisiCalc (for "visible calculator")is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp in 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, prompting IBM to introduce the IBM PC two years later. VisiCalc is considered to be Apple II's killer app. It sold over 700,000 copies in six years, and as many as 1 million copies over its history.

[macliam]

A history lesson!! I was a programmer/analystwith BT back in 1980. Most people were either programmers or analysts, working on big, batch mainframe systems - the analyst mainly designed the talks and the programmer coded them and got them to run, but everythin was done offline.

As I was qualified to do both jobs (I had an NCC Cert in Systems Analysis), I was quickly moved on to "Small Business Computer" (SBC) support and given full control of producing business solutions. The SBC was pre-PC, powered mainly by Zilog Z80 chips (some by inrel 8080) which were 8-bit architecture, 64kb memory machines running CP/M - the precursor of both PCDOS and MSDOS. It seems crazy, but these were the first time you could actually code at the computer, since they had a monochrome, text-based monitor showing 80 characters by 24 lines of text in a rolling display (no graphics!).

Many people used BASIC, which was (as it suggests!) a very basic "commercial" programming language or Fortran, which was a "scientific" language, but I converted to use CIS Cobol, a version of the most popular Commercial programming language at the time, with extension to use the pc screen for input and output. As this was done via a very slow "converter" (a primitive AI) that took business statements and converted them to the Cobol equivalents of machine code... I broke the system to learn to code directly in CIS Cobol via an editor (which gave far more flecibility and was more efficient).... I got a prize for that and became a "guru" for things SBC!

Then the "STAR" suite of programmes became available (knowing BT, it was probably available in the USA 2 years before but took that long to be "accepted"!). These were a groundbreaking suite of apps that allowed word-processing (Wordstar), a spreadsheet (Calcstar) and primitive Database (Datastar). I was sent off to various engineering sites around the UK to teach people how to use these..... which started a LONG association with spreadsheets and databases (word processing became a "given"). I produced spreadsheet-based timesheets which looked like the paper version but did all the calculations and a primitive stock-control system that used database theory to use as exemplars.... and got a promotion - that reinforced my love of such activities!!!

Amazing to think that just a couple of years before, the idea of sitting at a desk with a keyboard and monitor and writing commercial programmes or calculating complex outcomes seemed pie in the sky!
Then, just a few years later the PC and it's clones moved everything on a step - and now you have vastly more power in a smartphone!! I lived through a revolution!!!

[macliam]

October 17 1171 - After the previous incursion of the Anglo-Norman "Strongbow" (Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke) into Ireland in 1170 and his subsequent marriage to the daughter of the local King of Leinster, Henry II became fearful of his intentions and landed at Waterford with an army to claim sovereignty over his vassal.

The local Anglo-Normans, Norse and Irish, were unable to match his forces, so all submitted to him - except for the most remote Irish kings. This was the real start of the colonization and attempted anglicization of Ireland.... 851 years ago!

[Chadwick]

a groundbreaking suite of apps that allowed word-processing (Wordstar)

Don't suppose you've got a Wordstar to Word converter? Oh and a 3 1/2" floppy drive?
I've got the unpublished* first draft of the fourth Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy book that hasn't seen light of day for a while.


* Rejected by the publisher because it wasn't written by Douglas Adams. But it did get me an A in my English GCSE. I got a real paper rejection letter that I wish I'd kept.

[macliam]

I can't help you with the floppy drive (though it's not long since I gave up on mine!) - few people realise that the only storage available on the original PC was 5 1/4" single-sided, single-density floppies with a capacity of 360Kb...... how we old CP/M hands laughed with our vastly superior 8" 512Kb floppies!! But equally, how many people realise that the entire UK telephone billing system was designed to work on a computer with only 64Kb memory?

You can buy USB floppy drives for peanuts these days (~£20 new) - but you'll need to ensure your disks are compatible - just the recording density, because single or double sided ceased to be an option on most systems with 3 1/2" disks.

Worstar to Word converters are available online (I can't vouch for how good they are) - the "official" MS converter ceased in 2003. You'll probably have to do some tidying up and the formatting is likely to be screwed, but a bit of find and replace should clear up most issues.

[Richard Frost]

18 October 1922

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) is founded, later called British Broadcasting Corporation

[Richard Frost]

1989 The 1975 conviction of the Guildford Four overturned by British courts; the 4 men had been convicted in the 1974 Guildford pub bombings.

1988 British government bans TV and radio interviews with members of Irish political group Sinn Fein and 11 paramilitary groups.

1987 In retaliation for Iranian attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf, the U. S. navy disables three of Iran’s offshore oil platforms.

1973 President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court demand to turn over the Watergate tapes.

1954 Egypt and Britain conclude a pact on the Suez Canal, ending 72 years of British military occupation. Britain agrees to withdraw its 80,000-man force within 20 months, and Egypt agrees to maintain freedom of canal navigation.

1950 The North Korean capital of Pyongyang is captured by U.N. troops.

1949 The People’s Republic of China is formally proclaimed.