sutton050

Its the day after THE day we wait for all year, yes today is Boxing Day and so yesterday was Christmas Day and I've had a fab day, thank you for asking!  Lots of food, a little drink, a fair amount of chocolate, a home made cheese cake to die for and about an hour in the freezing air enjoying the hot tub with all the bubbles on... Hands down has to rate as one of the Best Christmas Days for me ever... and I hope yours were all as good. Now, I know you're all asking, why have I been so quite on the old blog and YouTube Channel?  Well, you know moving house completely threw things off, but also, in case you missed this news, I'm changing jobs. Yes, after 14 years I'm leaving where I've been and I'm going to be doing something else.  Quite what I can't tell you very much about, probably for a fair while.  But what I can tell you is, I start the new role on the 2nd January, the team I have been assigned to is brand new and we travel to the US in mid-January to c...

A long time coming, here's another story from my days long past, this one takes me to my very first serious role in an IT department, I was however just the dogs body.  The company ran many old PC's (which I actually was around to see mostly be updated to nice Compaq Pentium III's) and they had a couple of high spec Silicon Graphics workstations in the design department. The main manufacturing control and purchasing system, as well as payroll and a bunch of other services ran on a dual 386 based mini computer, which had a custom cut of ScoUnix and a bunch of bespoke C programs comprising the actual system stack, this was accessed by a whole host or Gandalf multiplexers combining the serial connections down from a hundred or so Wyse brand terminals (I wish I'd have nabbed one of those before I left). Anyway, it was time for this back end stack to be updated, and so a pair of Compaq Proliant servers were brought in, these were dual Pentium III class with a dedicated stora...

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be musing about the connections between the humble concept of the PC, where it started for myself, which processors and upgrade options I've taken, which dead-ends I've been down and where that took my gaming experience. And where I hope to take my gaming experience in the future. Today of course I'm running a quite nice Intel i7 processor and an EVGA GeForce 1080 GTX graphics card, however, that rig is nearing end of life for me, only the graphics card is a recent edition, and so as a high-performance low budget kind of chap I will be looking at my options, including the latest offerings from both Intel and AMD and the modern differences in nVidia versus AMD graphics offerings. The secondary thread from this will be a little retro-grade gaming, this is not going to be full on retro - though I am in the mood for some Carrier Command on my Atari ST - we're going to be looking at retro post 2000 stuff.... Watch this space. So why d...