Martian,

Regarding your statement of April 10th @ 8:36 a.m.
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Tony, if anything the decision in 1966 to secondacentimalize the U.K. currency for 1971 was taken to enable the use of the computer, and had absolutely nothing to do with Uropist Atomic Community, Uropist Defence Community, Uropist Economic Community, & Uropist Political Community. It is an irrelevant fact that all U.A.C.U.D.C.U.E.C.U.P.C. free statelets & crown statelets had secondacentimal currencies, except for the Christian Federal Republic of West Germany’s centimal currency and the 5th Republic of France’s decimal currency and the Papist Republic of Italy’s uno currency.

Tony, try adding up a column of sums of money denominated in £ s. d. f. on a decimal calculator, and then repeat the exercise using £ nf np 5na. It is much easier to handle secondacentimal currency, in fact it’s no contest. One shopmistress who certainly benefitted(benefited???) was my late aunt. She told me that totting up the day’s takings was much easier(much harder???) using secondacentimal currency than it was using £ s. d. f.

Tony, in pre-secondacentimal days every shopkeeper had a ready reckonner(reckoner???). That is, a book of tables giving all sorts of information for which you would now use a decimal calculator. It would have been impossible to replace these books with £ s. d. f. calculators as the £ s. d. f. calculators would have been specific for U.K. financial use, unlike all ultra-monte calculators which are decimal only.
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Martian, I’m sorry to hear that your aunt thought you were a tot.

Martian, just exactly which 1966 laptop computer was the 1966-1971 United Kingdom secondacentimal currency designed for?

Martian, was that 1966 laptop computer the same computer that typed out United States President George W. Bush’s Free State of Texas National Guard memos?

Martian, I see there are several £ s. d. f. calculators for sale on the internet. If £ s. d. f. calculators are for sale in 1896, 1926, 1946, and 2005, why weren’t they for sale in 1966?

Martian, if the majority of United Kingdom banks use the decimal calculator in 1896, 1926, 1946, and 2005, why didn’t they use the decimal calculator in 1966?

Martian, I don’t know what the word inflation means. Can you tell me?

Martian, I have 1£ made up of 960 farthings. I have another 1£ made up of 200 five-new-asses. Can you tell me which number is bigger, 960 or 200? Take your time, but when you’ve done that, then do this: Take two equal diameter 16 1/2’ lodgepoles. Chainsaw the first lodgepole it into 960 wooden coins. Chainsaw the second lodgepole it into 200 wooden coins. Which lodgepole produces the biggest coin?

Martian, in addition to old U.K. £ s. d. f. calculators being for sale on the internet, so are new avoirdupois weight calculators, & new common linear measure calculators, & new gunter surveyors’ measure calculators.

Info @

http://www.weights-and-measures.com

And topic:

Common Currency



P.S.

Martian,

In 1946 the United Kingdom Minus Ulster Nationalist Socialist People’s Labor Party wanted to establish a socialist regime in the U.K. But they had one problem: the U.K. people didn’t want to pay for it. So the U.K.MinusUlster N.S.P.L.P. regime went to the United States of America and asked if they could borrow £62,000,000,000, so they could nazify medicine, nazify hospitals, nazify railroads, nazify coal mines, and so forth. Just as the United States went along with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ plans in 1921, so the United States went along with the United Kingdom’s plans in 1946.

But the United States said it could only loan £38,750,000,000, and it had to be all paid back by 1976. The socialist nuts that ran the U.K.MinusUlster N.S.P.L.P. said that the money would not have to be paid back by 1976 because the entire world would be dead from nuclear warfare by 1966. Fortunately for some concerned, 1976 did come around, despite the U.K. secondacentimal currency shenanigans of 1966-1971, and the U.K.MinusUlster N.S.P.L.P. promptly went into meltdown, and disappeared from history in 1979.

Oh, by the way, in 1976 the United Kingdom went to the International Monetary Fund and asked for a loan on the grounds that it was a 9th world potato republic, because corrupt postal votes would never be tolerated in a 3rd world banana republic.

re (xcole): "Tony, try adding up a column of sums of money denominated in £ s. d. f. on a decimal calculator, and then repeat the exercise using £ nf np 5na. It is much easier to handle secondacentimal currency, in fact it’s no contest. One shopmistress who certainly benefitted(benefited???) was my late aunt. She told me that totting up the day’s takings was much easier(much harder???) using secondacentimal currency than it was using £ s. d. f.

Tony, in pre-secondacentimal days every shopkeeper had a ready reckonner(reckoner???). That is, a book of tables giving all sorts of information for which you would now use a decimal calculator. It would have been impossible to replace these books with £ s. d. f. calculators as the £ s. d. f. calculators would have been specific for U.K. financial use, unlike all ultra-monte calculators which are decimal only"

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REPLY: So, xcole, tell me how come fourteen-year old lads working with their fathers selling fruit and veg on market stalls before 1971 could reckon up with precision what was the total price of the goods the customer ordered?

And how *did* we manage both the Industrial Revolution and the development and expansion of the British Empire with the twin handicaps of pounds, shillings and pence *and* a Jurassic measurement system?

While you're about it, when were the foot, yard and acre invented - and did the silver for the silver coins minted by King Offa of Mercia come from the Ochil Hills near Stirling or not?

Don't try to get SENSE out of xcole, Tony; just sit back and enjoy the man.

Good loaded questions though!

I am sooooooo glad that Tony is not an imperial version of metre (eric).

Otherwise, with Berenger being absent for the moment, we would have had to put up with a multitude of "victory speaches".

Know what I mean?

;-)

I never get the point of Rory's posts - normally. I'm glad Im not the only one having difficulty in that regard.

Tony, Steve and Bryan take another look at the above post.

He's not actually challenging Tony at all. It's a spoof of what Martin said elsewhere on another thread. In fact the Martian is Martin. Note in particular that bit about computers and currency. He's ridiculing the point Martin made about decimalisation being spurred on by the computer revolution. Since when when did we have laptops in the sixties?

Rory is saying (in his inimicable style) that decimalisation of UK currency was too early to be the result of the computer revolution. He may be saying other things too but they are anyone's guess.

From my own recollection, the digital computer was around in the sixties, but only in the form of large installations and based on thermionic valve technology (or possibly transistors by then). I'm not sure whether they had become commonplace in the banking industry at that time but it is possible.

To get some idea of the state of the art for computers of the late sixties and early seventies look at some of the futuristic movies of the day. There was that favourite prop with the tape spools at the top of a cabinet which served the same purpose as the hard drive today.

The real beginning though of the technology we see today was around 1971 with the invention of the Integrated Circuit (IC or chip) which was the start of the minaturisation in electronic circuitry. It was around 1980 that we first saw the desktop (IBM) PC resembling (superficially) those of the present day.

I say superficially because it had a 4.7 MHz 16 bit processor and (up to) 640 kbyte of memory and a 5 1/4 inch diskette drive. Those with a hard drive were 10 Mbyte known as the XT. It was aound then when a 'spotty faced youth' called Bill Gates wrote a command driven operating system called DOS.

The rest as they say is history ...

Steve

I was away from the PC last night. I'm not in the huff! Working away from home.....

Tony

As Martin states above, Xcole is on your side!

However

"So, xcole, tell me how come fourteen-year old lads working with their fathers selling fruit and veg on market stalls before 1971 could reckon up with precision what was the total price of the goods the customer ordered?"

Perhaps the monetary amounts involved were smaller? I believe that I am slightly younger than you, but please remind me of market stall prices for fruit/veg/meat in 1971?

Currently, (based upon a purchase from a quality butcher yesterday at £5.04/kilo)) I would suggest that good steak mince sells at approx £2/5s/9d per pound. Do you honestly suggest that a 14 year old market trader could calculate (with precision) the correct price for 11 5/8 oz in his head? I don't think I could!

"and did the silver for the silver coins minted by King Offa of Mercia come from the Ochil Hills near Stirling or not?"

I so look forward to Xcole's answer to this!

Stan wrote

<<
From my own recollection, the digital computer was around in the sixties, but only in the form of large installations and based on thermionic valve technology (or possibly transistors by then). I'm not sure whether they had become commonplace in the banking industry at that time but it is possible.
>>

I wrote my first computer program in 1969. The target machine was an IBM 1130 which certainly did not have thermionic valves. It had large tape drives, but large tape drives remained common into the 1990's. When I started work in 1970 at a research centre, we had an IBM1130 on the site and we certainly did parts of our accounting on that machine. I also know that our payrole was run on another computer elsewhere within the organisation. In 1972 I was transfererd to the Company's IT department and have been working in IT ever since. (I was living in South Africa at the time).

Looking at the state of software in 1970, it must have been horendous trying to write computer programs and unless Britain adopted a decimal currency the additional cost of software in the banking sector would have been horrendous.

"It was aound then when a 'spotty faced youth' called Bill Gates wrote a command driven operating system called DOS"

I think you'll find that it started as GWBasic (DOS was too unusable - it was just the bootstrap portion). MS-DOS (and PC-DOS) arose from that.

And even today it claims the title "world's crappiest operating system" as each version became heavier and slower than the last.

I had (and still do have) a BBC Model B, by the way.

I was very good as Captain Jameson in "Elite".

The rest, as they say is whatever they say it is.

PS - I wrote some excellent programmes in BBC Basic.
PS2 - is a console game machine.

Ooh, and so is PS3. Keep with the times!

To me,

Sorry for that oversight.

Regards,
Me