Legendary sierra cosworth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Sierra_RS_Cosworth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywooLVq3tws

https://drivetribe.com/p/ford-sierra-cosworth-rs500-QzZQeRatTEyQ16uWGl7teQ

From what I can tell the escort cosworth came later ~1992.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Escort_(Europe)#Escort_RS_Cosworth

I always wanted one but couldn’t afford one and didn’t want to do what everyone else did, I.e stole one.

good memories of it. Did not like its old version of Informix as its database but when I first saw M$ Office and found how little it could do next to Uniplex and how slow Windows was on ( for then) high end hardware it was very annoying. I was baffled that it never became popular. I loved embedding SQL queries in spreadsheets ( in 1980s) to do formatting of reports. Just never got the hang of the report writer. COBOL report Writer is a different story. Loved that.

As for unix tty, yep, hated them but had to maintain and modify RS232 devices until middle 2000s. Ever tried to migrate old IBM RANS to new ones so that every dumb terminal and printer is still in same place. Easy enough once I had the scripts to collect config and recreate it on new hardware. Setting bits, baud, xon /xoff, whatever always made for a bad day on new kit. Especially on SCO boxes. cough, spit. Once working, document, document and make sure the rest of team knew where to find documentation. Have we all come back from a long leave and been told "X is borked, we cant fix it" and found it is a known problem, well documented in the unread, correctly located documentation but still somehow, returnees fault ?

Having had the misfortune to develop some cross-Unix-platform driver software for an embedded device that speaks 9600-7E1 RS232 recently, I can confirm that Unix serial port handling is still a raging dumpster fire of badly documented random flags.

My particular favourite on Linux is the IEXTEN flag in `c_lflag`. A naive reading of the documentation might suggest that it just affects the way canonical mode processes characters, but hohoho, of course not. What it actually does is enable random, data mangling, features that vary between different serial port drivers (which means in the modern world of USB dongles, means you can expect every serial dongle you try to mangle the data in slightly different ways.)

Naturally, it appears to be enabled by default.

Still, all good fun. I don't get enough excuses to break out the 'scope and logic analyser in this day and age.

9600-7E1 ??

You masochist.

9600-8N1 FTW

Sure, me too... but it sounds like the device wants 7E1 and only 7E1 or it throws its bits out of the pram. I've also worked on things where that stuff wasn't user-selectable. A hell of a lot of large expensive plotters, for instance.

Not IT based, but car story! Many years ago I flew from Aberdeen to Birmingham for a two-day meeting with a major supplier (to "discuss issues" we were having with their product). My company had a standing relationship with one of the car hire companies for a group 3 car at a daily rate below that available to most other folk getting a group 1 (mainly because we self insured). OK, group 3 wasn't great, but I was only going to be driving around a city.

At the desk, I was offered an Austin Allegro - no way, was my response: that was an appalling car. I said I'd happily take a group 1 or 2 car instead, almost anything that wasn't an Allegro. Nothing available; talk to the manager and there was one car reserved for another client in a couple days - I could have that (a Ford Sierra) if I guaranteed to return it on time. I agreed, signed the forms (~£20pd) took the keys and walked to the car. Yes it was a Sierra - an XR4x4. Not quite the Cossie but I had a couple of fun days with it. Somehow I must have taken a wrong turning on my way to the meeting and ended up going the long way round - and still got there on time :)

That contrasted with another hire where I got an XR3 (a flashy Ford Escort) at Heathrow - absolute death trap if you wellied it as all the power went through the front wheels, which immediately lost grip and would spin if you tried a quick getaway (e.g. joining the busy roundabout just down the road from the airport).

And in case posts need an IT angle - I recall the early HP Laserjets - the LJIII was my first decent home printer (took over from a Star dot-matrix one).

Ah yes, the joys of hire cars.

As a much travelled engineer, at least pre-pandemic I used to be in them regularly (the running joke was I had two company cars, one from the company and one from Hertz) and so ended up at the top level of their loyalty card scheme.

Thus when we had our normal routine rentals (class B) I was entitled to a free upgrade, and usually quite a nice one as in several of their airport locations I was there so often I was (in some cases literally) on first name terms with the staff.

Always remember the look on one of our directors faces when we were both in France for a meeting with the customer, but arriving separately (I'd been there all week doing some real work, he flitted in just for the meeting). He's there in a nice shiny Ford Focus, and looking quite pleased about it...

...at least until I pulled up in a 5-series BMW.

A teradyne engineer visited a site with a high end BMW. It was better than the site managers car. Big trouble, toys thrown out of crib.

Vauxhall Nova SRi, was a proper death trap.

I was asked to drive 1 back from a service, I blipped the throttle and it literally jumped from 1 side of the road to the other.

it didn't weigh anything & the 1.6l engine was far too powerful for anything on it to handle.

We were only allowed to book Group 1, but some of the folks who travelled regularly to Glasgow soon learned that the only automatics available were luxurious (for the time) exec-spec Granadas. They would always book Group 1 automatics, rental company had no choice but to upgrade them.

" You just do not get the same level of job satisfaction or client adulation when supporting clients remotely, do you? "

I feel fine working from my home office. I have a new customer that wants me on site now, and the highway and parking experience are every bit as horrible as I remember FBC (From Before COVID). Thankfully, that customer only signed for 3 days a week, and it would appear that, some days, I might be able to work remotely again.

I must have been a cave troll in a previous life.

I used to have both an FX-100 (landscape printer) and an FX-80 (portrait printer, but with "This printer prints SIDEWAYS(tm)!" sticker, since it had the Sideways(tm) add-on that allowed Lotus 1-2-3 to rotate spreadsheets 90 degrees as they were printed). In order to get either of them to print 8-bit characters, you had to send them a control character first - I believe it was the ¢ (cent symbol), which you sent by means of "echo (Alt-155) > LPT1". Sometimes it even worked, other times it just printed a cent symbol.

.... I would get there on two wheels rather than four. The two wheels being attached to a Suzuki GS1000, the choice of route then became one of the more important decisions! At least I would arrive with a big shit-earing grin before having to deal with the (l)users!

I had a GS1100GL, and I had a Subaru turn in front of me. I hit it so hard, the rear axle (of the car) tore off. Put the driver's husband in a wheelchair, sadly, because they were OAPs.

Anyway, after 30-odd years of riding bikes, I got a Zero SR electric. I did a firmware update on it this weekend[1], but aside from that, it's an absolute joy to ride, without a clutch, a very smooth power delivery (and lots of it), no heat from the engine (a blessing in Florida) and it's very lightweight. My other bikes are getting rather neglected. It's actually a good example of technology done well, now that they've had 10 years ironing out the bugs.

[1] via the phone app

Have you been eyeing up the Verge TS recently? There were a couple at "Fully Charged Outside" at the start of this month in Farnborough.

[1]An electric motorcycle with a HUBLESS hub motor!

[1] https://electrek.co/2020/05/07/verge-ts-electric-motorcycle-new-photos-tron-rmk-e2/

In the mid-80s we did most of our computing - circuit analysis and the like - on a VAX with a dot-matrix printer for the occasional print-out. Then we got an IBM PC (45MB disk!). It was funded by a customer project but the printer we needed to produce decent reports would have to be bought by the company. The boss was famously tight and instead of approving the req. for the HP LaserJet he presented us with a floppy with a near-letter quality driver on it and told us to use that for the reports and get the print-room to copy them onto decent paper and bind them. The dot-matrix printer was in his outer office next to his secretary (as they were called then). We only had to print one multi-page report before she went and told him to either move the printer or buy a quieter one. Moving it would have cost almost as much as buying one, so we got our LaserJet.

The HP LaserJet 4 was a brilliant printer. In the mid-90s, I remember being especially pleased when I printed a postscript desktop publishing file on my Amiga in the house to a 720 KB formatted floppy, took it into the office, and printed it on the LJ4.

I reckon there must still be some LaserJet 4s kicking about still in use somewhere as they seemed pretty bomb-proof.

Recall taking the train for a 100 mile trip with a Honeywell DPS memory controller board. Also got 'nicked' by French customs for importing unidentified objects of a security nature. Umm. Probably a Baguette.

For such a ubiquitous piece of computer hardware, printers are supremely bad at working properly.