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Tuesday, May
13, 2003
A memorial service for
George Morrow was announced at the end of his obituary (5/12 in the SF
Chronicle) for 2 PM, Friday, May 16, at the O'Connell Chapel, 1311 El
Camino, San Mateo. I'm planning to attend and would like to have lunch
with any of the like minded between Noon and 1:30 PM that day.
Anyone interested in joining can contact me
directly (bill@billragsdale.cc).
To reminisce about George and the nascent
days of the microprocessor...
For some coincidence he and I seemed to
haunt Mike Quinn's Surplus Store in the mid-1970's right at 10:30 AM
Saturday mornings. George had an enterprise going with Mike in which he'd
sort through barrels of unmarked, reject integrated circuits, identify the
type and salvage the (marginally) operational units. While the chips were
sold by the IC houses, mostly National and Fairchild, for their scrap
plastic value, George and Mike were recycling silicon.
The lesser would be sold by Mike. The
better ones were sold by mail order by George through a Byte magazine ad.
As the industry would go through periodic scarcities this grey market was,
at times, used to keep production lines going, mine included. Bill Godbout
was also involved and later formed a significant S-100 company.
George and I would often engage is a
spirited debate about the relative merits of the 4040 processor versus the
8008. For example, to what degree were the added support chips needed by
the 8008 justified by its improved processing power? As I was doing simple
industrial controls, when the 6502 came along. The debated ended as I
chose it and George graduated to the 8080 camp. IIRC George's first
product was a front panel with an octal display and keypad input to serve
as a program entry and debugger for S-100 systems.
Bill Ragsdale
I won't be in the Bay Area. I expect I know many of the people who will
show up. My regards to all.
I
haven't checked everything yet, but it looks like the TiVo problem is
solved. Dan Spisak and Eric Pobirs came over last night after going to the
Microsoft X-Box party, and we reset the system and started over. It seems
that Adelphia San Fernando Valley is quite different from Adelphia West
Los Angeles -- and Studio City is part of West Los Angeles. Although we
put the zip code in, and we are in a monopoly area, TiVo didn't know what
our service was; and when Alex set it up last week, he reasonably assumed
that since we are in the San Fernando Valley we got our service from
Adelphia of San Fernando Valley. We don't, the channel
number are either not the same or some conflict, and in general the poor
thing was confused. After telling it West Los Angeles, it did seem to have
the channels right; we still couldn't do anything to test it, because it
takes 4 to 8 hours to rebuild its data base and do housekeeping and
thinking to itself. This seems an excessive amount of time, but apparently
that's what it takes. I will go test the system later today, but I am
assured that all will be well now, and it will, finally, know. Dan
says TiVo will change the way you watch TV. Since I don't watch a lot of
TV anyway, I don't have many set patterns, but one thing, he says, is that
you don't have to start on the hour. Wait a while and use the buffer to
skip commercials. The implications of this for free TV and advertisers
look to be far reaching. On the other hand, who really wants to watch the
fifth rendition of a car ad? TiVo requires a connection to
its headquarters, either an Ethernet or a telephone line. I have it
connected by telephone at the moment. That's a bit slow, and the wiring
routing is awkward, but it does work. And of course it dials a number in
Sherman Oaks, which is next door to Studio City. I have no idea if Sherman
Oaks is also part of the West Los Angeles satrapy. I
am now looking for a way to get Ethernet into the back part of the house.
I'll probably end up stringing a line back there, but we'll see. An early
attempt to use the AC power lines doesn't seem to have worked, probably
due to the weird wiring configurations -- that part of the house was built
a year or two after the basic house, but since then there have been other
additions, and every one of them gets a fuse and switch box so the only
place they all come together is at the master switch just downstream of
the meter. Anyway, the TiVo story continues, but with luck it's pretty
well over. Later: alas not quite. It now has the
proper channels, but it does not have the proper program information.
Perhaps it needs to make another couple of telephone calls to update
itself. I sure hope so... It's almost working now. But it
is as much as your sanity is worth to call their "help" line, at
least for me. Their voice recognition doesn't work well, and their choices
tree is, uh, well wasn't appropriate for my problem. And there is no way
to get a human being.
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