Unnamed man has been accused of stealing a 40-year-old laptop valued
by the USCF at $40,000.
Also $100,000 (face value) in Qing dynasty China-Pacific Railway
shares.
Also Certificate for 1000 acres of the surface of the Moon, valued by
the USCF at $900,000.

Data from the laptop has been backed up on to 100 floppy disks - not
the 3.5"-inch ones, the big ones, do you remember them? - and these
are also missing and valued at $600,000. (c) William Shatner.

All amounts are in Zimbabwean dollars.
Reward for recovery: one year's subscription to Chess Life.

"Offramp" wrote in message
...
Unnamed man has been accused of stealing a 40-year-old laptop valued
by the USCF at $40,000.
Also $100,000 (face value) in Qing dynasty China-Pacific Railway
shares.
Also Certificate for 1000 acres of the surface of the Moon, valued by
the USCF at $900,000.

Not as silly as it may sound. I notice that a certain chess promoter was
trying to sell bits of Mars to raise money for a match

Data from the laptop has been backed up on to 100 floppy disks - not
the 3.5"-inch ones, the big ones, do you remember them? - and these
are also missing and valued at $600,000. (c) William Shatner.

Ah! But I am so old I remember not only the 5.25 inch disks, but also the
'IBM' 8 inch floppies! Dunno if those were the original 'floppies' but they
were like pizzas.

--

I remember my first bash at programming which was on ticker-tape and punched
cards - since I was a living genius at the time, this was a great honour I
was told, though our college didn't actually have a computer, that was 300
miles away in London, and what we had was a 2-ton modem, and, I kid you not,
2 guys in lab coats to work it )

Anyway, you code and send your stuff and maybe 30 minutes later, hola! Back
would come the answer, which, after you had converted it to ASCII would say
"57". If you were an "A" student you could get it to say; "The answer is
57".

There were also nasty little pins you had to push in order to encode your
program and its data, which bruised your finger-tips.

The [ROFL] personal computing revolution started for me with a Mac which had
no hard-drive [hadn't been thought of yet] but had one 3.25 diskette slot
which accepted a 400k disk. On that disk was the operating system, a word
processor, and several hundred documents.

After 2 years the revolution ended, since who could possibly EVER need more
than 2 x 800k drives? )
In one you put your operating system and maybe a program or two, and in the
other Sargon II or that some variety of stupid Mac game, like the submarine
one I...

All amounts are in Zimbabwean dollars.
Reward for recovery: one year's subscription to Chess Life.

Reward for information leading to recovery; 3 year's subscription to Chess
Lite.

I wonder who they are writing it for now? At least the Evans column allowed
feedback so you could assess /level/ of interest in any subject - maybe they
just write it by psychic-marketing techniques these days? I think removing
Evans' column also removed the last interactive feature USCF had with the
real world of chess - which maybe suits ChessHut just fine?

I blame Frank Niro for all this, since as everybody no, he snuck off with
all the sense the organisation every had [he actually seems to have snuck 3
weeks after he left, so to speak, since obviously no-one at ChessHutNorth
had need of sense, as such].

Makes selling time-share real estate on the Moon and Mars seem entirely
sensible activities in comparison, no?

Phil Innes