[Tom Otley]

Release from El Al….

EL AL is now completing the pilot stage of On-board Internet Service with WiFi systems on flights to Europe, on 15 of the airline’s aircraft – all of the Dreamliner planes that have arrived to date (5), the entire Boeing 737-900 fleet (8) and two Boeing 737-800 aircraft.

To mark the launch – the Basic package to Europe, including instant messaging, email and surfing the EL AL website will be offered for free during the inaugural period, until October 31, 2018.

EL AL’s new WiFi system will allow passengers using smartphones, tablets or laptops to surf websites, connect to email, use applications and social media networks, listen to music and watch films during the flight.

[stevescoots]

I still have my first email address…dial up AOL, 1995. i can remember as it was installed on a PC I bought when Windows 95 came out. Not my primary one anymore having moved over to Hotmail/outlook many moons ago but i still check it and clear the junk out once a month.

First world problems, i agree. i am in the process of setting up our factory in Vietnam and of course all the new employees are youngsters. I am fighting a war of attrition as we are setting up an ERP. Me saying they must work from spreadsheets alongside setting up the ERP (which none have had experience of) and them complaining it’s too hard and a waste of time and we should be using a cloud-based ERP and … blah blah. They struggle to accept that setting up something as complex as an ERP absolutely will not go smooth and will fail more than once during stress testing and if we are on sheets as well, then it does not all grind to a halt.
Trying to explain to millennials (or the “it just works” apple generation as I call them) that having all your data on a cloud when you are in a country that whilst has a very high speed…only has 2 lines in and out of the country and one of them regularly goes down is not the smartest of moves, blank faces all the way round.
Except from the It guy, as he just loves to have lots of server racks to play with

Anyway, back on topic, I use in flight wi-fi whenever possible on EK and CX, yes, its slow and clunky takes an age to download mails but then I come from the dial up floppy disk 256 mb hard drive generation. What I don’t understand is that I recall about 10 years ago taking a Lufthansa flight to HKG and they were trialling Wi-Fi back then. I could skype Vid call and even did some online gaming for a laugh. However now the connections seem much slower

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GivingupBA

[ASK1945]

[quote quote=875361]Release from El Al….

EL AL is now completing the pilot stage of On-board Internet Service with WiFi systems on flights to Europe, on 15 of the airline’s aircraft ……………………………………………….
EL AL’s new WiFi system will allow passengers using smartphones, tablets or laptops to surf websites, connect to email, use applications and social media networks, listen to music and watch films during the flight.[/quote]

Tom: whilst El Al have promised all these things, they have specifically excluded Skype and similar.

[FDOS_UK]

256 mb hard drive generation

Tha were lucky, lad. I remember 10mb being lauded as more then thee will ever use! (and I started with floppy disk only).

[PhilipHart]

I hate to be a topper, but for my final year undergraduate project in the mid 70s I designed and built a very minimal Z80 single-board computer which had 1KB ROM and a mere 256B RAM.

It required massive skill and discipline to optimise the code to maximise the use of every one of those precious bytes!

Happy Days.

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stevescoots

[stevescoots]

[quote quote=875718]

256 mb hard drive generation

Tha were lucky, lad. I remember 10mb being lauded as more then thee will ever use! (and I started with floppy disk only).[/quote]

I did not go back as far as my ZX spectrum

Jet set Willy (walsh) anyone?

[Tramor01]

I remember as a young market researcher working in the Strategic Marketing and Planning department at United Distillers – A few of us were issued with Toshiba T1200’s rather than a desktop – We thought we were the dog’s b’s 🙂

[FDOS_UK]

Gentlemen, I was talking IBM XT, not Speccy 🙂

Tramor01, I had a laptop about the same time, Victor brand, with an orange plasma screen. The person I sold it onto left it running with the lid closed and melted it!

Those early Tosh’s were nice – later, I had a Compaq SLT with the lift off keyboard, very nice design, wouldn’t mind something in the same format, today.

[ASK1945]

[quote quote=875946]Gentlemen, I was talking IBM XT, not Speccy 🙂

[/quote]

My big brother worked at IBM, so I was lucky to get a pre-release early IBM PC (around 1980) to try out in my business, before they were released in the market. Of course, I had to offer progress reports, to help them tinker with the eventually released model. Prior to that I had been operating a computer built for me, with two massive proper floppy disks in Drives A and B. The former held programs and the latter any data. They were both 150k – wow ! We were constantly swapping disks in and out of Drive B to work.

Around 1982 or so I bought a program called PC-Calc (known as a spreadsheet, whatever that was) from a guy in Utah named Jim Button. It was advertised in a computer magazine and I phoned him to buy it. He was later bought out by Lotus, who renamed it Lotus 123, who were themselves bought out by Microsoft, to produce Excel.

Also around 1982 I had an IBM luggable computer, which was the size of a small suitcase. I used it the following year to run a £2 Billion expenditure program for the then DHSS. They did not have access to mainframes for this particular work and so had been using programmable super calculators. What had been taking them about six days to run “What If” scenarios took me a total of about two hours.

[FDOS_UK]

[quote quote=875947]

FDOS_UK wrote:

Gentlemen, I was talking IBM XT, not Speccy 🙂

My big brother worked at IBM, so I was lucky to get a pre-release early IBM PC (around 1980) to try out in my business, before they were released in the market. Of course, I had to offer progress reports, to help them tinker with the eventually released model. Prior to that I had been operating a computer built for me, with two massive proper floppy disks in Drives A and B. The former held programs and the latter any data. They were both 150k – wow ! We were constantly swapping disks in and out of Drive B to work.

Around 1982 or so I bought a program called PC-Calc (known as a spreadsheet, whatever that was) from a guy in Utah named Jim Button. It was advertised in a computer magazine and I phoned him to buy it. He was later bought out by Lotus, who renamed it Lotus 123, who were themselves bought out by Microsoft, to produce Excel.

Also around 1982 I had an IBM luggable computer, which was the size of a small suitcase. I used it the following year to run a £2 Billion expenditure program for the then DHSS. They did not have access to mainframes for this particular work and so had been using programmable super calculators. What had been taking them about six days to run “What If” scenarios took me a total of about two hours.[/quote]

I remember those IBM luggables, built like brick outbuildings – a colleague slipped and dropped one down a flight of stairs, whereupon it smashed straight through a glass door and booted up afterwards!

[Author]

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