Does work get in the way for everyone? There is so much I want to do this summer, but I can’t seem to fit anything in to my work schedule. Most of the summits I want to do would require 3 days. I managed to take two days off for field day, but otherwise I’ve been working 6 or 7 days a week for months. Trying to plan 3 days off seems impossible right now.
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Always.
The forms have been submitted… I change to part-time from full-time on 1st Sep. That gives me 3 days+weekend off for “me time” from then on. 
It has taken 39 years work and 3 years university to get to this point!
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… with only 4 days of work left until I retire - and the last year having an extra day off each week I can confirm that work did get in the way - but despite the best intentions I expect that other things will get in the way some of the time… (37 years work and 4 years at University). As I have now activated most of the nearby hills will I be able to afford the fuel to drive to new peaks in my retirement? Paul
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To paraphrase Capt. Picard you just have to make it so you can.
It’s why I’m going part time. Instead of having to fund living and enjoyment out of savings/pensions, working part-time pays enough to fund living and then I only have to fund enjoyment. Well that’s the plan.
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I retired 2 months ago, but have signed a zero hours contract so that I can go back from time to time to earn some pocket money and keep my hand in. So far have failed to get away activating due to supporting my elderly Mum through some health issues and also starting on the (put off for years) sorting out our house.
First part of the house work is to empty the loft and put in a load of extra insulation in preparation for this winters energy bills. In doing so I found my Nascom 2 I built from a kit whilst at uni. Here’s the 48KByte RAM card (8" by 8"):
and for scale, 128GByte microSD card. I think that works out at a density increase over my whole career of approx 0.6 billion times 
its just staggering how much can change in one working lifetime.
[edited after I hadn’t read the RAM size correctly. doh!]
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Slightly different scenario here, yes when I worked it got in the way, I always tried to take leave on a Friday so I had a 3 day weekend to get out and about.
Now I have been medically retired, my Disability gets in the way 
I am enjoying retirement, but still can’t get out to play radio 
I am of course enjoying being a Chaser now , so still adding my Tenpenneth worth!
Tony
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Isn’t that 48K? 4116 is 16K x 1 dram. So 8 chips = 16k bytes and 3 rows of chips = 48k.
That’s a later one. Mine was the original with memory plague. I spent many days adding extra decoupling and thicker wires for the power rails. Happy days!
Maybe worth something now, check before you bin it. This is the voice of experience… I threw an Acorn System 1 with keyboard and cassette interface away when I moved house. Now 22 years later that tiny board is worth £500-£1000 with collectors 
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Yes you’re right Andy, I should have looked a bit closer! Still about 0.6 billion times density increase
It was a huge upgrade over writing programs to fit in the on-board ~128 bytes of RAM if I remember correctly. I may donate the boards to the local computer museum, although they already have a couple of Nascoms on their books. The power supply caps didn’t survive the years in the loft, so I won’t be trying to power it up. In its time it did help me win a few BARTG 2m VHF RTTY contests:
but that might have had something to do with my mates 3CX1500 and 4x16ele at 100ft (I was /A at the time…)
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Nice case. The Nascom keyboard was just wonderful to use. I had a Saturday job in the local computer shop and my Nascom II was the computer shop’s demo machine. I got it when they stopped selling Nascoms. I got the memory board and also a Nascom IMP printer out of the repair dept.'s “grot box”. They were customer returns. Memory plague was fixed for the memory but it took sometime to fix the printer. ISTR debugging degenerated into merely swapping chips using the spares out of the repair lab It was SO noisy when printing. But free! My mate’s girlfriend (they’re still together today) printed her final year thesis on it.
It’s amazing how good many early keyboards were and how rubbish new ones can be. The Apple IIe had a brilliant keyboard as did the original toaster Mac. I’ve got a genuine IBM Model M in the loft. It needs a good clean and then I need a PS2 to USB adapter. It doesn’t have a Windows key which I now find I use a lot which is why it’s in the loft and not in the shack. Likewise I have an IBM PS2 keyboard that came with a PS2 Model 70 I liberated from work years back. Not quite as good as the Model M but nearly so. Again no Windows key. Dell SK-8115 USB keyboard is what has been in use since 2006 as they are fine compromise between space needed, noise made and typing feeling.
I’ll away and find my Zeap 2.0 manual and relive writing Z80 code on my Nascom II when at Uni.
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Unfortunately the plastic keyboard tops on mine have deteriorated, but you have convinced me to rescue it from the car load that was about to go to the recycling center. The case is my own design, I got a local sheet metal shop to guillotine and bend the various bits of ali for me.
Next thing you know I’ll be ordering some caps from Farnell to repair the power supply 
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I though my Nascom 2 had a 64k memory board. By playing tricks you could copy the MICROSOFT BASIC ROM into RAM, swith the ROM off, patch the RAM copy to fix a few bugs, and have a few things run slightly better…
Or you could just switch the ROM off and run machine code using all available space…
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Yes I modified my EPROM board to support switching banks in/out. If I remember correctly I just had to poke a memory location to switch banks. The homemade daughter board has headers to plug into a couple of the DIL sockets:
Andy, I see I still have some EEPROMS with Zeap on the board
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Wow! Zeap, Nas-Pen, Nas-Dis
I still have a programmer and UV eraser. I power them up every now and then. But with everything now having Flash memory on board, I can’t recall burning an EPROM for maybe 15-17 years.
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The work should still need to be done four days from now. The summits might be gone (erosion, rising seas…). I’d say go and work that summit. Take it from a guy that retired with big plans and then found out he had cancer. 73 WB0CFF
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