AlienFTM

... and the video is where exactly on HMVF TV??? ;o)

My wife just asked me to book tickets for Tutenkhamen at the O2 Arena. Tickets are selling so fast I had to settle for week after next. I got only on conditional we spent two days and visited the Imperial War Museum (Google it) the second day. My colleagues on the Army Rumour Service assure me that the IWM is not to be missed. It's a short walk from Waterloo Station.

Hard to say. Collosus was dedicated hardware designed and built for one purpose and run by dedicated people who knew what they were doing. IBM mainframes run z/OS: zero downtime Operating System, by definition being unavailable no more than five minutes per annum - it takes about 1/2 hour to IPL (Initial Program Load = reboot). To do this, some years ago when z/OS was called MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage), I was told that 80% of the work MVS did was to monitor and run MVS. Definitely NOT dedicated, but who would by a mainframe to run a single task. IBM mainframes require System Programmers to keep them running. Mainframe SysProgs are one of a very small number of people I look up to (provided they can do their jobs: when I was in consultancy it wasn't unknown for me to tell them how to do it), but the breed is dying. You spotted the dinosaur joke in my previous post? THEY have been telling us as long as I have been in the industry (1985) that the days of the mainframe are numbered. Mainly because universities could never afford to buy mainframes, pay SysProgs, Data Management teams, operators, etc when Windows boxes are available over the counter. In the 1990s "mainframe" became a dirty word and they became Enterprise Servers, but a couple of years ago our proudly informed us that mainframes are IN again, and sexy, and we make all our money from mainframes. Did you know that every single byte of Barclays' system-critical data is on mainframes? 80% of the world's corporate system-critical data are on mainframes. In the USA some 137 universities and colleges teach about System Z; in the UK, that figure is zero. So long as it remains that way, I have a job for life, and the way things are going, when I reach compulsory retirement I could earn a mint as a consultant, because there are only the two of us can do this job. That's why calling the Z990 T-Rex tickled me. Truly it was king of the dinosaurs I'd be surprised if Colossus won, but there would be a lot of handicapping to consider. Would the Colossus team be as well trained as their predecessors? Would the modern team have to start from scratch? etc, etc

Do I espy a vertically-elongated left-hand side-bin there, presumably to accommodate a couple reloads? Only 30 years later does it occur me that I cannot recall our Mark 5s having a similar arrangement for their Swingfires. Suddenly it seems that had the Cold War got hot, GW Troop would have spent their time going back for replens

It's been a long time, but I was a control signaller, so map marking was a primary task and I ought to remember. Bear in mind that the symbols date back ISTR to before the Great War and were IIRC German in origin, so details will vary with time and by country, so that whereas what I recall ought to be NATO standard, it might be muddled with stuff from WW2, which was my specialist subject before joining and I claim the right to have a senior moment and simply forget. A rectangle indicates a unit. A vertical (if possible) line from the centre bottom of the rectangle points to the unit's location unless it is spread over an area in which case its area is marked accordingly. If the HQ is located separately, the vertical line is moved to the bottom left corner of the rectangle so that it looks like a flag. You might for instance find a Battery Commander and his HQ attached to battlegroup HQ (or brigade HQ in pre-battlegroup days) so that he had direct contact with the troops requiring artillery support and could call down fire from the guns, further back. The level of the Arty sp would depend on the OrBat. A black dot (cannon ball) inside the rectangle indicates that it it artillery. If it was wheeled artillery, ISTR it would have a pair of circles (wheels) underneath. If it was tracked (self-propelled) artillery, ISTR it would have an oval around the cannon ball indicating tracked. Infantry would be represented by crossed webbing straps - an x from corner to corner of the rectangle. Wheeled or tracked infantry would be similarly qualified to the arty described above. ISTR that recce, being essentially an extension of the cavalry tradition, carried a single diagonal in the style of a Sam Browne. Because our battlegroup was independent and reported direct to Div, we never bothered marking our own units thus because we didn't need to - we knew. Armour carried the oval already mentioned. Unit size? Indicated by symbols above the rectangle. Hmmm. Struggling here. something like: o section ooo troop / platoon etc ' squadron / company / battery etc " regiment (infantry battalion) x brigade xx division xxx corps xxxx army xxxxx army group If a unit or formation were significantly under / overstrength, this would be qualified by + or - after the symbol. So 212 Battery would be a rectangle containing a cannon ball with ' above it. The number 212 to the right would identify it and the rest is taken from the symbols. Higher formations would cover an area of the map marked by their boundaries at peer level. Army Group would cover a huge area. Boundaries between army groups would be drawn as a single solid blue (as in blue on blue) line broken occasionally to insert the Army Group symbol (hands up? Correct xxxxx) to indicate whose boundary. Lower formations would have their own areas within the army group, with peer boundaries indicated likewise. Starting at the Forward Leading-edge of Own Troops (FLOT) where the elite recce troops are out doing their thing, (in my day) the medium recce element of the Recce Regt would cover the entire Divisional frontage with two squadrons, one per Task Force / Brigade (Task Force was a mid-70s attempt to increase the proportion of combat troops by reducing the REMFs - it proved unworkable and within a handful of years BAOR reverted to brigades). Medium Recce would cover the area between the FLOT and the Forward Edge of the Battle Area (FEBA) where the rest of the army started. (There might be other troops attached to the medium recce battlegroups including armour, infantry, engineers to undertake demolition tasks and an artillery FOO.) HTH and is understandable (it has taken all morning in between meetings, phone calls, questions from the industrial trainee and now Wor Lass on MSN as I type, who made me order two tickets for the Tutankhamen exhibition at the O2 arena, but ticket availability was disappearing from the website faster than I could check them. Then there was accommodation and to book two days' leave ...).

I was posted to the RAPC Computer Centre at Worthy Down in December 1985. They were rightly proud of their two bleeding edge IBM 3083 mainframes, comprising a staggering 96 megabytes of core memory ("RAM") and a DASD farm capable of holding 134 terabytes of data on Direct Access Storage Devices (hard drives). About ten years ago I read that the entire processing power put on the moon by the Apollo programme amounted to no more than the average engine management system of a BMW (ten years ago). About five years ago our processor farm in the next block to where I am sitting amounted to IIRC 124 mainframe images. You can split one mainframe box the size of a large wardrobe into a number of discrete logical mainframe images and you can likewise take multiple boxes and link them all together into one machine, so counting how many mainframes we have is difficult, though a few years ago our lab director informed us that in our machine block we had more than half of the MIPS - a measure of mainframe processing power in millions of instructions per second - of IBM EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) North. When the Z990 T-Rex (King of the dinosaurs - that name always cracked me up) came out about that time, it was possible to install 128 discrete mainframe images in a single box, i.e. the whole of our processor farm. So you can see that the truism that processing power doubles every 18 months is very much true. Pleased to report that our build machine, a Z9109 was, the day it was installed, the fastest box on the site. The AIX server decides when to run a build. The AIX server extracts the code. The AIX server starts a build on the mainframe. The mainframe determines what needs to be built. The mainframe determines what order to build them. The mainframe builds them (usually twice, sometimes three or more times per night). The mainframe packages the build. The mainframe loads the build onto tapes. The mainframe copies the build to a web package. The mainframe test installs the build. The mainframe reports the build. I Feed The Mainframe. FTM

It looks perfect, so it must be fake. Everybody knows that all weapons scuff very quickly and the edges go silver where the coating comes off.

I went into the regimental tailor and said, "I have this button. Can you sew a shirt on it please?" Actually, after transfer to Pay, I found myself in the same block as the QM's Clothing Store. Because they always liked to think that buttering me up would get them preferential treatment, I'd walk in holding two socks and ask, "Can you exchange these please? I had two pairs of socks but I lost one of each pair." I still have a dozen or more pairs of the then-new Socks, Poly-Wool which replaced Socks, Poly-Cotton after the Falklands. Still great for keeping your feet warm.

There's a coincidence. I went into my Tuesday 10 o'clock meeting where one of my colleagues described an item to me. I had no clue about the item, but he added, "I saw it when I visited (some place in) the New Forest, site of the drop of the biggest ever bomb in the UK." To which I replied, "That would be a Grand Slam then." I then pointed out that the Americans go on and on about MOAB being the biggest ever non-nuclear bomb to be dropped, but in fact according to figures I saw earlier this year, the Grand Slam, developed over 60 years ago, weighed a few pounds more. Tirpitz. Attacked time and again by 617 Squadron, The Dambusters, only to be thwarted by a smoke screen the size of a county whenever an allied aircraft came over the horizon. Damaged and, courtesy of Op Chariot destroying the dry dock at St Nazaire, nowhere to go for repairs. Parked up in a fjord for the duration of the war. Ironically they moved Tirpitz from one fjord to another, supposedly to offer it better protection, only to bring it within range of Lancasters flying from Scotland to Russia. One Grand Slam in the water created a tidal wave big enough to turn the whole thing turtle. Grand Slam broke the sound barrier in free fall.

As far as I am concerned, if the local residents' cars were not parked outside their houses while they remembered the fallen, they ought themselves to have been attending a remembrance celebration somewhere and not be back before those who had parked for this parade had gone their ways.

The L in DISPOSAL is faded to pink.

Figures. Completely wrong time to be a fire-around-corners MG34.

Which you have to laugh at. CVR(T) and Clansman were contemporary, but the government of the day could only afford one or the other. Asked to choose, the Army chose CVR(T) then proceeded to shoehorn two Larkspur sets into a CVR(T) turret, a very tight fit. And believe it or not, even before we got Clansman, I remember reading a Soldier magazine in BAOR reporting on how Bowman would be the next big thing. I never dreamt it would be nearly 30 years later.

Is it me or a duff photo, or does the third one down show a fire-around-corners MG34 as used at Monte Cassino (never heard of it being used anywhere else)?

ISTR it was 14 and Sir John Mills reckoned it was the best day's work he ever did.

You're telling Force Reserve is no longer an RAC posting??? According to a thread I read yesterday (see picture of Saracen on plinth outside the main gates), there is no longer an RAC presence in the SBA either. But I thought there was still an RAC presence in Cyprus ... where?

LD (who were 15/19H when Baz and I were in) only converted to Bowman earlier this year prior to deploying to Helmand as a battlegroup.

The Allies would have been slaughtered at Waterloo had it not rained torrentially for 12 hours before the battle. Napoleon was only ever going to win by beating the Brits and the Germans in two halves. He had to beat the Brits before the Germans turned up. Wellington had his infantry lie down behind the crest while Napoleon rained cannon fire on them. The French artillery could not drop the shot any closer than a handful of yards behind the infantry because of the crest and the sodden ground soaked up all the energy of the shot rendering it useless. Hours of artillery fire which might have devastated the British forces were wasted as the clock ticked down to the arrival of Blucher. Not as simple as that - there were plenty of other factors. ---ooo0ooo--- Hitler timed the Ardennes Offensive to nullify Allied air monopoly so that he could get his tanks to Antwerp before the cloud cleared. He failed miserably and the tactical air forces had a turkey shoot when the weather did clear.

Capable of firing chemical rounds? Or a meringue?

So what mob sponsors your unit? Which leads me to ... What sort of Clansman? I doubt you are teaching them the 321 (does anybody still use HF?) and ISTR they were cutting back on the number of 353s per vehicle shortly after I left cos only the ACVs and the rebros needed two meaty sets. Once you are talking 352, 351, 349 et al, they are infantry sets and therefore supposedly idiot-proof.

Anybody tell me when UNFICYP Ferrets changed from standard Army plates (01 EC 28 in 1976) to UNF 554?

Strange. When we were firing Swingfires, everybody helped with the ammo-bashing (unpacking, loading, etc) including the squadron medic. The medic had noy long retrained from crewman and was quite happy ammo bashing (apart from place a hundredweight of Swingfire on his shoulder where it pushed the 15/19H shoulder title in his epaulette into his shoulder. OUCH! He turned to one of the GW Troopers, trying to look knowledgeable, and asked, "So do these things have a trace so you can see it going downrange?" At which point everybody roared with laughter because as it went downrange it left a ten foot flame behind it.

There was a great stink about 1980 when it was discovered that Scorpion turrets sat on Russian bearings. There we were lined up waiting to take on 3 Shock Army: if we found ourselves not advancing backwards, would our target be the roller bearing factories so we could repair our own turrets?

Flashback to 1981. One summer afternoon I was sat in the B Sqn FHQ Troop cage (room) in the cellar of the Squadron offices, repairing - I mean soldering over the snap-fit connectors which kept coming undone, muttering, "That'll fix you, you little bleeder" - Clansman bonedomes and other radio kit. All along the passage were the other troops' cages. I became aware of a commotion outside. I went to investigate. There was a member of Surveillance Troop. Recce Regts always had an extra sabre-but-not-sabre troop on the OrBat (if you see what I mean). We had had an Assault Troop of Panzergrenadiers to give us organic infantry support. We had had a GW Troop giving us Swingfire ATGM capability. Now we had Surveillance Troop, in Spartans with ZB298 Doppler Ground Surveillance Radars. Every year in BAOR, our Surveillance Troop was entered in the Boselager Competition. We were 100% professional, regular army recce troops at a time when every other NATO country was largely conscript. Apart from the Americans who were still coming out of their disaster in South East Asia, and anybody with the brains to do a good job in the US Army would not go near it. The quality of the US Army in those days made us laugh. They invested huge amounts in PR in the style of the film Private Benjamin to attract people to join up. Boselager was a recce competition. Every NATO country entered teams. Our team figured they were a shoe-in to win or at least do well in the competition, but every year between 1978 and 1980 they came back disappointed at only finishing in mid-table. It was only when I did my residential Civil Service German (Army) Linguist course through most of 1980 that I realised that in every other country, Recce is a euphemism for Special Forces. So what was worse? Our team fishing as low as mid-table? Or that they beat half of NATO's Special Forces? So, as you can see, this seven-foot tall member of Surveillance Troop represented a genre of meanness, a lean, mean killing machine. He was staring at a pile of rubbish (old mattress, broken chairs, etc) that had temporarily been dumped at the foot of the stair well. "What's wrong?" I asked. "I saw a rat. It was at least this big," he replied, his arms outstretched in the traditional anglers' stance." "This is what we'll do. You go to your troop cage and get a pick-helve. I shall remove items from the rubbish pile one by one until the rat makes a break for it. When the rat breaks cover, you engage it with the pick-helve. The floor is concrete and will take any punishment even you can give with a Self-Loading Pick-helve (Army joke). We can mop up the blood later. Ready?" A few items of rubbish later, the rat broke cover. Said Trooper engaged the rat, laying down a beaten zone with his Self-Loading Pick-helve. All the while he screamed like a little girl and he totally failed to hit the target. The rat ran up the ramp to the surface and off into the trees. Sad ... but true.

Scusi dove il bar? It's a line by Roger Waters in Not Now John on The Final Cut - A Requiem For The Postwar Dream. On Halloween, as is our wont, we went into town to Bella Italia for a meal, then a film to stay out of the way of the little darlings rampaging through the streets of our estate. The young lady was well impressed with my pronunciation of the Italian items. (She was also fit.) 1. She didn't know I was a linguist. Maybe a German linguist, but my brain is attuned to reading foreign script with the right accent (Hands up if it irritates you when you are in Starbucks and people talk about Caffe Latte, with the correct short A in Caffe but a pretentious BBC English long A in Latte when even the bonest bone in the skeleton can see that the two words are identically constructed so the noun ought to be the same in each case ... and only the English and the French use long As.) 2. If I'd asked her in English she'd have been confused by my outrageous Pitmatic accent. (I come from Sunderland but you'd never guess since I lost the accent living down south for decades. "Oh yes I would." Ed)