BS: Another question for Brits

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 02:58 AM

Does taht mean I can claim 144 when we get there, or is it

There are 100 different types of people: those who can do binary arithmetic, those who can't, those who don't know what it is and those who don't care?

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Sooz
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 03:56 AM

You and me both makes 10 of us!

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: GUEST,Nessie
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 04:55 AM

It was this very day in 1971 that we went decimal. I remember the oddness of my first purchase (10 No.6 ciggies on the way to my last year at school, 11 new p), how mental arithmetic suddenly became a whole lot easier and purses a whole lot lighter.

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: GUEST,PMB
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 05:03 AM

Well purses were lighter because new pennies are about an eighth of the weight of old ones, with two point four times the value, and new ha'pennies (hah, I bet you forgot them!) even smaller and still worth more. And because shopkeepers rounded up the prices, so your pockets emptied quicker.

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 05:45 AM

Quite simple, this country had a ready made decimal note, i.e. the ten shilling note. Had they based the new currency on that, inflation would have been virtually nil.
The slavish devotion to the pound, we are not the only country to have a currency with this name, Turkey and Italy both have Lira which is the same thing. I believe that France once had a Livre too, cost this country dearly. By that I mean you and I, who are the people who end up paying for the governments mistakes every time.
I mean, it's not like it's their money they're spending is it? It's our taxes, and our opinion only matters when there's an election in the offing, because they want us to put an X next to their name on the ballot paper. Can't have them losing their reservation on the gravy train can we?


Rant

Rant

Rant

G

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Grab
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 07:56 AM

Anne, you had it easy, doing that in a shop.

My first semi-real job was as barman at our sailing club, aged 17. (I was underage, but it was a private club so that was OK. 17 years ago too, incidentally.) The cash register was an old mechanical monstrosity, and although it claimed to add up totals and work out the change, it simply didn't - its innards were buggered up somehow, so every so often it'd get things wrong. If it was majorly visible then it'd be fine, but generally it'd be a small amount which you wouldn't necessarily notice.

Result - anyone doing the bar had to be able to add up the price in their head, and work out the change in their head too. As Anne and other shop-workers know, there's some pressure to do this quickly. But you really don't know what pressure is until you've been adding up the numbers with two dozen beered-up blokes waiting to get served! :-)

My mum used to use the household accounts as a way of exercising my sister's and my mental arithmetic with a massive long series of "plus £5.29 - plus £29.45 - plus £86.20..." Having two of us gave a cross-check for when one of us got it wrong, and she must have been doing the sums herself to check as well.

"Five-and-twenty" is fairly old useage, isn't it - remember "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie"? German still uses that notation. Since that the rest of the number goes in order from highest to lowest, it's not exactly intuitive, which might be why it's pretty much died out.

Graham.

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 07:56 AM

It may have become eaier for you. I still find myself thinking, bloody hell - I paid three pounds seventeen and six for that!

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 08:17 AM

The cost of 1 gallon of petrol now, is equal to what I used to pay to fill my mini up to the brim in 1966. That lasted me a whole week to and from work too.
G

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: GUEST,PMB
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 09:03 AM

That's not bad Giok when you consider that beer is up from about 2/- or less to £2.50 or more- that makes 25x - I doubt if your mini had a 25 gallon (110 litre) tank. £5 was almost a week's wages for a young'un then, don't forget.

But I did do a double take when I paid 43p for ONE parsnip in a local shop a while ago. 8 and bloody six for one sodding parsnip!

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 07:06 PM

Does that mean I can claim 144 when we get there That would be gross, Richard!

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: HuwG
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 01:13 PM

" ...we all learnt multiplication tables up to 12 times. Don't kids still learn their tables?

Working in IT in the 1980's, it was sometimes necessary to do lots of calculations in hexadecimal i.e. using base 16. In this system, A is 10, B is eleven and so on up to F which is 15. OK, so how many channels can you have given that they have a minimum buffer size of 0x0100 and the available buffer space using redundant initialisation functions in the combined code and data segment is 0xFAB0 - 0xE810 ? (I have made things easy for you by using the ALIGN = PARA directive so that all function and segment addresses are multiples of 16.)

This was all in the days before Windows with on-screen calculators. It was almost all done on scrap paper, although there were one or two programmers who could do the sixteen times table in their heads.

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Bert
Date: 17 Feb 08 - 12:45 PM

...purses a whole lot lighter...

That's 'cos the buggers stole the other 140 pence out of the pound.

And remember Nine pounds nineteen and elevenpence threefarthings?

I remember when beer was one and seven and it went up to one and ten. At that time I was brewing my own for less than theepence a pint. And that was buying sugar, hops and malt at retail prices.

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 17 Feb 08 - 03:16 PM

What did it taste like Bert?

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 17 Feb 08 - 11:22 PM

G'day Bert & Rich B,

Probably better by proportion of the outlay!

It reminds me of an Australian (Queensland region) song of (~) the '50s called Home Brew - the chorus of which ran (presumably with the singer drinking legally-taxed beer ... not the home brew he is remebering):

Oh! It's fivepence a bottle, and that is the rub -
That's less than we pay for a glass in the pub!
Each sip I take, fills me with wrath ...
Who gets the cream, when I get the froth?

Regards,

Bob

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 18 Feb 08 - 07:35 PM

I used to make home brew. Rather nasty, but very cheap, and pretty strong stuff. And that's not me knocking home brew in general, just my home brew.

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 19 Feb 08 - 07:00 PM

Singles (45rpm) cost 6s 8d, so you could buy 3 for a quid....

Kitty

Subject: RE: BS: Another question for Brits
From: GUEST,Bert
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 12:20 PM

Much better than the stuff from The Rose and Crown.