Famous people you were at school with?.

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Nigel Goodwin

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Totally by accident, I came across mention of someone on-line, who is now fairly famous, and was at school with me.

Back in Grammar School, we had three forms per year back then X, Y and Z - I was in Z.

We were a Rugby playing school, and one of the school teams was the "under 13's" - presumably we must have been 13 at the time?, because the "under 13's" challenged each individual form in our year to a game of Rugby. This was a little tricky, as there was only 30 pupils or so per year, and mixed sexes - so it was only just barely possible to get a team together.

Anyway, they played X, and beat them, they played Y and drew - then they played Z (us) - and by half time we were absolutely thrashing them. During the half time break the referee happened to do a count, to find out they had 16 players, and we only had 14 - so gave us one of their players to make the sides even. As you can imagine, we thrashed then even more in the second half

The point of this is that the player they gave us was Nigel Shadbolt, I still remember because he had the same first name (only the second other Nigel I'd ever met), and an unusual second name.

So imagine my surprise when I found out he's now Sir Nigel Shadbolt, fairly famous, and has worked with Tim Berners-Lee.

Nigel Shadbolt - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org
 
You are more famous to me than him due winpicprog. I never heard about his name.
=)
 
Pommie said:
I went to a school reunion and it turned out I was the highest achiever. My bio.
Click to expand...

I went to a 25 year reunion, we just all met at a pub and talked - it was really very interesting. Most people turned up, some hadn't changed at all, and some I'd no idea who they were

The girl we all fancied at school (Jenny) hadn't aged well, but I think very pretty girls often don't? - didn't fancy her any more.

However, this absolutely stunning woman came and sat talking to me, after a few minutes she said "you don't know me do you?" - to which I replied "no, I've no idea who you are". She told me her name, and I remembered her well, she just bore no resemblance to how she looked back at school.

Interestingly, the guy whom organised it (just from a school photo, and ringing round people he knew, and looking for names in the phone book) I didn't know at all, neither his name, nor did I recognise him.

But it was a really good night, and great to meet people who you hadn't seen for 25 years.

BTW - nice bio!.
 
I forgot faces and names 7 years after school already .
 
A similar thing often crosses my mind, after leaving school, I spent 6 years in training for the starting point of my future profession.
This was in the City of Oxford, many instances working in the Universities themselves, I am frequently seeing names of famous people that state they were at Oxford during this stint of my training, I must have literally rubbed shoulders with some of them at some time, both in working and leisure time, local pubs etc.
.
.As to the work, interestingly one of them entailed converting the old Oxford Observatory from 110VDC service to 230VAC.!
 

Yes, in the distant past the UK had a wide variety of voltages, and either AC or DC. Not far from me (ten miles?) there was a large industrial complex called 'Staveley Works', who apparently generated their own power (back before the National Grid) which was DC and 200V or so? - only of interest because the surrounding town was supplied with power by them.

I never had occasion to work there back then, but I used to work with a guy who had done - historically TV's used to be AC/DC and had taps for different mains voltages, which I'd never had to use - but he had, on a daily basis.
 
MaxHeadRoom78 said:
.As to the work, interestingly one of them entailed converting the old Oxford Observatory from 110VDC service to 230VAC.!
Click to expand...
I did some work on this a few years ago:- https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/about/36-inch.telescope

The synchronous drive that keeps it pointing in the same direction as the earth rotates was, and probably still is, run at 200 V AC, three phase. Cambridge ran on that voltage in the 1950s when the telescope was built.

The valve-based frequency stabiliser had failed, and I built a solid-state one for them.
 

Amazing how so much old gear is still in use - my son-in-law works as a technician at the University Of Twente in the Netherlands - and they are collecting all old XP machines they can, in order to keep old machines running. They won't run on more modern OS's nor more modern hardware, and the manufacturers have obviously long since ceased support, if indeed they still exist. Replacing the machines, if even possible, would cost millions - so it's worth the effort of collecting old hardware.

Personally I'd like to think that a University would have the capability of reverse engineering both the software and the hardware, and creating a suitable modern control system for the machines? - but I suppose that's a much longer term solution, and a much more expensive one?.
 
Nigel Goodwin said:
Amazing how so much old gear is still in use - my son-in-law works as a technician at the University Of Twente in the Netherlands - and they are collecting all old XP machines they can, in order to keep old machines running.
Click to expand...
I am still using a XP professional PC, as well as the occasional Win10 Laptop.
The reason is I find XP a much better interface, but more important, I have programs running that would cost a fortune to upgrade to 10.
IMO, Win10 credo was, if it works, we can always change it!
 
I attended school and actually had several courses with this guy:

Ricardo Salinas Pliego - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Although both of us graduated as engineers, he went to become an entrepreneur and is now worth in excess of US$ 13.6 billion.
I continued with a career in engineering and I am worth several orders of magnitude less.
 
We have a C.N.C. lathe in school. Which was there before I was (been there 15 years). I fired it up a few years ago to discover it was running Windows 95. I keep thinking I should rip all the electronics out of it and replace with a newer board. I'm sure there will be open source software available to run on it.

Mike.
 
I went to so many schools I hardly remember the schools or the people in them (started in the UK - finished in NZ)

Closest I can get to anyone famous is a girlfriend from last year of school became an announcer on radio in NZ some years ago.
 
Depends if the CNC is done in software and use the drives to close the loop, as in Mach3 etc, or if the PC has a Galil motion or similar card, there is no advantage, as the loop is closed in the card processor and the PC is just a MMI
 
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