Favourite Links!

Marine Engineering History.
A neat UK page with great pictures of old engines, both steam and diesel, from the past. Including a tribute to the engineers of R.M.S. TITANIC who all went down with their ship.

goldmachinery.com
Antique machines for sale from a machine dealer, click on the antiques section of their invintory goldmachinery.com

www.pledge.co.uk. .Engine Turning and Ornamental Turning. David Pledge of Pledge & Alworth Engine Turners (London, UK) . Extensive information about the history and use of these machines, as well as vast amounts of information about practical applications, are available on their informative and constantly-updated website at

Not strictly a web link but Steve Chastain sells exact dimensioned drawings and data for a very successful small cupola. This little furnace is one of the few I have ever heard of which produced nice hot iron the very first heat! Well designed and strongly built. If you are interested, contact him direct at the following address: Steve Chastain
2925 Mandarin Meadows Dr
.Jacksonville, FL 32223

Kew Bridge Steam Museum.
Some of the most famous and beautiful, preserved, working steam engines in the world! The famous engines of the Kew Bridge Pumping Station, on the Thames above London, are truly awesome; you have to see them to believe anything this incredible and huge could be made of metal by human hands.

British Horological Institute.
A large site from this prestigious organization. A must-see if you love old clocks, watches, and the history of timekeeping. Plenty of information here.

Woodworking Links

my-grain.com Antique woodworking Machinery collection

hit antique machinery section

Tuton press

austrailian woodwork

A-line machine tool Co .

fine woodworking

Woodwright's Museum

Inlay.com

A&A woodworking

Machinery

McMaster Co.

Veneer Prouducts Inc.

Van dyke's Restorer's

Ornamental Turning.
Steve Johnson, loves Holtzappfel ornamental lathes; and his massive site cov

ering their history and the gorgeous work they can do is truly an awesome piece of work! Don't miss it! Even if you're not into fine woodturning or antique machinery, this is an impressive example of a website created by an individual out of sheer dedication. Excellent graphics, links, and layout.

my-grain.com Antique woodworking collection

hit antique machinery section Click here

Monty Python.
What can I say? If you're not a Python fan, then get outta here! Download complete scripts, etc.

PythOnline.
This is the official Monty Python homepage, presided over by Eric Idle, with all sorts of neat T-shirts and other goodies you can order. For the true Pyton fan; don't miss it!

Tannahill Weavers
One of the best groups in the world! Guitar, fiddle, flute, Scottish bagpipes and sweet harmonies on traditional and contemporary ballads. Available on tape or CD, too.

Google
This is now our Search Engine of choice. Lean and mean, not cluttered up with advertisements and slowloading graphics. Excellent search algorythm.

AltaVista
Another excellent Search Engine, and very good for International searches.

The OAK Repository, CP/M Archives
Remember CP/M? Well, it is still around and there are tons of programs hoarded away on the Net for it. Perhaps the best collection is in the OAK Repository. Many hundreds of programs for all your favourite old machines, KayPro, CompuPro-Godbout, NorthStar, etc.

Borland Online Museum
Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were among the finest programming environments for many early platforms. Borland has placed several early DOS versions of both in their online museum for free download. My favourite for PC was Turbo Pascal 5.0.

Simtel.Net MS-DOS Archives
Here is the best online collection of DOS software of all types for older PC's. A little bit of everything is here! Plan on spending quite a few visits to browse all of it; it is HUGE!

Steve McCoy's TRS-80 Site
Here is an excellent site for TRS-80 fans. I still have a pair of the monster Model 12's with twin 8 in. floppy drives. With Pickles & Trout CP/M, this was real seat-of-the-pants computing!

Herb Johnson's S-100 Pages
Herb is the premier online authority for S-100 computing and for a number of years wrote the well-known "Dr. S-100" column for the The Computer Journal. His site has a wealth of info and he is happy to send copies from his extensive collection of original manuals and documentation at nominal charges.

Vintage Computer Festival
This is an annual event in Silicon Valley, with a huge flea market and many exhibits celebrating our computing heritage. These chaps have one of the finest collections of older computers and a terrific pool of expertise to call on if you need answers to questions regarding a vintage machine or program. Their LINKS page is the finest on the Web.

The Analytical Engine
The first true computing machine, built by Charles Babbage in the Nineteenth Century. This beautiful steel and brass mechanical marvel embodied most of the concepts of modern computer function. Many of the principles of computer programming were pioneered for this machine by Lady Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, the first true programmer. The Ada language was named in her honour. This is a wonderful and marvelously crafted site, worthy of an extended visit! Henry Ledgard, a professor of computer science and a well-known author on programming languages, wrote a marvelous book in the early 1980's which was built on the premise that Sherlock Holmes had known of the Analytical Engine and employed it in many of his investigations. FROM BAKER STREET TO BINARY, MacGraw-Hill, 1983, is written in the best Holmesian style and is both fun reading and an excellent tutorial on computer use and programming from the world's most famous detective and deductive reasoner. The popularity of this book led to two more, ELEMENTARY BASIC and ELEMENTARY PASCAL, both of which are most excellent reading and a welcome addition to anyone's lilbrary if one is lucky enough to come across them.

The Manchester Baby
Largely neglected by American computer historians, the Manchester SSEM or "Baby" as it was affectionately called, built in the late 1940's at the University of Manchester, was the first computer which had all the normal components we now regard as characteristic of a basic computer system. On 21st June 1948, it ran the world's first successfully stored program and could handle any short user program from its electronic memory. This led immediately to a full sized system, the Manchester Mark 1, and further, to the world's first commercially available system, the Ferranti Mark 1.