Peckris

I was going to say 5, but now you mention it, it could be a 3 too.

Is that a Digital PDP-11? (DEC). That looks like the usual config, CPU/ 2 Drives/9 track tape. That was a popular unit early on. It looks like you are ready for any contingency with the full set of replacement cards on top of the Tape Drive! Ha, Ha! See my reply just above yours - there's been some Photoshop jiggery pokery going on

Haha - nicely Photoshopped. Just a pity you forgot about the reflection in the mirror

Cool. Nice spot.

Then I'll have to give up. It's bedtime. I'll see the answer tomorrow.

Well there only appears to be one N in BRITANNIA (all barred A's by the way), but that's because the coin is so worn between 11 and 12 o'clock that if there was an N it could have worn right away.

I think his girlfriend wasn't referring to coins...

A noble ambition - but where do you draw the line? Ok, you've always had a 1922/27 which is mega rare, but what others do you aim to get? Obviously 1933 is the commonest one that's out of reach (well, compared to 1920 type 2, 1926ME reverse 1927, 1922ME, 1952, 1953 type 1, and 1954!!), but there must be very rare issues you don't know if you will ever see or afford?

Oh yes of course it is. That would make it 1699 or 1700 'no stops on obverse'.

Ouch!!!!!!!

Me too!

Yeah - I bought a BU 1924 from Colin Cooke in the 90s, but it had even lighter hair detail than normal. I queried his selling price (£33!) and was told they were shooting up in price and very hard to get in that grade. I decided to keep it.. V glad I did

Oh yes - I just remembered the make of my first PC : it was a "Beltron". Yeah, you never heard of it either

I remember a Project Manager stopping me on the stairs in the late 80s and proudly announcing that after an upgrade each employee now had a workspace/storage area of 2 GIGABYTES! I looked at him blankly. What's a gigabyte?

It's what the good old 3d was made of. I thought that was brass? They were called 'brass threepences'!

Yes, what Declan says re. the 1925s. As for the other points: 1921 is quite a scarce date (comparatively) but you wouldn't think so from the mintage figures. It's my bet that some of that figure includes halfcrowns minted in 1921 with a date of 1920. It is not likely that the RM held much of a stock of pre-1920 coins - the big era of inflation was WW1 when you see a massive increase in the mintage of silver : from an average of 3 million a year 1911-13, to an average of 24 million a year 1914-18. That reduces to 10 mill for 1919 so you could see that demand was falling and the RM was already planning ahead for the silver reduction. The large mintages for 1920-23 simply reflect the withdrawal of .925 silver coins which needed to be replaced; there wasn't a huge demand for new issues. This can be seen from the big reduction in mintage 1924-26 when that job was done. Actually, the Mint only had a limited success in withdrawing .925 silver coins - the public, knowing that silver coins were being debased, hung on to their solid silver coins in quite large quantities. Which is why you see so much silver dated 1914-1919 around now, in an average of GVF condition.

“Home made replica from three penny bit and 5p. Poorer on reverse due to manufacturing process” - :lol: Does that mean if I take a hammer to my car I can call myself a car manufacturer? But.. but.. it's rare! Have you noticed how there is a doubling of the legend in places?

Indeed. In Britain it amounted to around half a day's wages for a building worker.

No stops on obverse? That would make it 1695 if you could only make out the date.

The truly awful one was Windows 2000 (shown as 98SE in that timeline) - it lasted only months before Windows ME replaced it, and then XP was released only a year later. People tend to think that XP > Vista was an awful long time without any Windows update/release, but don't forget SP1 and SP2, which were quite substantial enhancements to XP. It's just that with Microsoft's almost legendary lack of imagination and flair, they decided to call them 'Service Packs', so people now just think of XP as a single entity when in fact it was three quite separate and substantial versions. I stole the timeline from Wikipedia My first computing experience was was with CP/M (anyone remember that - Digital research) using a Z80 card in an Apple ][, we had a massive brute of a hard disk with the amazing capacity of 5MB! Later we migrated to DOS and then Santa Cruz Xenix - using a Tandon AT with a 100MB disk (this hardware cost £2000 in 1986) My favourite operating system has to be RiscOS running on an Acorn Archimedes, though Amiga Dos was interesting So yes Bob, I am that old, and I haven't written a line of code for over 20 years now,so everything getting a bit rusty David Too cool David. I started with a TRS-80, with two floppy drives (one for the Operating system), with a fabulous 48k Memory board. Then on to a Olivetti PC with PCos operating system, then IBM PC, then IBM XT (5 MB disk), Multiple IBM AT's, Dell (multiple), and currently have a HP Omni27, Multiple channel, with Beats Audio! It been a great ride! When I first started in electronics it was tube technology, then tranisters, Then integrated circuits, then large scale IC's, then PC's on a chip (286,386.486, etc), and now multi-Core, and multi channel... My first computing course was in 1980, after failing a now-notorious aptitude test in the 1970s! I can't remember what the computer we used was, but I do remember we were shown the adverts for the Sinclair ZX80. My second training course was in 1985 at Kalamazoo in Birmingham, where a midi-computer with 1 MB of RAM supported 15 dumb terminals, a printer, a COBOL compiler, and also had BASIC too. Slow? Painful! My computing career was centred on IBM mainframes using COBOL, PL/1, and EASYTRIEVE. I didn't get a computer at home until the early 90s, and it was an 8088 Turbo, 5 KHz / 10 KHz (or do I mean MHz?), with a 20MB HD which I only ever half filled, on which I ran MS-DOS 3.3 and a little software suite called Mini Office Personal, which included WP, a database, a spreadsheet, communications, and probably other things I never used. In 1994 I got my first Mac and compared to using DOS it was like a "cat's whisker" AM radio compared to a digital-era TV. However, I did keep Mini Office on various backups, plus the various documents I created, and have discovered an amazing software app DOSBox (which also runs in Windows, by the way) and can now actually run Mini Office on an Intel Core i5 iMac!!! DOSBox will run any DOS apps and there's a website with free DOS games that can be downloaded for it - http://www.dosgames.com/

Blimey - the silver alone's worth more than that! (Just noticed - my 7777th post!!)

"I'm Enery the 8th, I am Enery the 8th I am I am I got married to the Widow next door She'd been married 7 times before..." Sorry about that - the typo in your topic title had me in stitches. FWIW, I think Windows XP is one of the ugliest OS's ever dumped on us all, but millions of users got used to it. As a Mac user since the mid-90s, I did have a brief experience with Windows 7 a few years back, and found its ease of use and general 'prettiness' a vast improvement over XP. I have heard that W8 is not so intuitive to use at first, as many things about it have been redesigned, so the jury's still out on that one. From my own experience, I'd say W7 might be the way to go for now.

Here's an EF example - make up your own mind. I suspect it's more to do with rarity however, than superiority. Mind you, a currency piece in similar condition to that proof would command a high premium.

No, I wouldn't say that (though the photographs are a bit out of focus). From what I can see, I would say Fine, and perfectly respectable. However, at that grade it would have to be rare to be worth anything much.