Author: kayrpea61

The Strasbourg Astronomical Clock

Many, many years ago, as a child, I was taken to the Old Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. The attraction that truly had me intrigued, at the time, was the Strasbourg Clock. This model of the clock was built by a young Sydney clockmaker, between 1887 and 1889. It is believed that his working model was based solely on a postcard of the original.

To this day, it remains one of the most popular attractions at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Leap forward to 2012, when we were fortunate to visit Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France.  The Strasbourg Cathedral (Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg) is the home of the original Strasbourg Astronomical Clock (in fact, the current clock built in 1843 is the third to occupy the site).

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Our first glimpses of the Cathedral are from the canals and the streets nearby.

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DSC03409The cathedral is inspiring when we get closer, especially the detail around the entrance. DSC03410

I am always attracted to an organ, (and this one does not disappoint)DSC03413The intricate carving of the pulpitDSC03421

At last, we reach The ClockDSC03416

Our guide made sure that we arrived a few minutes before the hour, when the clock really comes to life, as it has done since 1843.

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Our guide, Catherine, detailed the history and workings of the clock. As part of her story, she mentioned that the Sydney model of the clock is significant, because it is the only model of the clock outside Strasbourg. That came as a bit of a surprise to me.

The other surprise I had was that I was the only person in the group, which included other Australians, that knew about the clock at the Powerhouse Museum.

If you are interested, you can read more about the Strasbourg Astronomical Clock here, and about the Sydney model here.

Obernai

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Obernai, the town whose Coat of Arms appears above, is the second largest town in the lower Rhine region of Alsace.  The major town of the region is Strasbourg, which is 31km to the north-east.

Obernai has a population about 12,000, and clearly benefits from tourists travelling the Alsace Wine Trail.

We enter from the car (and coach) park, through the walls. There are inner and outer walls, both beautifully restored.

Buildings form a part of the inner wall.
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DSC03490After passing through the inner wall, we find attractive buildings and streetscapes wherever we wander.

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While not really large, the churches had attractive architecture, including rose windows.

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Our guide pointed out a stork’s nest on top of one building. The stork is recognised as an emblem of Alsace.

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All too soon, it was time to re-join our party and head back to Strasbourg. However, I did manage to remember enough French, from my schooldays, to purchase some delicious biscuits. The hardest part of that was too choose which ones.

A Lifetime of Technical Evolution: Part 2.

This post follows on from A Lifetime of Technical Evolution: Part 1

In the years that followed the first PC in our workplace, one remembers the introduction of Word Processors, for which the company standardised on Wang products.  In late 1982, after nine years in Melbourne, my job took the family back to Sydney. Soon after, personal computers began appearing in the offices of some ‘pioneers’.  One remembers Apple IIe and Commodore 64 as the favoured tools at the time.

The first computer to appear in our household was the somewhat amazing Apple IIc, in late 1984.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

This natty ’little’  machine provided hours of educational entertainment for the family. More importantly, the girls learned to type on it. Part of the logic in purchasing this computer was based on the technology teacher at their school. His advice to parents was that “By the time these children reach 6th grade primary, if they can’t touch type, they will be left behind.”

It is worth reflecting on the fact that the Apple IIc was an early indication of the advent of a portable personal computer, precursor to the laptops and netbooks that are now so prevalent. It had 128 KB of built in RAM, 32 KB ROM, a processor which ran at just over 1MHz, and it accepted 5.25 inch floppy disks!

It wasn’t long before the first Windows PC was needed at home, so that there could be compatibility with work done at school or office.  About seven desktops and  three or four laptops later, the home computer on which I am writing as has 6 GB of RAM (6,000,000 KB), 1340 GB of internal memory and processor speed of 3.33 GHz (just 3000 times faster than the Apple 2c) Well, it is nearly 30 years, after all.!

While thinking about the huge increase, that we have experienced in RAM and ROM, it is also amazing to consider storage. I can recall our IT department, with its huge IBM mainframes, jealously guarding against the need for increased storage, because it was so expensive.  Storage seemed to become ‘relatively cheap’ in the 1990s, when the benchmark was $1.00 per megabyte, i.e. we had to pay $250 for the 250 MB we wanted to add to our PC. We can now buy 1 terabyte for less than $100!  (1TB = 1,000,000 MB, so on the old criteria, 1TB would have cost $1million).

It is a sobering thought that the average mobile [smart] phone now has more processing power and storage capacity than the English Electric KDF9 computer at the University of Sydney: the computer we learnt to programme in 1964.

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Photo shows an English Electric KDF9 Computer, similar to the one installed at Sydney University in 1964. (Photo courtesy chezfred.org.uk)

Without these incredible developments, we would be much less anxious to take, and store, all our digital photos, let alone a movie or TV series.

Similarly, without the increases in processing power, communications, the internet and our blogging capacity would not have evolved so rapidly.