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Tony Armas Jr.

Antonio José Armas (born April 29, 1978), better known as Tony Armas Jr., is a Venezuelan former professional baseball right-handed pitcher. He spent most of his active career with the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals of Major League Baseball (MLB).

New York Yankees
Armas was signed by the New York Yankees as an amateur free agent in 1994.

Boston Red Sox
Armas and a player to be named later (Jim Mecir), were traded to the Boston Red Sox in 1997 for Mike Stanley and Randy Brown.

Montréal Expos/Washington Nationals
He was sent to the Montréal Expos in 1997 along with pitcher Carl Pavano in exchange for Pedro Martínez.

Various injuries held him back until 2003, when he was the team's Opening Day starter, shutting down the Atlanta Braves at Turner Field, 10–2. But the strong start turned into a breakdown weeks later, after he was diagnosed with injuries in his arm and shoulder which required season-ending surgery. At that time, Armas had a record of 2–1, 23 strikeouts and a 2.61 ERA, with a WHIP of 1.065 and not allowing a home run until his fifth and last start.

Armas worked out in 2004 spring training, and his recovery was proceeding. Although the team initially hoped he could be ready for the start of the season, the rehabilitation was slower than expected. He finished the season with a 2–4 mark in 72 innings.

In a nine-year career, Armas had a 52–65 record with 674 strikeouts and a 4.62 ERA in 917.3 innings. At bat, he was a .098 hitter (26-for-265) with ten RBI.

During the 2006 season, Armas had a 9–12 record in 30 starts. Armas missed one month with arm problems, but in his second game back from the disabled list he pitched seven innings, allowing only one run on three hits.

On October 29, 2006, Armas filed for free agency.

Pittsburgh Pirates
On February 1, 2007, he signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates for a one-year $3.5 million contract with a 2008 mutual option. After starting the 2007 season 0–3 with an 8.92 ERA, Armas was removed from the rotation.

New York Mets
On February 11, 2008, he signed a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training with the New York Mets. He re-signed with the Mets in January 2009. However, he was released on March 31, 2009, after not making the team.

Atlanta Braves
In April 2009, he was signed by the Atlanta Braves and assigned to the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves. On July 25, 2009, the Braves released Armas.

Pitching style
Armas used a low-90s moving fastball and a sharp-breaking curve to establish what he wanted to do with each hitter. He had an effective slider, a splitter, and a changeup to keep opponents out of balance.

Personal life
Armas is the son of former All-Star outfielder Tony Armas, and a nephew of former first baseman Marcos Armas. Tony's father broke into the Majors with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1976.

title: Tony Armas Jr.


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Ruben Kun

HE Ruben James Kun (30 March 1942 – 21 September 2014) was a political figure from the Pacific nation of Nauru and was president of the Republic of Nauru.

Early career
Kun was a lawyer before becoming a political figure.

He was the minister assisting the president of Nauru in the cabinets of Lagumot Harris in 1978 and 1995–1996. He was the speaker of the Parliament of Nauru from August 1981 to December 1986.

He was Minister of Finance under Bernard Dowiyogo and Lagumot Harris from January 1978 to May 1978, and again in the cabinet of Lagumot Harris from November 1995 to November 1996.

President of Nauru
Kun succeeded Kennan Adeang as president of Nauru from 19 December 1996 to 13 February 1997, and was succeeded by Kinza Clodumar.

Post-presidency
Kun was again Minister of Finance under Bernard Dowiyogo from August 1998 to December 1998. Under the Pacific Solution asylum policy, Australia has an arrangement with Nauru that allows asylum seekers arriving in Australia to be detained on the island. Kun represented detainees in a case before the nation's Supreme Court.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ruben Kun


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Battle of Alcácer Quibir

The Battle of Alcácer Quibir (also known as "Battle of Three Kings" (معركة الملوك الثلاثة) or "Battle of Wadi al-Makhazin" (معركة وادي المخازن) in Morocco) was fought in northern Morocco, near the town of Ksar-el-Kebir (variant spellings: Ksar El Kebir, Alcácer-Quivir, Alcazarquivir, Alcassar, etc.) and Larache, on 4 August 1578.

A Moroccan victory, the battle has been described as "the greatest military disaster the Portuguese ever suffered in the course of their overseas expansion." It marked an end to Portuguese attempts to reconquer territories it had lost in Morocco.

The combatants were the army of the deposed Moroccan Sultan Abu Abdallah Mohammed II, with his ally, the King of Portugal Sebastian I, against a large Moroccan army under the new Sultan of Morocco (and uncle of Abu Abdallah Mohammed II) Abd Al-Malik I.

The Christian king Sebastian I had planned a crusade after Abu Abdallah asked him to help recover his throne. Abu Abdallah's uncle, Abd Al-Malik, had taken it from him with Ottoman support. The defeat of Portugal and disappearance of the childless Sebastian led to the end of the Aviz dynasty, and the integration of the country in the Iberian Union for 60 years under the Philippine Dynasty in a dynastic union with Spain.

King Sebastian of Portugal
Sebastian, who would later be known in Portugal as the Desired, was the son of the Infante Dom John (son of John III of Portugal) and Joanna, daughter of the Emperor Charles V. His father died before he was born, and he became king at the age of three after the death of his grandfather in 1557. He was educated almost entirely by Jesuits, by his guardian and tutor Aleixo de Meneses and by Catherine of Austria, sister of Charles V and wife of King John III. Some, judging him after his defeat, alleged that under these influences his youthful idealism soon mutated into religious fanaticism, although he never joined the Holy League.

The Portuguese Cortes asked Sebastian several times to go to Morocco and stop the turmoil of the advancing Turkish military presence, because the Ottomans would be a threat to the security of the Portuguese coasts and to the commerce with Guinea, Brazil, and the Atlantic Islands, like the Azores and Madeira. But it was only when Abu Abdallah Mohammed II al-Mutawakkil went to Portugal and asked for Sebastian's help in recovering his throne from his uncle that Sebastian decided to mount a military effort. Sebastian felt driven to revive lost glories by intervening in North Africa, influenced by the events such as the defense of Mazagan in 1562 from a Moroccan siege. Accordingly, in 1568, the kingdom began to prepare for intervention in Morocco.

This policy was not only supported by the mercantile bourgeoisie as it would benefit commerce in this area (primarily, gold, cattle, wheat, and sugar), but also by the nobility. Up to that time Portuguese military action in Africa had been confined to small expeditions and raids; Portugal had built its vast maritime empire from Brazil to the East Indies by a combination of trade, sea exploration, and technological superiority, with Christian conversion of subject peoples being one, but by no means the only, end in view. Sebastian proposed to change this strategy entirely.

In 1574 Sebastian visited some of the Portuguese bases in North Africa and led a successful raid on Muslim territory beyond the then Portuguese city of Tangier, engaging in several skirmishes and in a confrontation of greater magnitude on 21 October. Although in numerical inferiority but with a heavy contingent of cavalry, he was successful, which encouraged him to grander designs against the new Saadian ruler of Morocco. He gave his support to Al-Mutawakkil, who was engaged in a civil war to recover the throne of Morocco from his uncle, the Emir Abd Al-Malik - who was aided by the Ottomans. Despite the admonitions of his mother and his uncle Philip II of Spain (who had become very cautious after the Battle of Djerba), Sebastian was determined to wage a military campaign, and he used much of Portugal's imperial wealth to equip a large fleet and gather an army which included soldiers of several nationalities: 2,000 volunteers from Spain (Castile), 3,000 mercenaries from Flanders and Germany, and 600 Italians initially recruited to aid in an invasion of Ireland under the leadership of the English adventurer, Thomas Stukley. It is said that the expeditionary force numbered 500 ships, and the army in total numbered about 18,000 men, including the flower of the Portuguese nobility.

Sultan Abd al-Malik of Morocco
Morocco, meanwhile, was under the rule of the Saadi (or Saadian) dynasty, a Moroccan Sharifian dynasty. Their rise to power began as a resistance to the Portuguese presence in Agadir and by the 1550s they controlled most of present-day Morocco and had supplanted the earlier Wattasid dynasty. Upon the death of Sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib in 1574 his son Muhammad II al-Mutawakkil inherited the throne, but two years later he was overthrown by his uncle Abd al-Malik. Abd al-Malik had travelled to Istanbul in 1574 and secured Ottoman support from the Sultan there himself. The beylerbey of Algiers provided him with troops and with these Abd al-Malik was able to depose his nephew after winning a decisive victory near Fez. Once on the throne, as an Ottoman vassal he had the Friday prayers and the khutba in mosques delivered in the Ottoman sultan's name (Murad III), adopted Ottoman clothing, and organized his army along Ottoman lines with the help of Turkish officers. After this, the Saadi army, whose bulk was recruited from guich troops ("military tribes" mobilized to serve as regular levies ), combined mounted arquebusiers, infantry armed with rifles, large numbers of light cavalry, and a detachment of artillery; most of which were newly trained in Ottoman tactics. In addition to his local guich troops and Berber contingents, many of the soldiers were recruited from Andalusis previously expelled from the Iberian Peninsula (or descended from those refugees), Berber tribes from the east such as the Zwawa, and from the Turks and ex-Ottoman soldiers in the region.

Ottoman presence
Indications of the presence of an Ottoman force accompanying the Moroccans to the battlefield vary between sources. Historian Stephen Cory, in reviewing relations between the Saadians and Ottomans in this period, states that the battle was won by the Saadians "without direct Ottoman assistance." Abderrahmane El Moudden, in a large study of Ottoman-Saadian diplomacy in this period, notes that some modern Turkish sources attribute the 1578 victory to Ottoman forces led by Ramazan Pasha on the field – though he also notes that some of these sources are liable to exaggerate Turkish military history.

In an encyclopedic entry about King Sebastian, historian Allen Fromherz indicates the presence of Ottoman forces at the battle, including Janissaries. Historian R. G. Grant states that Abd al-Malik's army was "partly supplied by the Ottoman Turks" and that it combined "Moroccan cavalry with Ottoman musket-armed infantry and cannon". Professor of Islamic Studies, Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, states that the Turks "could not take over the affairs of Morocco after [the Battle of Alcácer's] victory to which they contributed much". He also mentions that Abd al-Malik's army included Turkish troops, that its officers were Turks and so was the commander of his army, who is alleged to have had Abd al-Malik poisoned in order to secure total Ottoman control over Morocco.

Campaign
After haranguing his troops from the windows of the Church of Santa Maria in Lagos, Sebastian departed that port in his armada on 24 June 1578.

He landed at Arzila, in Portuguese Morocco, where Abu Abdallah joined him with an additional 6,000 Moorish allied troops, and marched into the interior.

Abd al-Malik I, who was gravely ill, had meanwhile collected a large army, rallying his countrymen to jihad against the Portuguese invaders. The two armies approached each other near Ksar-el-Kebir, camping on opposite sides of the Loukkos River.

Battle
On 4 August 1578, the Portuguese and Moorish allied troops were drawn up in battle array, and Sebastian rode around encouraging the ranks. But the Moroccans advanced on a broad front, planning to encircle his army.

The Sultan had 10,000 cavalry on the wings, and in the center had placed Moors who had been driven out of Spain and thus bore a special grudge against Christians. Despite his illness, the Sultan left his litter and led his forces on horseback.

The battle started as both sides exchanged several volleys of gunfire from musketry and artillery. Stukley, commanding the Portuguese center, was killed by a cannonball early in the battle. The Moroccan cavalry advanced and began to encircle the Portuguese army. Both armies soon became fully engaged in a melee.

The flanks of the Portuguese army began to give way to the Moorish cavalry, and eventually the center became threatened as well. Seeing the flanks compromised, and having lost its commander early in battle, the Portuguese center lost heart and was overcome.

The battle ended after nearly four hours of heavy fighting and resulted in the total defeat of the Portuguese and Abu Abdallah's army with 8,000 dead, including the slaughter of almost the whole of Portugal's nobility. 15,000 were captured and sold into slavery, and around 100 survivors escaped to the coast. The body of King Sebastian, who led a charge into the midst of the enemy and was then cut off, was never found.

The Sultan Abd Al-Malik died during the battle from natural causes (the effort of riding was too much for him), but the news was concealed from his troops until total victory had been secured. Abu Abdallah attempted to flee but was drowned in the river. Because of the deaths during the fighting of Sebastian, Abu Abdallah, and Abd Al-Malik, the battle became known in Morocco as the Battle of the Three Kings.

Legacy
Abd Al-Malik was succeeded as Sultan by his brother Ahmad al-Mansur, also known as Ahmed Addahbi, who conquered Timbuktu, Gao, and Jenne after defeating the Songhai Empire. The Moroccan army which invaded Songhai in 1590–91 was made up mostly of European captives, including a number of Portuguese taken prisoner at the battle of Alcácer Quibir.

For Portugal, the battle was an unmitigated disaster. Sebastian died on the battlefield along with most of the Portuguese nobility. The captive nobles were ransomed, nearly bankrupting Portugal. Despite the lack of a body, Sebastian was presumed dead, at the age of 24. In his piety, he had remained unmarried and had sired no heir. His aged, childless uncle Henry of Portugal, a cardinal of the Roman church, succeeded to the throne as closest legitimate relative. His brief reign (1578–1580) was devoted to attempting to raise the crippling financial reparations demanded by the disastrous Morocco venture. After his death, legitimate claimants to the throne of the House of Aviz, which had ruled Portugal for 200 years, were defeated by a Castilian military invasion. Philip II of Spain, a maternal grandson of Manuel I of Portugal, and nearest male claimant (being an uncle of Sebastian I), invaded with an army of 40,000 men, defeating the troops of Anthony, Prior of Crato at the Battle of Alcântara and was crowned Philip I of Portugal by the Cortes of Tomar in 1581.

Later, at the beginning of his reign, Philip II ordered that the mutilated remains said to be Sebastian's (and so recognized after the battle by some of his close companions), and still in North Africa, be returned to Portugal, where they were buried at the Jerónimos Monastery, in Lisbon. Portugal and its Empire were not de jure incorporated into the Spanish Empire, and remained as a separate realm of the Spanish Habsburgs until 1640 when it broke away through the Portuguese Restoration War.

Partly in reaction to the national trauma of this disastrous defeat, a cult of 'Sebastianism' which portrayed the lost monarch in terms similar to King Arthur arose. The legend of Portugal's "Once and Future King" who would some day return to save his nation has ebbed and flowed in Portuguese life ever since.

In fiction

 * The battle was the subject of the George Peele English Renaissance play, The Battle of Alcazar, and is also a central event to the anonymously written The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley. It is also mentioned peripherally in Thomas Heywood's 1605 play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. The real story of one of the most unfortunate and latest ransomed captives, Dom João de Portugal of the Counts de Vimioso, inspired the play Frei Luís de Sousa by Almeida Garrett.
 * The battle is reanacted in the 1990 film The Battle of the Three Kings.
 * In the 1990 film "Non", ou A Vã Glória de Mandar by the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira features a representation of the battle.
 * The battle is represented in the 2020 video game Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition as a historical battle mission under the name "The Battle of the Three Kings".
 * The battle is mentioned in the story "Among the Hairy Earthmen" by R. A. Lafferty, where it is depicted as one of a series of Renaissance battles provoked by extraterrestrial juvenile delinquents inhabiting human bodies.

title: Battle of Alcácer Quibir


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1967–1970

1967–1970, also known as the Blue Album, is a compilation album of songs by the English rock band the Beatles, spanning the years indicated in the title. A double LP, it was released with 1962–1966 (the "Red Album") in April 1973. 1967–1970 topped the Billboard albums chart in the United States and peaked at number 2 on the UK Albums Chart. It was re-released in September 1993 on CD, charting at number 4 in the United Kingdom.

The album was instigated by Apple Records manager Allen Klein during his final months before being dismissed from that position. As with 1962–1966, the compilation was created by Apple and EMI/Capitol Records in response to a bootleg collection titled Alpha Omega, which had been sold on television the previous year. Print advertising for the two records made a point of declaring them "the only collection of the Beatles". The success of the two official double LP compilations inspired Capitol's repackaging of the Beach Boys' 1960s hits, starting with the 1974 album Endless Summer.

A deluxe expanded version of the album was released on 10 November 2023, featuring the previously unreleased song "Now and Then", the final original single by the group. The deluxe edition features the album anniversary remix versions of the songs.

Album covers
For the group's 1963 debut LP Please Please Me, photographer Angus McBean took the distinctive colour photograph of the group looking down over the stairwell inside EMI House (EMI's London headquarters in Manchester Square, demolished in 1995).

In 1969, the Beatles asked McBean to recreate this shot. Although a photograph from the 1969 photo shoot was originally intended for the then-planned Get Back album, it was not used when that project saw eventual release in 1970 as Let It Be. Instead, another photograph from the 1969 shoot, along with an unused photograph from the 1963 photo shoot, was used for both this LP and 1962–1966.

The inner gatefold photo for both LPs has been attributed to both Stephen Goldblatt and Don McCullin, and is from the "Mad Day Out" photo session in London on Sunday 28 July 1968.

The album cover was designed by Tom Wilkes.

International versions
Unlike the 1962–1966 collection, the Blue Album was largely the same in the U.S. and the UK, although there were some variations.

The U.S. edition had "Strawberry Fields Forever" in its original 1966 stereo mix, while "Penny Lane" and "Hello Goodbye" were presented in mono, and "I Am the Walrus" with a four-beat electric piano introduction; the UK version had the more common six-beat beginning.

The albums had several other variants and anomalies. "Get Back" was described as the album version in the U.S. liner notes, although it was in fact the single version. In both countries, "Hey Jude" was around nine seconds shorter than it had been on the original single, although the full length was restored for the 1993 compact disc edition.

The original vinyl version faded in during the crowd noise at the beginning of "A Day in the Life". The fade in was different on both the UK and U.S. versions. The original compact disc edition, meanwhile, featured a clean version previously heard on the Imagine: John Lennon soundtrack album in 1988.

On the Spanish edition, "One After 909" replaced "The Ballad of John and Yoko", a song that had been banned from the airwaves shortly after being released as a single in 1969, for its allusions to "Christ" and "Gibraltar" in the lyrics.

Release variations

 * Original 1973 UK release: Apple PCSP 7181-2
 * Original 1973 US release: Apple SKBO-3404 (whole and sliced apples in blue background)
 * Second 1976 US pressing: Capitol SKBO-3404 (Capitol target label on back of album cover, blue label with "Capitol" in light blue letters at bottom)
 * 1978 first US blue vinyl release: Capitol SEBX-11843 (Capitol dome label on back of album cover, large dome logo at top of light blue labels)
 * 1980 East German release. Amiga 8 55 742. One disc only with 14 tracks, mostly from disc 1 of the original version.
 * 1993 CD release. Apple 0777 7 97039 2 0 (whole and sliced apples in blue background)
 * 2010 remastered CD release. Apple 5099990674723 (whole and sliced apples in blue background)

2023 remixed editions
The compilation, along with its counterpart, was rereleased with an expanded track listing on 10 November 2023.

The nine additional tracks are: "Within You Without You", "Dear Prudence", "Glass Onion", "Blackbird", "Hey Bulldog", "Oh! Darling", "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", "I Me Mine", and "Now and Then".

Six tracks ("I Am the Walrus", "The Fool on the Hill", "Magical Mystery Tour", "Revolution", "Hey Bulldog", and "Old Brown Shoe") received new stereo mixes for this release. The stereo mixes for the remaining tracks were sourced from those created for the following previously released album reissues: 1 (2015), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: 50th Anniversary Edition (2017), The Beatles: 50th Anniversary Edition (2018), Abbey Road: 50th Anniversary Edition (2019), and Let It Be: Special Edition (2021). The album is also available in Dolby Atmos surround sound. On the CD and digital editions, the additional tracks are inserted into the track list in chronological order of each track's original issue, while on the vinyl edition, the first two LPs retain the track list of the 1973 release, with the additional tracks placed on a third LP. The vinyl edition come in both standard and coloured vinyl with each compilation's respective colours.

Of note, both "A Day in the Life" and "Dear Prudence" feature clean openings on the 2023 release, as opposed to their album counterparts, which are crossfaded with their respective preceding tracks.

Track listing

 * The singles "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Penny Lane", "Hello, Goodbye", "Lady Madonna", "Hey Jude" and "The Ballad of John and Yoko", the B-sides "I Am the Walrus", "Revolution", "Don't Let Me Down" and "Old Brown Shoe", and the single versions of "Get Back" and "Let It Be" make their global album debut in this compilation.

All tracks are written by Lennon-McCartney, except where noted.

Weekly charts
Original release

1993 reissue

2010 reissue

Certifications and sales
In the US, the album sold 1,294,896 LPs by 31 December 1973 and 5,850,026 LPs by the end of the decade.

title: 1967–1970


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Bishōjo

In Japanese popular culture, a bishōjo (美少女), also romanized as bishojo or bishoujo, is a cute girl character. Bishōjo characters appear ubiquitously in media including manga, anime, and computerized games (especially in the bishojo game genre), and also appear in advertising and as mascots, such as for maid cafés. An attraction towards bishōjo characters is a key concept in otaku (manga and anime fan) subculture.

The development of the bishōjo aesthetic in manga of the early 1980s marked a departure from previous realistic styles, and the emergence of the aesthetic of "cute eroticism" (kawaii ero) and moe.

History
The bishōjo character type emerged in the lolicon boom of the early 1980s, particularly in the works of manga artist Hideo Azuma. Azuma's characters combined the round bodies of Osamu Tezuka characters and the round and emotive faces of shōjo manga. At the time, the dominant style in seinen and pornographic manga was gekiga, a realistic style characterized by sharp angles, dark hatching, and gritty lines; in contrast, Azuma's work displayed light shading and clean, circular lines. In doing so, Azuma developed "cute eroticism" (kawaii ero), a form of eroticism based on manga-style characters. Lolicon (derived from "Lolita complex") was one of several terms referring to this expansion in cute characters in manga and anime, and a corresponding attraction to and affection for such characters. Synonyms include "two-dimensional complex" (nijigen konpurekkusu), "two-dimensional fetishism" (nijikon fechi), "two-dimensional syndrome" (nijikon shōkōgun), "cute girl syndrome" (bishōjo shōkōgun), and simply "sickness" (byōki).

Several characters created by Hayao Miyazaki are considered icons of the bishōjo boom, particularly Clarisse from the film Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979), Lana from the TV series Future Boy Conan (1978), and Nausicaä from his manga and film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Another creator strongly associated with the boom was Rumiko Takahashi, whose character Lum from her manga Urusei Yatsura (1978–1987) gained immense popularity. Cultural critic Hiroki Azuma identifies Lum as a key development in fan interaction and response to bishōjo characters:

"I first visited Tokyo's gathering for producers of fanzines, the Comic Market, in 1984 or 1985, and fanzines devoted to characters from manga and anime series such as Urusei Yatsura ... were everywhere. The fans were responding to characters, without a doubt. Actually, to me, Urusei Yatsura is really an ancestor of bishōjo games and moe media—a completely useless male character is surrounded by all these cute girl characters, including Lum, an alien girl who wears a bikini and is in love with this male character."

Features
Bishōjo characters are typified by design elements (such as personality archetypes, clothing, and accessories) that are known and acknowledged by the audience.

Media
Bishōjo characters appear in almost all genres of anime and manga and in many video games, especially in dating sims and visual novels, sometimes to get more players or simply just to make a game look good. Bishōjo characters tend to attract males. Bishōjo characters sometimes are the most popular female characters as most people like anime, manga, dating sims, and visual novels more when the art stands out, looks pretty, and has beautiful females.

Bishōjo games
Games that are made with the intent of featuring bishōjo characters are known as bishōjo games. Because visual novels are considered games as well, bishōjo games also encapsulate visual novels made with the intent of featuring bishōjo characters. Although bishōjo games are made with a male audience in mind, they can extend to a female audience as well, such as the Touhou project.

Confusion regarding terminology
Although bishōjo is not a genre but a character design, series which predominantly feature such characters, such as harem anime and visual novels, are sometimes informally called bishōjo series. The characters and works referred to by the term bishōjo are typically intended to appeal to a male audience. Since one of the main draws of these series is typically the art and the attractive female characters, the term is occasionally perceived negatively, as a genre which is solely dependent on the marketability of beautiful characters rather than the actual content or plot.

The word bishōjo is sometimes confused with the similar-sounding shōjo ("girl") demographic, but bishōjo refers to the gender and traits of the characters it describes, whereas shōjo refers to the gender and age of an audience demographic – manga publications, and sometimes anime, described as "shōjo" are aimed at young female audiences.

Bishōjo is not to be confused with bishōnen – beautiful boy. It is also not to be confused with moe – which is a definition for a genre of entertainment which features cute/adorable girls rather than "sexy" girls. Although elements of Moe and Bishōjo are often blended together, so the two elements are closely entwined and cannot be completely separated from one another.

title: Bishōjo


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John Moores (British businessman)

Sir John Moores (25 January 1896 – 25 September 1993) was an English businessman, telegraphist, football club owner, politician and philanthropist, most famous for the founding of the now defunct Littlewoods retail and football pools company. Liverpool John Moores University is named in his honour.

Moores' football-betting empire and Littlewoods stores made him one of Britain's richest men.

Early years
John Moores was born at the Church Inn, Eccles, Lancashire, on Saturday, 25 January, 1896. He was the second of eight children and the eldest of four sons born to bricklayer John William Moores (17 September 1871 – 9 February 1919) and Louisa Moores (née Fethney) (9 March 1873 – 13 December 1959). John came from a line of bricklayers, his great-grandfather Sidney Moores was one (1818–1884), as was his grandfather John Moores (1847–1910), though he eventually set up a small building contractors business, and was landlord of the Church Inn where the future owner of Littlewoods was born.

John William Moores later became a site foreman. He was a hard worker but developed a drink problem. In 1918 he developed tuberculosis and died of the illness in 1919 aged 47.

At the age of 12, John got his first job, helping with a milk round before school started. He left elementary school in 1909, at the age of 13. John became a messenger boy at the Manchester Post Office, but was sacked for talking back to his superior. Shortly afterwards however, he was soon accepted in a course at the Post Office School of Telegraphy. This enabled him, in 1912 to join the Commercial Cable Company as a junior operator. Moores was in a reserved occupation and did not have to be called up for military service but he volunteered for the Navy in 1917, as a wireless operator. He was posted to a shore station in Aberdeen where he remained until April 1919.

Pre-Littlewoods days
After being demobilised from the Navy, Moores carried on working for the Commercial Cable company. In the early Summer of 1920 he was posted to their training school in Bixteth Street, Liverpool but after being taught to touch type, seventy to eighty words per minute and how to read cable slip, in November 1920, Moores was posted to Waterville in County Kerry, Ireland. He complained about the food that was served at the Waterville Cable Company Station, whose function was to receive messages from the US and Canada and re-transmit them to London and Liverpool. Moores was elected to run the Mess Committee. He established the Waterville Supply Company to order food from a variety of suppliers instead of just one, so was able to reduce costs and raise the quality of meals. Moores noticed that there was no public library around for miles. As a result, in April 1921 he set up a store that sold books and stationery. He bulk imported books from Britain and from Dublin and also sold golf balls as there was no sports shop or golf course. Between his telegraphist salary and the profits he made from the Waterville Supply Company (helped by his status of Mess President which meant that he did not have to pay for his own meals) he made £1,000 in 18 months.

In May 1922, Moores was posted back to Liverpool.

Start of the football pools
John, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes were friends who had worked together as Post Office messenger boys in Manchester. It was whilst looking for a new money-making idea that Moores heard about John Jervis Barnard, a Birmingham man who had latched onto the public's growing passion for two things: football and betting.

Barnard had devised a 'football pool', where punters would bet on the outcome of football matches. The payouts to winners came from the 'pool' of money that was bet, less 10 per cent to cover "management costs". It had not been particularly successful. Clearly, Barnard was struggling to make a profit. Hughes obtained one of Barnard's pools coupon, and the three friends one night, in September 1922, when the cable machines were quiet, sat discussing what Barnard would have to do to make money on it. Then they decided they could do it better and they could make money out of it themselves.

They could not let their employers, the Commercial Cable Company, know what they were doing, or they would be sacked. No outside employment was allowed. That ruled out calling it, for example, John Moores Football Pool or the Colin Askham football pool. The solution to that particular problem came from Colin. He had been orphaned as a baby and been brought up by an aunt whose surname was Askham, but he had been born Colin Henry Littlewood. And so, on 1 February 1923, the Littlewood Football Pool – as it was called originally – was started.

Each of the three partners invested £50 of their own money into the venture, and with the help of a small, discreet and cheap printer they got to work. In 1923, £50 was a huge sum to invest in what – based on Barnard's experience – was a precarious venture, and as Moores himself remembered: "As I signed my own cheque at the bank, my hands were damp. It seemed such a lot of money to be risking".

A small office in Church Street, Liverpool, was rented and the first 4,000 coupons were distributed outside Manchester United's Old Trafford ground before one Saturday match that winter. Moores handed the coupons out himself, helped by some young boys eager to earn a few pennies.

It was not an instant success as just 35 coupons were returned. With bets totalling £4 7s 6d (£4.37½), the 10 per cent deducted did not cover the three men's expenses. They decided to print 10,000 coupons, and took them to Hull, where they were handed out before a big game. This time, only one coupon was returned. Their venture was about to collapse almost as soon as it had begun. In the canteen of the Commercial Cable Company, the three partners held a crisis meeting. They had kept pumping money into the fledgling business, but midway through the 1924–25 football season it was still losing money. The three young men had already invested £200, with no prospect of things improving. Bill Hughes suggested they cut their losses and forget the whole thing. Colin Askham agreed. They could see why John Jervis Barnard's idea of a football pool had failed in Birmingham. They expected Moores to concur, but instead he said: "I'll pay each of you the £200 you've invested, if you'll sell me your shares".

Moores admitted that he considered giving up on the business himself, but was encouraged by his wife, who told him "I would rather be married to a man who is haunted by failure rather than one haunted by regret". Moores kept faith and he paid Askham and Hughes £200 each.

The following year Moores enlisted the help of his younger brother Cecil to help, along with the rest of his family. In 1927 Moores gave up working for the Cable Company but in April 1929, he was prosecuted under the Ready Money Betting Act 1920. Following a court appearance, he was convicted. However, as his company never accepted cash, only postal orders that were cashed after the football results and the winning payout had been confirmed, his appeal was upheld.

In 1928, Cecil Moores devised a security system to prevent cheating. The breakthrough came when the owner of the coupon printing company Arthur Bottomes suggested that he took his exact expenses out (plus a bit extra) before calculating the winning payout. Eventually the pools took off, becoming one of the best-known names in Britain.

Moores insisted on being known as "Mr John" to those who worked at Littlewoods, rather than Mr Moores or Boss.

Littlewoods Mail Order
In January 1932, Moores, who was by now a millionaire, was able to disengage himself sufficiently from the pools to start up Littlewoods Mail Order Store. At the end of the first year the turnover was £100,000. A year later, in 1934, it had risen to £400,000; and by early 1936 mail order was grossing £4 million a year. Moores had made his second million. The idea may have come from the little mail-order firm Moores had started in 1921 in Ireland, and he knew that the enormous mailing list which pools had built up would be very helpful; but it was also inspired by the hardship and poverty prevalent everywhere in the bleak depression years at the beginning of the 1930s. Also, he could remember only too well the difficulties with which his mother had to cope when feeding, clothing, and bringing up a large family or the problems when his father was too ill to work or following his death as his mother had three children then aged 13, 11 and 9 to bring up. There had for some time been institutions in existence, such as the Co-operative Society, and the tallyman of the north, which enabled the poorer members of society to buy things they needed. Moores's originality lay in applying a mix of these schemes to a large-scale business enterprise.

As usual all the family were involved. They researched and planned catalogues and helped to choose the merchandise, and Moores visited the United States to get information from big American mail-order firms such as Sears Roebuck and also Europe.

Littlewoods stores
This was followed on 6 July 1937 by the opening of the first Littlewoods department store in Blackpool. By the time World War II started there were 25 Littlewoods stores across the UK and over 50 by 1952.

The war years
The company then turned to war work – warehouses were equipped and staff were retrained so that the company could make parachutes. From 1940 they also made barrage balloons and in 1941 dinghies and munitions were added to the manufacturing portfolio. 1942 saw aircraft parts and bridge pieces being manufactured and from 1943 the firm built storm-boats that could cross water and land on beaches. They also became experts at 'boxing' – making compact transportable kits containing dismantled vehicles that could be reassembled at their destination overseas. The boxing division also made Pacific Packs containing rations for soldiers in the Far East. The football pools continued during the war years however.

Post-war
In late January 1947, Moores fell ill and contracted meningitis – he spent two weeks in hospital. He recovered and returned to work in March but later said he felt run down for a while after that. The businesses continued to expand, and his two sons were given roles in the chain stores and at director level. The company branched out into manufacturing and testing of garments as a natural progression from the manufacturing work that had been carried out during World War II.

He decided to delegate more and put his financial affairs in order. He took out a five-year £1 million life insurance policy and put some of his shares in trust for his children (with various conditions – they were not allowed to sell the shares, his daughters received half as many as his sons in case they married as he did not want any men who were not family having influence over his business, and no child would have any shareholder power until they were 30 years old).

In 1957 the company installed its first computer to help with stock control. Nine years later in 1966 an IBM System/360 computer was installed. In June 1961 Littlewoods took over Sherman's Pools of Cardiff and Moores launched a sixth mail-order company, Peter Craig in 1967 in Preston.

Everton Football Club
In March 1960, Moores gave up his chairmanship of the pools business, and handed over the reins to his brother, Cecil Moores, (10 August 1902 – 29 July 1989), so he could become a director of Everton Football Club. In June, he became the chairman. On 23 June it was revealed that during the 1959–1960 season he had lent Everton £56,000 interest free so they could buy players and on 14 April 1961 he famously sacked Johnny Carey in the back of a London taxi and appointed Harry Catterick as Everton manager in his place. The event would become synonymous in football with the phrase "taxi for...", particularly for under fire football managers.

He would remain as Everton chairman up to 29 July 1965, resigning due to the poor health of his wife, who died of cancer six weeks later. On 3 August 1972, Moores regained the chairmanship and was chairman until 1 August 1973 when he resigned for the second and final time. He then became vice-chairman. Moores retired from the Everton board of directors on 8 July 1977.

Moores attended the 1984, 1985 and 1986 FA Cup finals, all of which featured Everton. At the 1987 Football League Cup Final, sponsored by Littlewoods, Moores was the guest of honour and presented the League Cup to the winning team who were Arsenal.

Baseball
John Moores was a keen baseball fan and created a league for Liverpool-based teams in 1933. He later enticed Everton players such as Dixie Dean to the game. In 1938, he donated the John Moores Trophy to the English national team for beating the United States four games to one in a five-game series, in what became known as the first Amateur World Series. The Great Britain team consisted largely of Canadians from the Yorkshire-Lancashire league.

For his efforts, he was posthumously inducted into the British Baseball Hall of Fame in October 2009.

Knighthood
On 30 April 1970, along with his friend Bessie Braddock, Moores was made a Freeman of the City of Liverpool. In 1972, he was made a CBE, going to Buckingham Palace to receive it on 14 November that year for his youth work and services to the arts on Merseyside. In 1978 he was awarded the first Gold Medal for achievement, and in June 1980 he was knighted. He received his knighthood from Prince Charles on 29 October 1980.

Family
Moores married Ruby Knowles (27 October 1894 – 8 September 1965) in Liverpool on 19 September 1923. They had four children:
 * 1) Elizabeth, Lady Grantchester (8 June 1925 – 2 February 2019) who married on 12 April 1947 Kenneth Bent Suenson-Taylor, 2nd Baron Grantchester (18 August 1921 – 12 August 1995), and had issue including the present Lord Grantchester.

 * 1) John Moores Jr., CBE (22 November 1928 – 22 May 2012),
 * 2) Peter Moores, CBE (9 April 1932 – 23 March 2016) and
 * 3) Janitha Moores later Stubbs (b. 4 July 1937).

Other interests
In 1992, Liverpool Polytechnic took the name Liverpool John Moores University in his honour upon being granted university status. A statue was later built which stands in the courtyard of the university's Avril Robarts Library.

In 1956 he became chairman of the Liverpool Motorists' Outing for Handicapped Children.

The John Moores Painting Prize is co-ordinated by National Museums Liverpool. The first John Moores exhibition was held in 1957, six years after the Walker Art Gallery re-opened after World War II. It was intended as a one-off, but its success led to it becoming a biennial event. By the early 1960s, the exhibition was regarded as the UK's leading showcase for avant-garde painting. Winning works have included classic paintings by Jack Smith (Creation and Crucifixion), William Scott, Roger Hilton (March 1963) and David Hockney (Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool).

Political activities
Between 1933 and August 1940 Moores was a Conservative councillor for the Sefton parish for Sefton Rural District and West Lancashire Rural District. In September 1933 he stood as a National Government candidate for Clay Cross and at the November 1935 General Election in Nuneaton but failed to be elected both times. Moores on occasion attacked socialism, but in November 1935 he called for coal miners to be paid more money and for them to have better working conditions. Despite his views, he was good friends with the Labour MP Bessie Braddock and the two worked together on several projects involving Liverpool.

Later years
Moores retired as chairman on 24 October 1977 of Littlewoods and was succeeded by his son Peter. He went into semi-retirement, visiting his office on the 11th floor of the Littlewoods organisation between 10 am and 1 pm every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. However, as profits fell from 49 million to 11 million, (Moores remained on the board) he resumed the chairmanship on 10 October 1980. He resigned for the second and final time on 25 March 1982 and went into semi-retirement again. On 28 May 1982 he was made life president of the organisation. He attended board meetings until 1986.

On 23 March 1986 Moores was burgled and tied up in his home. Two shotguns, jewellery, and money were stolen. The case was featured on Crimewatch UK two months later.

John Clement succeeded Moores as chairman, the first non-family member to do so. Moores had two operations, on his achilles tendon in May 1986, and then for an enlarged prostate in July 1986, but never fully recovered nor regained his health. In 1987 he was able to get about with a walking stick but by the following year he was confined to a wheelchair.

In May 1988, he attended his final ever AGM, but whilst there he began to struggle to speak and suddenly lost his thread. That was his final ever involvement with Littlewoods. He was unable to talk at all in the final years of his life.

Death
Sir John Moores died at his home, "Fairways", at Shireburn Road, Freshfield, Formby, on Saturday, 25 September, 1993, where he had lived since 1930. He was cremated six days later in Southport in a funeral attended by family members only. A memorial service was held for him on 30 November 1993 in Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral attended by 2,000 people, 1,500 of them Littlewoods employees. His son John Jnr paid tribute to his late father in an address.

Will
The following month it was revealed he left an estate valued at £10 million gross in his will that he made on 11 March 1988. and that he left most of his fortune to his four children. Littlewoods revealed he relinquished nearly all his shares in Littlewoods in 1979. His shares in Everton FC were left to his two sons and his shareholdings and investments in Bermuda to his two daughters.

The Sunday Times Rich List 1989 estimated his estate to be worth £1.7 billion. The Littlewoods businesses were sold to the Barclay Brothers, nine years after Moores' death, in October 2002.

In the 2006 Sunday Times Rich List, the Moores family's wealth was estimated at £1,160M.

title: John Moores (British businessman)


text:
Sabrina Harman

Sabrina D. Harman (born January 5, 1978) is a former American soldier who was court-martialed by the United States Army for prisoner abuse after the 2003–2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Along with other soldiers of her Army Reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, she was accused of allowing and inflicting physical and psychological abuse on Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious prison in Baghdad during the United States' occupation of Iraq.

Harman was convicted of maltreatment of detainees, conspiracy to maltreat detainees, and dereliction of duty. She was sentenced to six months in prison, forfeiture of all her pay and benefits, demoted, and given a bad conduct discharge. She was imprisoned in the Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar in San Diego, California.

Harman consistently acknowledged a fear that the abuses being committed at Abu Ghraib, both during her time at the facility, and afterwards during her sentencing, would be a cause for the rise of further radicalization in the region, as would later be seen in the formation of groups such as ISIL.

Early life and education
Harman was born in Lorton, Virginia. Her father was a homicide detective. Harman graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield, Virginia.

Military career
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Harman joined the Army Reserves and was assigned to the Cresaptown, Maryland-based 372nd Military Police company. Harman worked for a time as an assistant manager at Papa John's Pizza in Alexandria, Virginia, before her company was activated for duty in Iraq in February 2003, and was deployed to Fort Lee, Virginia for additional training; however, this was in combat support, not internment and resettlement.

Harman, an MP, was stationed at Abu Ghraib as a guard.

Abu Ghraib facility
Harman was the second soldier to be tried for mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib. She was depicted in several of the most notorious photos taken at Abu Ghraib in late October and early November 2003, and she is accused of taking other pictures.

In late October 2003, Harman wrote to her wife in Virginia (as quoted by The New Yorker: )

"Oct 20, 03

10:40pm

Kelly,

Okay, I don't like that anymore. At first it was funny but these people are going too far. I ended your letter last night because it was time to wake the MI prisoners and 'mess with them' but it went too far even I can't handle whats going on. I cant get it out of my head. I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with an asp [ expandable baton ] to find 'the taxicab driver' handcuffed backwards to his window with some underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started “poking” at his dick. Again I thought, okay that’s funny then it hit me, that’s a form of molestation. You can't do that. I took more pictures now to 'record' what is going on. They started talking to this man and at first he was talking 'I'm just a taxicab driver, I did nothing.' He claims he'd never try to hurt US soldiers that he picked up the wrong people. Then he stopped talking. They turned the lights out and slammed the door and left him there while they went down to cell #4. This man had been so fucked that when they grabbed his foot through the cell bars he began screaming and crying. After praying to god he moans a constant short Ah, Ah every few seconds for the rest of the night. I don't know what they did to this guy. The first one remained handcuffed for maybe 11⁄2-2 hours until he started yelling with pain for god. So they went back in and handcuffed him to the top bunk on either side of the bed while he stood on the side. He was there for a little over an hour when he started yelling again for god. Not many people know this shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove that the US is not what they think. But I don't know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist. Kelly, its awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.

Sabrina"

Harman explained that her Military Police unit deferred to practices already being conducted by military officers and civilian contractors present at the facility:

"[She] said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation. 'They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed,' Harman said in interviews by e-mail this week from Baghdad. 'The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk.' She said her military police unit took direction from the military intelligence officers in charge of the facility and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations."

Sentencing
In 2005, Harman was convicted on six of the seven counts she had been initially charged with, which related to the maltreatment of detainees, conspiracy relating to abuse, and dereliction of duty; She was sentenced to six months in prison the following day, for which she would serve approximately four months due to credit for time already served.

Despite the gravity of the accusations involved, Harman received a fairly light sentence, serving just four months in prison. Throughout the case, various individuals, including two former prisoners at Abu Ghraib, proclaimed her innocent nature submitting testimonies in her defense, which were officially accepted by the court. These prisoners noted Harman’s 'gentle' treatment of detainees, something unusual compared to other guards at the facility, who generally saw the prisoners as more or less as a proxy for military intelligence - “She has no cruelty in her, even though she is an American woman, she was just like a sister.” Her defense attorney, Frank Spinner, said: “I felt very strongly in Sabrina Harman, I feel she’s a very naive, very innocent person. … She didn’t know how to react to that experience (at Abu Ghraib).”

At her sentencing, Harman stated:"As a soldier and military police officer, I failed my duties and failed my mission to protect and defend. I not only let down the people in Iraq, but I let down every single soldier that serves today. My actions potentially caused an increased hatred and insurgency towards the United States, putting soldiers and civilians at greater risk. I take full responsibility for my actions. ... The decisions I made were mine and mine alone." Harman's attorney said he hoped to see the military chain of command put on trial, rather than low-ranking reservists like Harman: "'I don't think we can even begin to imagine the kind of environment that she was in. First of all, she wasn't trained to be a prison guard, so she didn't even know the basic rules. She wasn't trained in military intelligence. I don't think any American can really truly appreciate the stress that existed along with the fact they were undermanned and not trained to perform this mission.'"

title: Sabrina Harman


text:
Windmill Hill culture

The Windmill Hill culture was a name given to a people inhabiting southern Britain, in particular in the Salisbury Plain area close to Stonehenge, c. 3000 BC. They were an agrarian Neolithic people; their name comes from Windmill Hill, a causewayed enclosure near Avebury. Together with another Neolithic tribe from East Anglia, a tribe whose worship involved stone circles, it is thought that they were responsible for the earliest work on the Stonehenge site.

The material record left by these people includes large circular hill-top enclosures, causewayed enclosures, long barrows, leaf-shaped arrowheads, and polished stone axes. They raised cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs, and grew wheat and mined flints.

Since the term was first coined by archaeologists, further excavation and analysis has indicated that it consisted of several discrete cultures such as the Hembury and Abingdon cultures; and that "Windmill Hill culture" is too general a term.

title: Windmill Hill culture


text:
List of Major League Baseball principal owners

Current Major League Baseball team owners and the principal corporate entities that operate the clubs:


text:
Talk:Doi Inthanon

Actual height
The official marker stone at the summit, along with several other signs and various trinkets in the summit souvenir shop, gives the height as 2565m. One sign goes so far as to state "2565.3341 Meters Above Mean Sea Level" (in English and Thai).

http://www.dnp.go.th/parkreserve/asp/style1/default.asp?npid=1&lg=2 also says "2,565 meters above the sea level" (sic).

Leave a message here if photographs are needed. ~ 203.147.0.44 12:53, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Conflicting names of mountain range
The name of the range that Doi Inthanon is part of conflicts between Geography (Thanon Thong Chai Range) and the infobox (Shan Hills). Lestermandersson (talk) 14:21, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

 * Thanon Thong Chai is a subrange of Shan Hills, thus they're both correct. Lestermandersson (talk) 07:38, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

 * Many sources claim that it's part of the Himalayan range. Possibly apocryphal. Kortoso (talk) 00:08, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

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Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems

Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Inc. (MITS), was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975.

Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry modules for model rockets such as a roll rate sensor. In 1971, Roberts redirected the company into the electronic calculator market and the MITS 816 desktop calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973. A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974.

Roberts then developed the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. Hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for the $397 computer kit. Paul Allen and Bill Gates saw the magazine and began writing software for the Altair, later called Altair BASIC. They moved to Albuquerque to work for MITS and in July 1975 started Microsoft.

MITS's annual sales had reached $6 million by 1977 when they were acquired by Pertec Computer. The operations were soon merged into the larger company and the MITS brand disappeared. Roberts retired to Georgia where he studied medicine and became a small town medical doctor.

Founders
Henry Edward Roberts studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Miami before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1962. He soon became an electronics instructor at the Cryptographic Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one-man company, Reliance Engineering. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's department store in San Antonio. In 1965, he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree, and became a commissioned officer. Roberts earned an Electrical Engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Forrest Mims was interested in science and electronics as a youth and even built an analog computer while in high school. Mims graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 (major in government with minors in English and history) then became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force. While serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Mims continued his model rocket hobby. At Texas A&M, Mims developed an infrared obstacle-sensing device and he experimented with it at the Saigon School for Blind Boys and Girls. Launching model rockets in an area accustomed to rocket attacks and working with blind children resulted in a story in the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. This caught the attention of an Air Force Colonel, who arranged for Mims to be assigned to the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB even though Mims lacked an engineering degree.

Roberts and Mims were both assigned to the Lab's Laser Group in 1968. Roberts had reactivated Reliance Engineering and built an infrared intrusion alarm for his uncle's fish farm in Florida. Later, Roberts and Stan Cagle, a civilian worker who also went to Oklahoma State, started building a power supply they hoped to sell. Mims became an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met the publisher of Model Rocketry magazine in July 1969. Mims told him about a transistorized tracking light that he had used on night launches of rockets in Vietnam. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry; "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets" by Captain Forrest Mims. Mims became a regular contributor to Model Rocketry.

Model rocket kits
Manned space flight and the race to the moon in the 1960s made model rocketry a popular hobby. Roberts, Mims, Cagle and another Air Force officer from the Lab, Bob Zaller, decided they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. Roberts wanted to call the new company Reliance Engineering, Mims wanted to form an acronym similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT. Cagle came up with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, MITS. The December 1969 issue of Model Rocketry (circulation 15,000) carried a press release that began: "Reliance Engineering in Albuquerque, New Mexico has announced the formation of a subsidiary company for the manufacture of miniaturized electronic and telemetry systems designed for model rockets. The company is called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Reliance Engineering president Henry Roberts announced that 'MITS is presently conducting an intensive research program involving high quality miniature telemetry systems.'" "The first commercially available model rocket telemetry transmitter is among the first items to be offered by MITS. Accessory modules including a tone beacon, temperature sensor, and a roll rate sensor, as well as tracking lights, ground systems for data reduction, and light weight, water activated batteries will soon be available."

They designed and built the telemetry modules in their homes and garages but they were only able to sell a few hundred units. Mims had sold a feature article about the new solid-state device, light-emitting diodes, to Popular Electronics (circulation 400,000) that May. With the hope of selling kits to the larger readership; Roberts and Mims designed a device that would transmit voice over a beam of light, the Opticom. The editors accepted the project story and both articles were featured on the cover of the November 1970 issue. The payment for the articles was $400 but meeting Les Solomon, Popular Electronics technical editor, proved to be significant to both Mims and Roberts future success.

In August 1970, Les Solomon, his wife and daughter were on vacation in the southwest and arranged to visit Mims, Roberts and their families. At that time, Dan Meyer and Don Lancaster were among the most prolific authors in Popular Electronics. Meyer had built a million dollar a year business that sold kits of parts to build the project that he and Lancaster wrote about. Mims and Roberts wanted to do the same and quizzed Solomon on the kit business. Solomon gave them some statistics but said there was no way of knowing how many kits an article would sell, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand.

MITS had purchased components to build 200 Opticoms but only sold around 100 units. Roberts wanted to design a new electronic calculator kit but his partners wanted out. Bob Zaller had already left MITS and Forrest Mims was out of the Air Force and wanted to become a full-time writer. Roberts bought his 3 partners out for $600 in cash and $350 in equipment. (Roberts' four-year commitment to the Air Force ended in mid-1972.) Mims and Roberts remained friends and collaborated on books, magazines and instruction manuals.

Calculators
Ed Roberts' interest in computers began in high school when he built a simple digital computer from relays. His first real experience with computers came while at Oklahoma State University where engineering students had free access to an IBM 1620 computer. Roberts' office at Weapons Laboratory had the state of the art Hewlett-Packard 9100A programmable calculator in 1968. In July 1970, a semiconductor company, Electronic Arrays, announced a set of six LSI ICs that would make a four-function calculator. Roberts was determined to design a calculator kit.

To fund the new project, Roberts sold 15% of MITS to fellow Air Force officer, Lieutenant William Yates. He also got an investment from another Weapons Laboratory officer, Major Ed Laughlin. Several other officers and scientist at the lab were interested in this state of the art calculator kit and helped with the design. Forrest Mims wrote the assembly manual in return for a calculator kit.

The MITS 816 was known as a "four-function" calculator; it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. The display was only 8-digits but the calculations were done to 16-digits of accuracy. The custom molded case gave the kit a professional appearance; the kit was $179 and an assembled unit was $275. The MITS 816 was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. Thousands of calculator orders came in each month, in contrast to poor results for previous kits that MITS had offered.

The steady flow of calculator sales allowed MITS to run full page advertisements in Radio-Electronics, Popular Electronics and Scientific American. In the June 1972 Radio-Electronics, MITS announced a 14 digit calculator (Model 1440) with memory and square root function for $199.95 kit and $249.95 assembled. The original 816 kit was reduced from $179 to $149.95. Both calculators could be controlled by upcoming programming unit.

The monthly sales reached $100,000 in March 1973 and MITS moved to larger building with 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) of space. To meet the demand for assembled calculators, an automated wave solder machine was installed. In 1973 MITS was selling every calculator they could make, 110 employees worked in two shifts assembling calculators.

The functionality of calculator ICs increased at a rapid pace and Roberts was designing and producing new models. The MITS 7400 scientific and engineering calculator was introduced in December 1972. It featured trigonometric functions, polar to rectangular conversion, two memories, and up to a seven-level stack. A kit with a three-level stack was $299.95 and an assembled unit with a seven-level stack was $419.95. The next month the Series 1200 four-function pocket calculators were announced. The six-digit model was $59.95 and the twelve-digit model was $99.95.

The Programmer accessory had been mentioned in the earliest advertisement but it was not featured until March 1974. This was the same size as a desktop calculator and could hold 256 programming steps. (It could be expanded to 512 steps.) It was limited to emulating calculator key presses and simple sequence branching. The programming was done by entering hexadecimal key codes. The combination of the MITS 7440 calculator and the programmer was not nearly as sophisticated as the HP 9830 calculator but $400 for both kits was a fraction of the HP price.

MITS calculators
The feature and price information is from advertisements in Radio-Electronics magazine (issue date shown). The 816 price is from the original article in Popular Electronics.

Price wars
Bowmar Instrument Corporation introduced the "Bowmar Brain", a four-function pocket calculator, in September 1971 and the $179 calculator sold over 500,000 copies in the first year. Bowmar then developed the "901B" calculator that was priced at $120. In September 1972, Texas Instruments (TI) introduced the TI-2500 portable four-function calculator that also sold for $120. The 901B and the TI-2500 both used the TI TMS0100 family of "calculator-on-a-chip" integrated circuit. TI was now directly competing with their IC customers. Other semiconductor companies such as National Semiconductor and Rockwell began selling calculators. Commodore Business Machines and other office equipment companies also got into the market. A frenzied price war started. By early 1974, Ed Roberts found he could purchase a calculator in a retail store for less than his cost of materials. The larger companies could sell below cost to win market share. Bowmar lost $20 million in 1974 and filed for bankruptcy. Commodore acquired their IC supplier, MOS Technology. Texas Instruments won the price war but their calculator division lost $16 million in 1975.

To compete in this market, Roberts needed more capital. He took MITS public in November 1973 with a stock offering of 500,000 shares at $1 each. The 1973 oil crisis caused a stock market downturn and MITS was only able to sell 250,000 shares. This allowed MITS to pay off the existing debt, but did not allow for any expansion. Roberts had developed several test equipment products such as a Waveform Generator and a Digital Voltmeter so he attempted to appeal to kit builders again by featuring the test equipment and digital clocks in the advertisements, instead of calculators. MITS was losing money, and by July 1974, the full page prominent ads were replaced with quarter-page ads in the back of the magazine.

MITS was now $300,000 in debt and Roberts was looking for a new hit product. He decided to return to the kit market with a low cost computer. The target customer would think that "some assembly required" was a desirable feature. Roberts had looked at the Intel 4004 for calculators and thought the Intel 8008 was limited and difficult to work with, so he chose the most recent 8080 as the basis for his machine. The target price of this complete computer kit had to be under $400. To meet this price, Roberts agreed to order 1000 microprocessors from Intel for $75 each. Roberts and his head engineer, Bill Yates, began designing the computer. The company was down to 20 employees and a bank loan for $60,000 financed the design and initial production of the new computer.

Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics
In January 1972, Popular Electronics changed its editorial focus in an attempt to attract more advertising revenues. Reviews of stereo equipment and citizens band radio were featured; experimenter and constructions projects were gone. Dan Meyer, Don Lancaster, Forrest Mims, John Simonton and many other authors immediately started contributing to the competing Radio-Electronics magazine. The June 1972 cover story was "Experimenting with a $32 Solid State Laser" by Forrest Mims. Another article in that issue was "Experiments with Op-Amps" by B.R. Rogen; this was a pseudonym of Popular Electronics technical editor, Les Solomon. Solomon wrote articles for Radio-Electronics while working for Popular Electronics. Lou Garner, the longtime solid-state editor, moved to Radio-Electronics for a year. Several MITS kit projects were featured in Radio-Electronics including the ITC 1800 Integrated Circuit Tester (May 1972), the Model 1700 Function Generator (July 1973), the Model 1440 Calculator (July 1973) and the 88 VLCT Computer Terminal (November 1974).

Radio-Electronics had a smaller circulation than Popular Electronics but led the way with innovative construction projects between 1972 and 1975. John Simonton's first modular electronic music synthesizer was featured on the cover of the May 1973 issue. It sold for a fraction of commercial synthesizers and his PAiA Electronics produced them for decades. Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter in September 1973 and Jon Titus's Mark-8 computer in July 1974 were the catalyst of the home computer revolution.

Art Salsberg became the editor of Popular Electronics in 1974 with a goal of reclaiming the lead in projects. He wanted to publish a computer project that was more functional and elegant than the Mark-8. Les Solomon knew MITS was working on an Intel 8080 based computer project and thought Roberts could provide the project for the always popular January issue.

Ed Roberts and Bill Yates finished the first prototype in October 1974 and shipped it to Popular Electronics in New York via the Railway Express Agency. However, it never arrived due to a strike by the shipping company. Solomon already had a number of pictures of the machine and the article was based on them. Roberts got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover is an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine.

Products
The Altair 8800 was modeled after early 1970s minicomputers such as the Data General Nova. These machines contained a CPU board, memory boards, and I/O boards; the data storage and display terminal were external devices. The Teletype Model 33 ASR was a popular terminal because it provided printed output and data storage on punched paper tape. More advanced systems would have 8-inch floppy disks and a video terminal that would display 24 lines of 80 characters such as the ADM-3A. (No graphics were available and lower-case letters were a $75 option.) Most of these computers had a front panel with toggle switches for entering data and lights for displaying it. These were normally used to boot the computer and to diagnose problems.

The Altair 8800 kit came with a front panel, a CPU board with the Intel 8080 microprocessor, 256 bytes of RAM, a 4-slot backplane and an 8-amp power supply for $439. A 1k byte memory board was $176 and the 4k byte was $264. The serial interface board was $124 and the parallel interface was $119. The Teletype Model 33 ASR was $1500. There was a special price for an 8k byte system with Altair BASIC (Microsoft first ever product) for $995. Bill Gates, and Paul Allen wrote Altair BASIC with Monte Davidoff contributing the Floating-point arithmetic routines. Altair BASIC initial developed from February 1975 to May 1975 and announced by MITS in July 1975, the 4k version on paper tape for $150, the 8k version with cassette support for $200 and the Extended 16k version with disk support (December 1975) for $350. To encourage selling more boards, Altair BASIC was discounted to $60, $75, $150 respectively, when bundled with 4k, 8k and I/O boards

When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics reached readers in mid December 1974, MITS was flooded with orders. They had to hire extra people just to answer the phones. In February, MITS received 1,000 orders for the Altair 8800. The quoted delivery time was 60 days but it was many more months before the machines were shipped. By August 1975, they had shipped over 5,000 computers.

The Altair 8800 computer was a break-even sale for MITS. They needed to sell additional memory boards, I/O boards and other options to make a profit. The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter, Computer Notes, had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards. The delivery time given was 60 or 90 days, but many items were never produced and dropped from future price lists. Initially, Roberts decided to concentrate on production of the computers. Prompt delivery of optional boards did not occur until October 1975.

The Intel 8080 did not have dedicated circuitry to support dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) because in 1975, this type of memory was still a new technology. MITS wanted to use DRAM because it consumed less power than static RAM. However, they had several design and component problems that led to a high failure rate with their 4K Dynamic RAM board. By July, new companies such as Processor Technology were selling 4K Static RAM boards with the promise of reliable operation. MITS released its own 4K Static RAM board in January 1976.

The only floppy disk drives that were readily available in 1975 were IBM compatible 8-inch drives. MITS selected the Pertec FD400 disk drive which could store over 300,000 bytes of data. The Altair disk controller occupied two boards and had over 60 ICs. The initial units were to be available in August, but were delayed until the end of 1975. The production version of Extended Disk BASIC was released in April 1976. The controller with one disk drive sold for $1,480 (kit) and $1,980 (assembled).

Marketing
The first full page advertisements for the Altair computer appeared in the February issues of Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics magazines. Soon MITS was advertising in technical journals such as the IEEE Computer, and general interest magazines such as Scientific American. MITS was also the most prominent advertiser in the new hobbyist computer magazines such as Creative Computing and Byte.

David Bunnell joined MITS as a technical writer in the calculator heyday. In April 1975 he created a newsletter so the MITS staff could easily communicate with the customers. The newsletter, Computer Notes, was available to customers and other interested readers. It was a large format newsletter; 11.25 by 15.5 inches (286 by 394 mm), and each issue had 8 to 24 pages. In January 1977, it switched to a smaller magazine format and the last issue was produced in January 1978. Bunnell started Personal Computer magazine in October 1976 and went on to a successful career as a magazine publisher.

Computer Notes featured a wide variety of authors. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were regular contributors to the early issues. They wrote about Altair Basic and general software topics. Ed Roberts wrote a monthly "Letter from the President" column where he would answer customer questions and even review competing products. MITS engineers, such as Tom Durston and Steve Pollini, would give technical descriptions of new products. Altair owners would contribute software and hardware suggestions and occasionally a complete article.

MITS purchased a camper van in April 1975 and outfitted it with an Altair system complete with floppy disk, a Teletype Model 33 and every accessory MITS produced. The "MITS-MOBILE" was literally a showroom on wheels that would travel from city to city showcasing the MITS product line. They would hold seminars at hotel conference rooms that would draw crowds of over 200 people. The most notable seminar was at Rickey's Hyatt House in Palo Alto, California in early June 1975, where a member of the Homebrew Computer Club left with an unreleased copy of Altair BASIC. After retail computer stores were established in most cities, the "MITS-MOBILE" was retired.

The first (and only) World Altair Computer Convention was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico in March 1976. The convention, organized by David Bunnell, was an overwhelming success; with 700 people from 46 states and seven countries attending. Many of the attendees would go on to become leaders of the personal computer revolution.

Clones

Owners of mainframe systems and minicomputers could purchase additional memory, interface boards and peripherals from third party suppliers; so it was predictable that owners of the Altair 8800 computer would do the same. MITS's delays in delivery of systems and accessories accelerated the formation of Altair compatible suppliers. The first ones started appearing in mid-1975 and by July 1976 complete computer systems were readily available. The technical manuals for the Altair 8800 provided electrical schematics of the 100 pin computer bus allowing others to design compatible boards. There was not a proper technical standard at the time and some "compatible" boards did not work with other "compatible" boards. Later, the industry developed the S-100 bus standard.

Bill Godbout Electronics in Oakland, CA was the parts supplier to many of the hobbyists and students from Berkeley. George Morrow approached Godbout with several Altair compatible designs that Godbout agreed to produce and sell. The October 1975 Byte magazine carried an advertisement headlining "Get your MITTS on a Godbout RAM kit." The 4K byte Altair compatible board was $131.07.

Godbout also sold components to Processor Technology for their 4K Static RAM board and serial / parallel interface board. Lee Felsenstein designed an Altair compatible video board that provided 16 lines of 64 upper and lower case characters on a black and white television. This $160 board became very popular and led to the Processor Technology Sol-20 Computer in 1976.

The IMSAI 8080, the first "clone" of the Altair computer, was released in December 1975. It corrected many shortcomings of the original Altair 8800 by providing a larger power supply, a 22 slot motherboard, and easier wiring of the front panel. Ed Roberts reviewed the IMSAI in his April 1976 column in Computer Notes, and agreed that the IMSAI was in some ways better than the original Altair. Roberts also pointed out that the new Altair 8800B was superior to the IMSAI 8080 and the upgraded Altair 8800A fixed the same issues that the IMSAI did.

Altair computers were only available from the 20 or so authorized Altair computer dealers, but the IMSAI 8080, Processor Technology Sol and many other clones were sold by hundreds of newly opening computer stores.

The S-100 bus was used throughout the 1980s until it was overtaken by the IBM PC ISA bus. Seattle Computer Products (SCP) was a manufacturer of S-100 memory boards. The company's engineer, Tim Paterson, designed an Intel 8086 CPU system on two S-100 boards in 1979. Microsoft, then in nearby Bellevue, Washington, used the prototype machine to test their 8086 version of BASIC. Digital Research had promised to deliver an 8086 version of their CP/M operating system by December 1979 but missed that date. SCP needed a disk operating system to sell its 8086 products so Patterson wrote QDOS, a "Quick and Dirty Operating System" in three months. Microsoft would later purchase QDOS from SCP for $50,000 and use it as the basis for the IBM PC DOS.

Altair BASIC
In December 1974 Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell in Boston. They saw the Altair 8800 computer in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and knew it was powerful enough to support a BASIC interpreter. They wanted to be the first to offer BASIC for the Altair computer, and the software development tools they had previously created for their Intel 8008 microprocessor based Traf-O-Data computer would give them a head start. While their friend, Paul Gilbert, was building the computer, Allen wrote a program that ran on a DEC PDP-10 time-sharing computer that simulated the 8008 system. He also modified DEC's macro assembler to produce the machine code for the 8008 microprocessor. The Traf-O-Data software could be written and debugged before the computer hardware was complete. Gates and Allen worked at TRW where they had unlimited access to a PDP-10.

Harvard had a DEC PDP-10 that was available for student use. They would use it to develop BASIC. While Allen modified their development software for the new 8080 microprocessor, Gates began writing 8080 assembly language by hand on yellow legal pads. They enlisted another Harvard student, Monte Davidoff, to write the math routines.

By early February the program coding switched from legal pads to the PDP-10 and a preliminary version was completed by March 1975. Gates and Allen had been in contact with Roberts and MITS and the older looking Paul Allen would travel to Albuquerque in March. MITS needed more time to get a computer with 7k bytes of memory working, and they needed more time to get the software finished. When Allen arrived at MITS it took a day to get the software running; Allen remembers this being caused by computer memory problems while Roberts remembers the delay was due to software problems.

The April 1975 issue of the Altair Newsletter, Computer Notes, had a banner headline "Altair BASIC - Up and Running". The software was to begin shipping on June 23, 1975. The software price was $500, but discounted to $75 with the purchase of an Altair computer with 8k bytes of memory and a serial I/O card.

On July 22, 1975 MITS signed a contract for the Altair BASIC with Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They received $3000 at signing and a royalty for each copy of BASIC sold; $30 for the 4K version, $35 for the 8K version and $60 for the expanded version. The contract had a cap of $180,000. MITS received an exclusive worldwide license to the program for 10 years. They also had exclusive rights to sub-license the program to other companies and agreed to use its "best efforts" to license, promote and commercialize the program. MITS would supply the computer time necessary for development; a PDP-10 owned by the Albuquerque school district. Paul Allen left his job at Honeywell and became the Vice President and Director of Software at MITS with a salary of $30,000 per year. Bill Gates was still a student at Harvard and just a contractor with MITS. The October 1975 company newsletter gives his title as "Software Specialist".

The price of Altair BASIC to customers who purchased additional memory and I/O boards from MITS was $75. Users may have gone along with that if the memory board were reliable. Customers bought the computer from MITS, and working memory from companies like Processor Technology. Rather than pay $500 for BASIC, they would acquire bootleg copies of the software. Only about ten percent of the early customers actually purchased BASIC. With a royalty due of $30 per copy, Gates felt that the computer hobbyist were stealing money from him. In February 1976 Bill Gates, "General Partner, Micro-Soft", wrote an "Open Letter to Hobbyists" that was sent to every computer publication insinuating that the hobbyists were thieves. MITS had announced a new computer based on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor in November 1975, the. The machines were supposed to ship in January 1976, but hardware design problems delayed shipment until May. Paul Allen rewrote their 8080 simulator to support the 6800 microprocessor. Ric Weiland, a high school friend of Gates and Allen, converted the Altair BASIC's 8080 assembly language to 6800 assembly language. To eliminate the per copy royalty loss issue, the 6800 BASIC was licensed to MITS on a non-exclusive basis for a flat fee of $31,200. Weiland and Marc McDonald were impressed with the new MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor that was a derivative of the 6800. They modified the 6800 development system to support the 6502 and "cranked out" a 6502 edition of BASIC. This version was later sold to Commodore and Apple.

The January 1976 issue of MITS's newsletter, Computer Notes, carried an ad for 8080 BASIC. The last paragraph stated: "Licenses for source listing and rights to distribute the binaries are also available to OEM buyers. Write or call Mr. Paul Allen at the MITS plant in Albuquerque for more detailed information." Microsoft found several corporate customers for BASIC and proceeds were evenly split with MITS. Pertec acquired MITS in December 1976 and refused to allow any more OEM deals, even though the agreement required MITS to use their "best efforts" to license the software. The contract required MITS and Microsoft to use binding arbitration to settle disputes. In September 1977, the arbitrator ruled in favor of Microsoft, MITS could continue to use BASIC on their machines but lost the exclusive license. Microsoft could license the software to anyone and keep all of the royalties.

There was no longer a business requirement to remain in Albuquerque so Microsoft wanted to relocate to a larger city that would be more attractive to new employees. The San Francisco bay area was considered but Allen and Gates decided to return home to Seattle. Microsoft moved to Bellevue, Washington in January 1979.

Sale to Pertec
In 1976, MITS had 230 employees and sales of $6 million. Roberts was tiring of his management responsibilities and was looking for a larger partner. MITS had always used Pertec Computer Corporation disk drives and on December 3, 1976, Pertec signed a letter of intent to acquire MITS for $6 million in stock. The deal was completed in May 1977 just before the National Computer Conference in Dallas, Texas. Roberts got $2 million and the other 500 MITS shareholders (including the Altair co-designer, William Yates) split the rest.

Pertec was eager to increase sales to small businesses through the 26 Altair Computer stores across the United States. The marketing toward hobby/home user was curtailed. The November 1977 issue of the MITS newsletter, Computer Notes, was the last produced by the Albuquerque staff. There was one more issue produced by the Pertec staff in Chatsworth, California. The back cover of the leading home computer magazine, Byte, always carried a full page Altair advertisement. This ended with the September 1977 issue. Roberts and Yates stayed on and worked on special projects.

In August 1979, Pertec agreed to sell a 45% stake to North American Philips for $37 million. Before the deal was complete, Pertec agreed to be acquired by the West German computer company, Triumph-Adler, for $120 million. In 1978, Pertec had sales of $150 million and Triumph-Adler had sales of $466 million.

The Altair products were merged into the Pertec line and the MITS facility was used to produce the PCC-2000 small-business computer. The Albuquerque plant was closed in December 1980 and the production was moved to Pertec plants in Irvine, California.

By the end of 1977 Roberts left MITS and returned to Georgia to be a gentleman farmer. He studied medicine at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and graduated with a M.D. in 1986. Roberts practiced medicine in Cochran, Georgia, population 4500, until his death in 2010.


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Talk:Latatian

Does this warrant an article? Falcon 23:16, May 8, 2004 (UTC)

title: Talk:Latatian


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Talk:M10 motorway (Great Britain)

Untitled
pcb21: thanks for the re-edit which I mostly agree with, but to say it is a 'motorway' in the 'south of england' are both over-playing its status. It is the remnant of a bad route selection and, strictly, is in the 'East of England' region (which would be even sillier to write!) VampWillow 23:18, 2004 May 8 (UTC)

 * I agree that it isn't much of a motorway, but if we don't call it a motorway, I don't know where the cut-off point between "spur" and proper motorway is. e.g. the M45 is surely a proper motorway. If the government calls it a motorway, we should probably too. I agree that "north of london" is better than "south of england". I felt your original first sentence needed a slight rewording but I did it poorly. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 23:28, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

 * Just realised we hadn't met before, so hi and welcome to wikipedia! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 23:37, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

 * The M45 is a difficult one as it still has intermediate junctions, whereas the M10 (imho!) is only there because it got left behind in the move of the southern end of the M1 to Watford Berrylands (nowe J4). It wouldn't be built now, it doesn't have the traffic level to justify its creation, and is really only there as an emergency route to bypass the closure of the M1 should that happen. To me, 'mototways', including 'spurs' are intentional creations, and the A41(M) (now deceased), the M41, and a few other little stretches are accidents that don't deserve (or usually receive) the nomenclature of 'Motorway'.
 * ps. and a Hi to you to! VampWillow 23:54, 2004 May 8 (UTC)

Change of classification
"It is to lose its motorway status and to be reclassified as part of the A414." Can anyone actually point to a valid source for this, as there has been no local publicity and the A414 already exists. Were it to lose Motorway status one would expect it to gain a new linkroad at the Hemel end so that non-motorway traffic could access the route (there being no intermediate interchanges) and, again, there are no publicised plans to do this (not to mention the unjustifiable cost). I've only seen this mentioned on one of the UK roads' sites and nowhere else and very much doubt its likelihood. --Vamp:Willow 21:36, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 * It just shows you shouldn't believe all you read on the web! I've reverted my edit. rossb 09:22, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 * nods - I'm not saying it isn't going to happen or might not happen, just that I've found nothing else to confirm that it is likely to happen or that someone is willing to spend the money on it. (ooh ... caveats!). As a motorway it would be paid for by the Dept of Transport, as the A414 it would be the local council needing to find the cash to pay for new road junctions, access roads, etc. --Vamp:Willow 11:16, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 * Perhaps This Statuatory Instrument can change VampWillow's mind. The M10 will lose its classification as a "Special Road" when the M1 widening works in the area are complete. A collector/distributor lane will be provided that will physically separate motorway and non-motorway traffic, at relatively small cost.  Perhaps you shouldn't dismiss things without checking more thoroughly first! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.36.242.186 (talk • contribs)

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title: Talk:M10 motorway (Great Britain)


text:
Murray River (New Zealand)

The Murray River is a minor river on Stewart Island / Rakiura of New Zealand. It enters the Foveaux Strait sea on the eastern side of the island.

title: Murray River (New Zealand)


text:
Murray River (disambiguation)

The Murray River is a major river in the Australian states of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

Murray River may also refer to:

Australia

 * Murray River (Queensland), the river of the Murray Falls in Queensland
 * Murray River (Western Australia), a river in Western Australia
 * Murray River Council, a local government area in New South Wales
 * Murray River Flag, a river navigation flag
 * Murray River National Park, a protected area in South Australia
 * Murray River turtle, a river turtle

Canada

 * Murray River (British Columbia), a river of British Columbia
 * Murray River, Prince Edward Island, a town

New Zealand

 * Murray River (New Zealand), a minor river on Stewart Island/Rakiura

title: Murray River (disambiguation)


text:
Perejil

Perejil may refer to:

 * Perejil Island, an islet between Spain and Morocco
 * Parsley Massacre, the genocide in which the pronunciation of "perejil" was used as a shibboleth

title: Perejil