Graham Snowdon Computers have changed most people’s lives beyond recognition over the last 30 or 40 years. The Tandy 200 laptop terminals I was using as a journalist in the 1980s had a built-in memory of roughly 20,000 bytes, sufficient to upload 3,000 words of text into a newspaper’s editorial system. There are one million bytes in … Read more
More than three years after lockdown and our last very successful visit to the Sheffield Assay Office, Stumperlowe Probus Club resumed what will hopefully be a regular programme of outside visits when we toured Yorkshire Water’s Ewden fresh water treatment plant on the River Don north of Sheffield. Yorkshire Water is one of the largest … Read more
The remit for anybody writing these blogs is not to report word-for-word what the speaker said, but to try and give a concise overview (perhaps 500 words at max) of what the talk was about, and how the presentation was received by our members. In the case of Sir Clive Jones, it is difficult to … Read more
American student Amanda Knox spent almost four years in an Italian prison following her wrongful conviction for the murder of fellow student Meredith Kercher. But was she really wrongly convicted? Stumperlowe Probus Club members made up a 32-strong jury which was asked to cast judgement after an enlightening hour-long examination of the facts by their … Read more
Our long-awaited return to face-to-face gatherings – after more than two years of virtual Zoom meetings forced upon us by the Covid emergency – provided us with an inspiring talk by retired anaesthetist Dr Alan Kershaw in our new surroundings of Fulwood Sports Club. Alan, 65, who spent 25 years as a consultant at Barnsley … Read more
The siege of Leningrad is not one of the better known episodes of the Second World War, but was the deadliest single event of the conflict. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, lasting for 872 days, and resulted in the deaths of 1.1 million people as Nazi Germany blockaded … Read more