I seem to recall it was a parcel shelf, though anyone daft enough to put parcels on it was asking for trouble. This was a time when seat backs stopped at shoulder level (and no seat belts in the back (UK)). The number of injuries from rear seat passengers and parcels striking the driver was quite high as I remember.

1981 :: NASCOM 2 kit :: Z80, 2kB RAM, 2kB ROM, 8kB NAS BASIC, about 100 TTL chips on a 12x8 inch motherboard, all socketed, all hand soldered. Took about 3 months to build. Added some extensions like a 64kB DRAM board and a home designed programmable character generator. There was a Z80 assembler on tape which is what I used for most developments. I had a video monitor and I do recall having to hack the flyback circuitry to get a stable image. Not for the faint-hearted... Those were the days, when developers had to know how to solve clock skew introduced by 6 inches of ribbon cable (solution: cut 3 inches out). Now, I can't even distinguish two adjacent pins on a surface mounted chip.

I've always hated the idea of slashing anything. It's so ... uncivilised. How about: / Stroke \ Backstroke

Hooo, if only that were true! I've encountered libraries from a major manufacturer that *require* .Net 1.1 and won't run if .Net 2.0 is the only framework present. I don't know how they did it (or why come to that) but persuading customers that they must have both frameworks is sometimes a little tricky. And retrofitting 1.1 doesn't always work -- depends what sort of a mess the workstations are in... Just to ease matters, I'm not developing for 3.0 or 3.5 just yet -- waiting for the said manufacturer to catch up.