Posts by jake 26684 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Did it... happen often in that company... that people would share lavatories?"
Well, consider that the lavatory is the place where you wash up, yes. I'm sure they do share a sink.
"in the early 80s having to endure TP that had the texture and absorbancy of greaseproof baking paper"
Back in our day, it were made of machine-shop waste and came pre-soaked in dung. '80s kids had no idea how good they had it.
"Someone in Rochester, NY, tried calling 911 because she had lost her car keys. An interesting conversation followed until it was realized that a Canadian 911 operator had gotten the call across Lake Ontario."
Knowing a little bit about international Voice tariffs and how the switching system works, I can't quite picture how that would happen.
Coordination of Emergency Services across the 5,524 mile (8,891km) US/Canada border is non-trivial, and it certainly isn't automated.
"So how does 555 1212 work?"
Exactly as it is programmed to work, of course!
More seriously, as I said, "somewhat similar to", and "usually returns'. That number (directory assistance) is one of the exceptions to the rule. There are (were?) a couple others, some public and some only usable internally to $TELCO.
Back when I was working on the 4.xBSDs and lecturing quite a bit on the subject (roughly the 1980s), I was warned by a veteran professor that a bunch of the Freshman kids would probably be dropping their telephones in October after running up huge bills in September ... so I should ensure that they all knew how to use email as a primary form of contact. This telephone "problem" had been happening for a couple years, it seemed, and was becoming worse as time went on.
Thinking about it for a couple seconds, I told him I'd get right on it ... but instead of just teaching an email module, I also went into the intricacies of the by now fast becoming obsolete UUCP ... including an overview of Usenet.
Strangely, that October was the last time for the mass drop-off in student owned telephones at Stanford and Berkeley. I wonder why?
I am also in the US ... The small community where my parents grew up has one of the last party line telephone systems in the United States. We decommissioned it "officially" in 1972. After disconnection, $TELCO left us the obsolete equipment to dispose of as we saw fit.
Unofficially, it still works between two dozenish homes, mostly family members. It is possible to call me there by dialing one of two numbers we maintain specifically for the purpose, and then having the operator (or a computer, on the second line) patch from $TELCO to our party line[0] and then ring the requested number.
In the other direction, four short rings automatically patches you to an outside line, normally used for emergencies only these days (thus the computer controlled line ... the human operator is an elderly cousin). Then you rattle the hook to tell the computer what number to dial. Yes, it's slow to dial out ... but it has saved lives on at least two occasions; cell phones don't work well or at all in this part of the Mendocino County back woods.
Mostly it's used for birthdays, anniversarys and other family stuff like that. My "number" (inherited from my Grandfather) is two shorts & two longs.
[0] Don't panic ... it's legal, I built a couple optically isolated circuits specifically for the purpose.
While there might still be a few backwards folks here in the USA who would have an aversion to dialing 666, I hardly think that any of them would be smart enough to have a job that would require business trips abroad. Except government officials, of course ... and they have flunkies to make calls for them.
Note that dialing 911 does NOT connect you to "The Feds" (whatever that is!), rather it connects you directly to the locally managed emergency switchboard, so they can direct your call to local people who understand local conditions (the US being a fairly large place, it does little good to manage (for example) wildfires in the North Bay Area in California from an office building in Washington DC.)
With that said, I have seen similar aversions and confusions from British tourists here in California. There is nothing uglier than a newbie tourist with delusions of grandeur abroad, regardless of country of origin ... although some are worse than others. Some much worse.
555 was never assigned to helplines or TV shows in the US. In actual fact, the 555 prefix is left unassigned, somewhat similar to "example.com". Dialing a number with this prefix usually returns "This number cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again."
"I did manage to get is stopped"
Should have made it a Premium Number that provided a recording with information about the proper prefix for those who wanted the teenage boy bait[0] line.
[0] In both senses of the word ...
I just hate the pure, unadulterated and constant plastic commercialism the last three months of the year. You can't get away from it, and it's bloody awful, no matter how you look at it. I coined the term Horrordays back in 4th grade[0], much to my (very agnostic) dad's amusement & MeDearOld(very xtian)Mum's consternation.
"Many would rightly have just cause to complain, with a mountain of evidence to substantiate the claim, that the cost of their fun is at the expense of everyone/everything else"
One wonders what the current state of the world would be had the US remained isolationist in WWII ... methinks that you and I would not be allowed to have this conversation in that alternate timeline.
[0] Yes, I know, it is in use all over the place now. I have no idea if it was in use anywhere before I used it in the early 1960s; my Father had certainly never heard it used in that context before ... and I also have no idea if I was the absolute originator. Probably not ... I suspect that it had multiple "inventors" all over the world at various times.
I'm not indignant, just sad. All this freely available education, and yet still good ol' Homo Sap can't shake the bearded sky fairy silliness. Shirley by now we could at least celebrate Solstice on the actual Solstice, instead of trying to rename it and shifting it back a couple days?
Halloween and Christmas are the same holiday, if you look into it. To start with, any Techie will confirm that Oct 31 and Dec 25 are the same. Santa and Satan are anagrams. Have you ever seen Saint Nick and Old Nick in the same room together? Besides, who would YOU pick as the patron saint for the holiday best known for hedonism, libertinism, decadence and debauchery?
Yes, hard as it may be for outside observers to believe (especially after the last 5 years or so), us Yanks like to have fun. There is a reason we shipped your Puritans back to Blighty before declaring independence. But don't blame us for you lot keeping them ... all y'all could have palmed 'em off on the Aussies or Kiwis without too much trouble. But no, you let 'em take over. Now look at you. No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women, no fun, no sin ... There's a song in there somewhere.
Did the Age of Enlightenment teach us nothing? Sensible people celebrate Solstice. Not for religious reasons, mind, but rather because the hours of daylight (and thus the planting & animal breeding schedule) have tipped over for the second time in the current twelve months. I would have thought this would be normal by now among the Commentardariat.
That was days ago ... for us, the horrordays are over. The first of the chili seeds were planted today (more tomorrow ... even here in Sonoma, California hothouses have their uses), none of the five boarding mares are threatening to foal early (had a scare last week), and life is good :-)
It was a legal maneuver to make renaming the initials "AMIBIOS" unnecessary. The original name of the company was Access Methods Inc. The founders had a difference of opinion, and split up. One side got the name, the other got the BIOS. The new name is a reflection of the childish bickering that was going on between the former partners at the time (or that's how I read it in the trade press at the time ... mid 1980s).
"why carry an extra device"
When you've been carrying the same calculator around for a few decades, an emulator just doesn't feel the same. At all. Mine's an HP-45 or -55 ... The -35 also still works, but is kept under glass sans batteries (Dad's gift to me, Xmas '72 ... one of the few bits of hardware that I treasure).
The Meta key was invented at SAIL in 1970, with the Stanford Keyboard. Other folks in the AI community (notably Tom Knight and John Kulp at MIT) emulated, enhanced and extended Stanford's concept in ensuing years.
The first 101 (102, in some places) key keyboard was released by the imaginatively named Key Tronic Corporation in 1982.
IBM somewhat re-worked the 101/102 keyboard, bringing us the Model-M in 1985, which many believe to be the best "factory stock" keyboard ever invented.
I run a Model-M, with appropriate re-mapping of several keys to make movement from the home row unnecessary for most things. I have never found another combination that allows me to put my thoughts into ASCII faster or more accurately. Recommended.
All true enough, but I think II'll stick with vi ... 40-odd years of muscle memory is kind of hard to ignore. I even use vi as my shell for one of my logins. When I'm writing I hate the bells and whistles of a gui getting underfoot. Always have, always will.
And seriously, I do appreciate the article. I "collect" free editors, so I can give newbies a choice. Not everyone likes the same thing, so the more the merrier!
I stopped using walnut media on my brass ages ago ... I switched to wet tumbling with stainless steel media and have never looked back. The 5lbs of pins that came with the tumbler should last last long enough for my Granddaughter's kids to learn the art ... Compare that to constantly swapping out lead contaminated walnut dust, and, well, 'nuff said. Well worth the price of admission. Recommended.
We still use ground walnut shells as abrasives. Indispensable when restoring old farm equipment (steam powered, hit&miss, and pre-WWII tractors). Takes off paint, rust, dirt, grease & grime, leaves the metal behind. I always have three grits available. 50lb bags for about 70 bucks from Grainger. Recommended.
That was Micro Emacs, not a bad mini implementation of EMACS.
It's also not a very good implementation ... Kind of "meh", IMO.
It was included as the editor in Mark Williams Company's "Let's C", one of the first professional caliber C compilers for the IBM PC.
Nano, recently updated, is a descendant of uemacs, by way of Pico
It was ported to most of the micro operating systems of the mid to late '80s ... including Minix, where a young programmer named Linus used it to create a new un*x clone called "Linux". Rumo(u)r has it that he is still using uemacs for kernel coding.
Sounds like your neighbor's tree is a black walnut.
The meat is quite tasty, but very difficult to harvest. That's why I instead harvested the couple dozen or so on this property and turned them into furniture ... and in their place, I grafted the Ivanhoe varietal of English walnut onto a couple dozen "volunteer" black walnut seedlings. Why the Ivanhoe? Both because I like them, and because my brother had a tree to provide cuttings.
Everybody poo-poos the concept (because cell phones).
When I point out the obvious (that batteries are charged by the mains), they say that they'll recharge in the car.
When I say "I'm not talking about your end of the cellular connection, I'm talking about the cell towers, the vast majority of which have no backup power" they just stare blankly.
Needless to say, I still have POTS connections.
When troubleshooting, I use a similar technique ... except I explain, in great detail, exactly what I am doing and why to whichever cat or dog is nearby. They appreciate the attention, and going into enough detail to teach a canid or feline how networking works usually points out the obvious fairly quickly.
Somewhat strangely, talking to the damn fool b0rken equipment itself doesn't seem to work ... My wife says it's because the kit is afraid of me (I have tools, and I'm not afraid to use them), whereas the critters are not.
45ish years ago, my brother bought a house in Ukiah, California. When they connected the telephone, he was surprised to discover that it was the same number as the prior owner ... something about limited numbers at the exchange. He still gets calls for that family occasionally ... and snail-mail. He takes a message on the phone calls and passes them along as a courtesy (they are friends), and uses the junk snailmail as fire starter. Xmas cards, wedding announcements/invites and the like get forwarded. Yes, after 45ish years. It would seem that some people who supposedly know the former owner STILL haven't updated their address book.
That's from the old, unconnected world.
Kind of makes me wonder how long the data that metaface, alphagoo, redmond, cupertino, amazon, etc.collect on everybody and everything that they can is going to be valid (and sell-able), especially after a fair percentage of it becomes staler than last month's bread. Methinks a good deal of it is already quite stale ... What's the critical percentage of stale to valid before it's useless? Or do marketing "geniuses" care about that kind of thing?
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