Re: CHAT: INTERSYSTEMAL CONLANG

Commenting on Jeff Jones and Dan Sulani:
But what the young whippersnappers of today don't know is the pleasure
 ;-)  ) of
>>correcting mistakes and typos! Intoxicating whiteout fluid that got spread
>>to the good stuff as well as the mistakes...
As a fast but inaccurate typist, I contributed mightily to the profits of
the good people at White Out-- probably a bottle a week, in the course of
typing my 900 page dissertation.  The stuff tended to dry up and turn to gum

 >>chalked paper tabs to try and put
>>over the mistake after you backspaced and the retype was never the same
>>darkness as the original...
Those things simply didn't work for me; they didn't completely obliterate
the mistake.

 --- and I never could get the machine to go back
>>_exactly_ so as to cover the lettter perfectly! After putting the machine
>>into "neutral gear" and playing with the paper trying to get a
>>perfect postioning,
You must have been using a machine that more-or-less justified the type.  My
old SCM electric (with conventional type-bars) was OK in that respect.  It
had an interesting feature-- there was a dead key for accents, and you could
replace the type-head on it and a couple of other keys, a sometimes
uncooperative and finger-dirtying process.  The extra heads, of course, cost
about $5 each....

Most embarrassing Diss. Moment:  When you were ready to present your diss to
the department, it first had to be format-checked by a secretary in the Grad
School office.  Just a day or two before that, I caught major omission from
a rule, that took up more than half a page.  I added the new material, but
then had to retype/expand 2 pages into 3. (This was around p. 680 or so.)
Joy at such  cleverness-- but I forgot that I'd added a page.  So the sec'y
was flipping through the pages looking at spacing etc....as she approached
the 680s I suddenly realized there were going to be two 686s.  Just then she
got a phone call, but continued flipping while she talked. 684, 685, 686,
686...a dainty red nail tapped the page, and I returned home to a very
boring afternoon of renumbering 200-plus pages.

Around 1989 I got a little Casio electronic thing, not much bigger than a
computer keyboard, but miles ahead (in my view at the time) of the other
available and very expensive "word-processors" like SCM or Brother.  Each
key could make 4 characters, by using a "control" key, and it had almost
every accented char. a linguist could possibly want.  It previewed each line
in a little screen, so you caught most typos; it had 2 pages worth of
memory, which you could edit, correct, and then print.  A ribbon cartidge
that didn't last long....it could also print without a ribbon, on thermal
paper that cost around $15 per 100 sheets.  Unfortunately by the mid-90s,
Casio discontinued it-- no more ribbon cartidges, no more thermal paper.
The last time I used it, I discovered rolls of fax paper, about $5 per
100feet!! a big bargain, but then I had to cut and paste onto 8-1/2 x 11
sheets. That's when I decided I'd better try a computer.......
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At least with punch cards, you didn't have
>to retype the whole page (unless, like some of us, you made at least one
>typo per card).
>
>The nifty thing was we'd have to remember to insert an @EBCDIC card at the
>start of the deck to tell the system to translate the cards into ASCII,
>otherwise it would be total garbage. And then, the job would print out on
>an uppercase-only line printer for which administrative computing didn't
>bother to supply a correct translation table, so brackets would print as
>underscores and underscores as widgets etc. Before the program could be
>debugged, the listing had to be deciphered.
You have just listed some of my Top 10 Reasons Not to Like a Computer
(vintage 1973, when a sympathetic Comp Sci teacher tried to teach a few of
us ling. students all about it.  One of us (not me!!) introduced a loop into
his material, which ate up all the time we'd been allotted.)