Re: CHAT: INTERSYSTEMAL CONLANG

On Mon, 1 Jul 2002 11:49:59 +0200, Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...> wrote:

>    FWIW, I actually  _did_  trudge through the snow (although, thankfully,
>not 40 miles --- still, the snow could reach hip-high at times) in order to
>reach the two keypunch machines used by the entire university!
>Reaching there was one thing; getting to use one was something else! :-P
My first job in the computer racket was to be in charge of the students'
waiting list ... and kicking them out when their time was up.

>    And as for changing typewriter ribbons, I've smudged enough pages due
>to the ink on my hands from changing the ribbons, thank you! 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, chalked paper tabs to try and
put
>over the mistake after you backspaced and the retype was never the same
>darkness as the original --- 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, I nearly always ended up ripping out the page
>and retyping the whole thing all over again!
Manual typewriters. Never could use one of the damn things -- it took both
thumbs to press the shift key. 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.

>    No siree! Here's one "old-timer" who doesn't miss it!
>Not the keypunch and not the typewriter!
I guess not!

Jeff

>    Dan Sulani
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a
>
>A word is an awesome thing.

Reply