Once upon a time in a day grown dim I could read a punch card from its
patterned holes. I had a summer job as a verifier. I was not yet
authorized to put holes in the cards, just see that the existing ones were
in the correct locations. Pay was great. That summer job paid for most
of my first semester in college. Books, tuition, room and board. A high
school graduate can no longer expect that kind of pay.
Then the next term I was punching holes in cards in FORTRAN. Put the
cards through a hole in the wall. Get a print out two or three days later
when the batch was run. When I built my first micro and toggled in my
first app I was ecstatic. Wow I can debug the same day! Then upgrading
to paper tapes. Years later I got to work with the first generation of
IBM micros. No hard drive yet. But then I got a 10 MB hard drive and my
world was huge. Currently I have a stack of three 160 GB drives. That is
nothing compared to what servers run these days. Then FORTRAN and COBOL
are still running many of the legacy applications. Only the GUI wrappers
have changed since the '70s. Makes me warm a fuzzy to read that old code
again.
IM would drive me bonkers. I'd probably started sending things like
QSK?? QRM QRM lid lid :) That would confuse them!
My current OS is Win2K. The splash screen says it was built on NT
technology. I thought NT meant New Technology? So I am supposed to read
it as "built on new technology technology"? Even the MS crowd cannot
remember its own acronyms over a few years.
Kevin.
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:07:47 -0700 (PDT), Jessie Oberreuter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Heh, another thing that I've seen happen quite frequently is the
re-invention of terms for many many common computer and network concepts
as the technology hits parts of the general population that have had no
introduction to prior terms. I was recently asked to join a friend's
yahoo group and found myself seeing a bunch of messages with subject
lines ending in (n/t).
"What does (n/t) mean?"
"No text -- It's for writing one-liner responses... so people know
not to open the message for nothing."
"Ah! The wheel turns again. Same as EOM (End of Message) or the
even more archaic EOL, EOT, and EOF. Kids these days ... no sense
of history :)."
'Course, then someone forces me to use Instant Messenger, and I drive
them nuts writing things like:
"that's disgusting!
:feels ill
... because back in the MUD/MUSH days, lines beginning with quotes were
"said", and lines beginning with colons were acted or emoted. These
features have not (yet?) (re)appeared in IM clients...
--
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