Now I am remembering engineering offices in the 1980s filled with cigarette smoke and the deafening clatter of the secretaries banging away at IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriters. And then, the blessed release from tyrannical secretaries brought by a PC in every cubicle and WordPerfect 5.0.
A question on a TV quiz programme today wanted the names of various items no longer in use as they have been replaced by 21st century versions. Think Betamax, Ceefax, floppy disc, sundial……. It struck me that most people under the age of 40(?) would not have a clue.
Those two well known ladies Dot Matrix and Daisy Wheel.
I never thought of it like that. It's like Toy Story, as both were eclipsed by (fizz-bang-peeowww) Lazer Jet
(ETA - I found a big folding pile (you'll know what I mean) of tractor-feed paper at our industrial museum the other day. Not an exhibit, just something being used for making rough notes. I bet a deceased pensioner donated it, having no further use for their Amstrad PC-something-or-the-other WP system).
(ETA again. In my world, Dot and Daisy's friend Pen(ny?) Plotter was also cruelly discarded)
My dad used a PCW9512 with WHITE text on the monitor, and got a fancy 24-pin dot matrix printer. We had to make do with the 8256 for our school work, though my dad did order an extra 256k of RAM which only came out as (I think) 192k after he bent a leg while inserting one of the chips. None of these fancy "memory modules" in those days.
40 years ago I had a PCW 8512, mostly used for word processing (Locoscript anyone?) but I did also convert a Greek vocabulary learning program from BBC Basic to run on Mallard Basic, including mapping all the Greek character forms.
I have just removed a box of stuff from my car, which is almost 19 years old and not very reliable, and which I am replacing with a newer (3 year old) car early next week. I’ve realised I won’t be using half the contents of the box in the new car - i.e. the road atlas, the two local A-Z street maps, and the seventeen CDs!
(I also found two pairs of clean socks, a pair of gloves, a scarf, 8 pens, 6 pencils, two clothes pegs, a cloth face mask, a very squashed box of tissues, a foot pump, an ice scraper and various National Trust leaflets.)
I think there are people still including sundials in their gardens.
Making sundials is still a common enough project in schools, among Scouts and in other contexts with children, at least in my experience.
Yes! My friend (who has many unusual interests) showed me a book of design info, which means I now know what a gnomon is (rather impressed that spellcheck has that one!) Mind he lives near Accrington, which might be even less sunny than here.
(ETA - I found a big folding pile (you'll know what I mean) of tractor-feed paper at our industrial museum the other day.
Great for comedy speeches, that. You walked in clutching a block of it, said you'd just be saying a few words, start reading off the top, and drop the bottom of the stack so it unfolded as it fell.
I did that in a best man speech. I started by saying “Peter has given me a short list of things he doesn’t want me to mention” and then dropped the stack.
Plain - but I remember the green stripey stuff from being a kid and the neighbours 'something big in computers' giving me some to draw on. As I remember it was an odd 'landscape' layout - I wasn't so impressed with the green stripes The machine tool at which my Dad worked at that time used paper tape about an inch wide, full of holes for what I imagine was an optical NC reader. Those tapes saw duty in my Casdon toy till (if you're in your mid 50s from the UK, you probably know what that was) - I'm not sure if I pretended the holes were not there and I was in a shop, or the holes were there and the till was a lathe. Both, probably.
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I like that :-) My first encounters with a computer were on a Dragon 32. There's (S.Wales accent) powerful :-)
My dad used a PCW9512 with WHITE text on the monitor, and got a fancy 24-pin dot matrix printer. We had to make do with the 8256 for our school work, though my dad did order an extra 256k of RAM which only came out as (I think) 192k after he bent a leg while inserting one of the chips. None of these fancy "memory modules" in those days.
(I also found two pairs of clean socks, a pair of gloves, a scarf, 8 pens, 6 pencils, two clothes pegs, a cloth face mask, a very squashed box of tissues, a foot pump, an ice scraper and various National Trust leaflets.)
Yes! My friend (who has many unusual interests) showed me a book of design info, which means I now know what a gnomon is (rather impressed that spellcheck has that one!) Mind he lives near Accrington, which might be even less sunny than here.
I did that in a best man speech. I started by saying “Peter has given me a short list of things he doesn’t want me to mention” and then dropped the stack.
(@mark_in_manchester: was your tractor feed paper plain, or the green stripy kind?)