[Elecraft] Now that we know

[Kevin Rock]

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 
<joberreu at moselle.com> 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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