Posts by Workshy researcher 15 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2022
That reminds me of Leland Sklar's "producer" switch. Leland is a bass guitar player who has played with all the greats.
“I call it my producer’s switch,” explains Leland. “If I’m on a session and the producer asks me to get a different sound, I make sure he sees me flip this switch and then I just change my hand position a bit. There are no wires of anything that go to this switch. It's a placebo, but it’s saved me a lot of grief in the studio.”
I seem to remember that we had Unix desktops at Essex University in the early to mid 1980's. They were an in house build called "Senate". I remember climbing around dusty buildings installing the 10BASE5 (thick ethernet) cables to support them. They had 20Mb hard disks and almost all of it was taken up by the operating system!
That reminds me of having to pick up a scintillation counter from the University of Surrey (or was it Sussex?) and bring it back to Essex University in a Mazda pickup truck in the mid 1980's.
It was very easy to load as the university had a loading bay with a ramp of the right height. A couple of chaps pushed it onto the bed of the pickup and then it was down to me.
It was very tall and extremely heavy due to the lead lining making the handling of the truck quite difficult. When I got back to Essex, no such loading bay existed at the destination, so a number of burly technicians were tasked with physically lifting it off the truck. Having done my bit, I beat a hasty retreat....
As a young tyro I was surprised that the truck was charged as a car when we crossed the Dartford tunnel unloaded, but as a commercial vehicle when we made the return journey.
Ah DOS Wordprocessors...
I taught adults WordStar and then WordPerfect for many years.
In Wordstar:
"What do you mean you can't start a line with a full stop?" (it is treated as a comment)
"Do youy want do do this Y/N?" "Do you really want to do this Y/N?" "Are you sure Y/N?"
In WordPerfect
"I told it I wanted the title in bold and it hasn't done it!" Scroll to the top of the document and reveal codes. You then see n (where n is a large integer) [Bold] codes.
Particularly problematical when you are invilating an RSA Word Processing exam!
I remember working at Essex Uni in the early 1980's and got my first taste of Unix on their network of Senate computers (built in house I believe) . The network used thick ethernet which I had helped to install. The spec of the Senate computer was quite a high one and included a 20 Mb hard disk, which was impressive for the time. The Unix system took up most of it, so one day I started deleting all the stuff that I felt was not required. "Surely we don't need yet another compiler" etc. By the end I had gained quite a lot of disk space.
I logged off at the end of the day, and when I logged on the next day, everthing had been copied back over the network during the night. So someone somewhere had some forethought.
Apart from Unix, my first OS was CP/M.
That reminds me of when I was teaching IT to school leavers in the mid 1980's. We were storing basic details in a (dBASE2) database and then searching for combinations of data. I was helping a particularly attractive 16 year old young lady. I knelt down next to her computer, so I could see her screen and heard myself asking "What are you looking for in the sex field?".
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