That’s right…if you want to impress your kids..tell ’em you graduated high school and college before Google and Wikipedia.
February 19, 2015 at 12:15 am
B Woodman
When I was in HS, we still used slide rules. The first four banger calculator came out in my Frosh year at college, an HP at $400. No PCs then ( that’s Personal Computer). Only big college and commercial mainframe computers would be able to talk to each other by 300 baud telephone audio modems. You had to schedule your time on the mainframe well in advance.
February 19, 2015 at 3:19 am
pyrodice
the 120 baud audio couplers to the line printer (or even band-printer could hear you whistle, if you dd it right… MIT used to have competitions to see who could make it beep the most times in a minute, apparently.
February 19, 2015 at 7:47 am
eon
I learned programming on an IBM mainframe that took up a 30 x 40 foot room and used punch cards. I had one of the first “inexpensive” calculators (a TI), and still use a TI-30X I bought a decade or so later.
My Pickett N902-T still acts as a final check.
cheers
eon
February 19, 2015 at 9:06 am
Bad Cyborg
I did my calculations for Air Force electronics tech school with a slip stick (nothing so nice as your Pickett). At that time about all you could get were 4-banger calculators. After we got out of tech school, one of the other guys in my class and I both wound up at the same base. He was sorta a tech geek and got one of those HP wonders. You had to enter the calculation in Polack (reverse polish) notation.
eon, I, too, learned programming (COBOL) on punch cards but on a Burroughs B3900. I am a lousy typist and could only average 1 good card per minute. Since you cannot do anything in COBOL in under about 50 lines it took a while to key in the cards. Add to that the Burroughs compiler’s odd way of indicating where the errors were in a program (as likely to indicate the error under the line before or after the line with the error as under the line with the error) and debugging could be very “interesting”.
February 19, 2015 at 11:35 am
Jon
Still have my HP-45 on my desk at home. Pickett LogLog is in my tool chest in the garage. My kids won’t believe me when I tell them that the HP cost over $300 when new… Just bought my 9th grader a TI ‘equivalent’ for $20
February 21, 2015 at 7:24 pm
Ken Mitchell
I spent a year as an undergraduate teaching assistant at college, teaching “Physics Laboratory”. One of the students walked in one day with a backpack full of brand-new slide rules. He handed me one and said that the University Bookstore had put all their slide rules in a bin at the door, labeled “Take One”. I’ve been tempted to hang it in a shadow box frame with a glass cover, and the label “In Case of Power Failure, Break Glass”.
February 19, 2015 at 12:08 am
B Woodman
Holding the tablet, and accessing Google. In school (before all of the above), we used to call that “cheating on the crib sheet”.
February 19, 2015 at 12:10 am
B Woodman
Aaaannd. . . I see that Sam, not Skye, is doing the work.
(I wonder if Skye would know what “work” is, even if it came up and bit her on the ass)
February 19, 2015 at 1:04 am
pumpkincat
To be fair, if I were Sam, I wouldn’t want to hand the knife off to Skye just yet either. Not until I were sure she had an idea of what she was doing, and wasn’t going to ‘accidentally’ injure herself to get out of doing anything else.
February 19, 2015 at 2:19 pm
JT
Skye would probably need to google which end of the knife to hold…
February 19, 2015 at 12:14 am
Natty Bumppo
“I an Skye, just another airhead who can’t get through life without a teleprompter. Just like my supreme leader.”
February 19, 2015 at 2:25 pm
JT
The one point in Skye’s favor is that this shows she has some native intelligence. She is simply ignorant and easily duped. These are correctable conditions. As they say, “stupid goes all the way to the bone.”
Ignorance always makes it easier on ruling despots. All that learning makes control much harder…
“Queen of Google”?
On exams for aircraft systems, you are handed the books…the idea being that you have to know where the answers are in real life…systems are so complex that you cannot know everything, but you HAVE to know where the details lie(the devil is in the details)
February 19, 2015 at 3:20 am
pyrodice
Same way for naval combat systems equipment… Some shit ain’t on google, not that you’ll always have that, if you’re in the middle of the pacific…
February 19, 2015 at 9:28 am
interventor
WiFi on Pitcairn Island.
February 19, 2015 at 12:13 pm
Unca Walt
O Dear Lord!!
I will NEVER read “Pitcairn’s Island” again.
February 19, 2015 at 2:23 pm
markm
Ditto for Air Force tech school. Tests were “open book”, where the books were the official manuals – sometimes a three foot stack. You needed to find the information in the manual, NOT to rely on memory. Do you want to fly an airplane after it’s repaired by a guy who thinks he remembers the correct torque settings?
Because it was open book, they expected the scores to be high. IIRC, the cutoff to pass was 85%. Most of the trainees scored in the low 90’s. I was second in the class at 96-point-something, losing by just by 0.1% .
But think about it – do you want to fly in a supersonic fighter that’s been repaired by a guy who gets it right 96% of the time? (And that applies even to electronics – civilian electronics generally won’t kill you if it malfunctions, but I worked on terrain-following radar, which means that if it fails, the airplane might smack into a hill. Or maybe the self-test detects the problem and pops the plane up a few thousand feet, where it’s safe from crashing but an easy target.) That’s one reason that we had a long on the job training after tech school. The Navy has a slight advantage in that most mistakes won’t sink the ship right away. OTOH, Navy techs have to fix almost everything on the ship while it is underway. Air Force techs get plugged into fairly narrow specialties, and most of the work is done in shops. I could say “I’m the radar tech, for intercoms you talk to Airman Reed over there.” As I understand it, in the Navy, aside from parts such as propellers that are too big to change without dockyard equipment, if it’s broke and no one is qualified to work on it, _someone_ is going to read manuals and learn how.
February 19, 2015 at 2:10 am
Calvin
It would be so disruptive if her power failed and her battery was dead.
As the legendary Commodore John “Gutsy” Grimes was known to say, “Never put yourself at the mercy of a single fuse.”
February 19, 2015 at 9:14 am
MasterDiver
Beat me to it, but nice to see someone else knows his “ABC” (A. Bertram Chandler)
February 19, 2015 at 7:56 am
eon
Books require nothing but ambient light to use. They are portable, durable, easily “accessed”, and the most useful ones have a menu that tells you where everything is instantly. It’s called the “index”, and is generally found in the back.
If computers had come along first, the book would have been hailed as a marvelous achievement in mobility and energy conservation.
And if things “go down” and don’t come back, books will still be here when the WWW isn’t.
It’s happened before; a civilization-wide communications system collapsing along with the civilization. See “fall of Rome”. The system there was the Roman mail/courier system, but the principle is the same.
The Alexandrian Library was very useful- until nobody could send a request for a copy of a book. And that was before it was destroyed.
Hmmphfff. If you are gonna trim the insulation off the ends of the black and white wires to connect them, who cares if you nick the ends? Then starting at the end you just peel the plastic back. Never believe Google or Skye.
February 19, 2015 at 10:08 am
OpenTheDoor
Anything much above 14 gauge, that way is mighty hard for a woman to do, seeing as how you only want to strip 1/2″ bare.
Try doing a whole house your way, then let me know how your fingers feel.
February 19, 2015 at 9:06 am
Big Jim
Sam should check with Zed about the inexpensive cable sheath rippers available at the Homey Despot. Under two bucks and you never nick a conductor. Razor knives aren’t the best choice for what she’s doing. I’m surprised she doesn’t know about them.
February 19, 2015 at 9:19 am
Bill
Yeah. Box cutters can also be used to castrate. Ask John Bobbit……
February 19, 2015 at 9:24 am
Bad Cyborg
Still think Lorena should have used pinking shears instead of scissors. Then she shoulda dropped it into the garbage disposal instead of tossing it out the car window.
I once told a young “stud” that if I caught him around my house again I’d turn him into a Ken doll. He replied that if I did that I’d go to prison. I said sure, but I’d get out before his junk grew back. Don’t recall ever seeing that one again.
February 19, 2015 at 11:12 pm
FedUp
Didja hear the one about the Chinese guy who sexted his girlfriend with his wife’s cell phone?
She cut it off with scissors.
Doctors sewed it back on.
She cut it off again in the hospital and made it disappear.
February 19, 2015 at 9:19 am
Bad Cyborg
I had something similar happen last weekend. The grandkids were over (daughter and son-in-law, too, course) and my 12 yo grandson was trying to get his 4 yo brother to sing the ABCs. I started singing the Big Bird song where he sang the alphabet as one long word. Everybody looked at me like I was nuts. I tried to convince them that the song was real. Suddenly we all heard Caroll Spinney singing the song. My 8 yo (2nd grade) granddaughter had googled it and found the clip on YouTube.
But I still think kids in school shouldn’t be allowed to use a function on a calculator until they demonstrate that they can do it – RELIABLY – with pencil and paper first. I have a couple of slide rules put back along with a couple of books with trig and log tables. If things go totally into the dumper I’ll at least have a fallback.
February 19, 2015 at 9:32 am
SAR-NOW
When I graduated HS, I could do most basic math in my head, including extracting cube roots up to some limit which I’ve forgotten along with the ability. Great way to amuse oneself while maintaining a serious expression during those times one would otherwise fall asleep during mandatory attendance listening to bafflegab. Today’s youth can’t make simple change even when the computer tells them how much! Sad.
February 19, 2015 at 10:23 am
OpenTheDoor
Yep, worked at a gas station in the early 60’s, made change out of a cigar box.
At the end of the day, the gallons pumped had to match the money.
There were no calculators, no time for hand with cars waiting.
I knew a fellow engineer who had the trig tables pretty much memorized.
When I retired, all the new engineers knew was CATIA. It was so much fun seeing the young wise guy computer wiz stumble over a compound contour fuselage lines drawing.
February 19, 2015 at 10:11 am
JTC
If the POS machine goes down while you’re in the drive-thru at Mickey D’s, hope you ain’t hungry.
February 19, 2015 at 10:41 am
Grunt GI
Yup, my millennial son is still amazed I didn’t die of boredom as a child without video games…I told him I had a creek in my backyard…best multi-media entertainment ever.
We used this thing called our imagination as kids…
February 19, 2015 at 11:33 am
John M
Video games? We didn’t have a television until I was about 9! (We didn’t have a childhood obesity problem, either…)
When I was in Saudi Arabia the offices all had the old Osborne portables, which looked like a fat little suitcase that folded open to a monochrome screen at the top and a keyboard at the bottom. We had nothing up where we were. Then the offices got the IBM 286, and put all the Osbornes in a closet. I expropriated three Osbornes, taught myself how to use them, and gave them to my Bangla clerks, who thought that was really neat, and saved me a lot of time and effort.
February 19, 2015 at 11:41 am
John M
A person can read about brain surgery on Google too, but I wouldn’t trust them to perform it on me… Just because Google can show you how to do something doesn’t mean you have the eye-hand coordination to duplicate it…
February 19, 2015 at 7:37 pm
B Woodman
Or the experience.
(Anything that can go wrong, will, and at the worst possible time)
OK, that is — or should be! — 12/2 Romex, in that the outside sheathing is yellow. You must show a 20 amp receptacle attached to that, and not the more common 15 amp. It is still safe as long as you use a 15 amp breaker, but it’s a waste of heavier gauge wire.
February 20, 2015 at 9:22 am
SteveInCO
Not necessarily. Putting a 20 amp breaker on 20 amp capable wire, you could run two 10A appliances at once on two different 15 amp outlets and not overload the circuit. (Because you (hopefully!) wired your outlets in parallel (by running pigtails to the connectors on the device), each one is only carrying 10 A.)
February 20, 2015 at 10:10 am
markm
The problem is that there is nothing to prevent an idiot from plugging one 20A appliance into one of the 15A outlets. Common sense as well as the Code requires that the entire circuit be sized to the breaker.
February 21, 2015 at 2:35 am
SteveInCO
I thought 20 A plugs were shaped differently and only went into 20A outlets. If I was wrong, I was wrong.
February 19, 2015 at 3:10 pm
momnotmom
Burn her anyway!
February 19, 2015 at 7:29 pm
Pamela
Oh inexpensive eletro-shock therapy, tattoo removal and a pretty funky hair perm…just add water
51 Comments
That’s right…if you want to impress your kids..tell ’em you graduated high school and college before Google and Wikipedia.
When I was in HS, we still used slide rules. The first four banger calculator came out in my Frosh year at college, an HP at $400. No PCs then ( that’s Personal Computer). Only big college and commercial mainframe computers would be able to talk to each other by 300 baud telephone audio modems. You had to schedule your time on the mainframe well in advance.
the 120 baud audio couplers to the line printer (or even band-printer could hear you whistle, if you dd it right… MIT used to have competitions to see who could make it beep the most times in a minute, apparently.
I learned programming on an IBM mainframe that took up a 30 x 40 foot room and used punch cards. I had one of the first “inexpensive” calculators (a TI), and still use a TI-30X I bought a decade or so later.
My Pickett N902-T still acts as a final check.
cheers
eon
I did my calculations for Air Force electronics tech school with a slip stick (nothing so nice as your Pickett). At that time about all you could get were 4-banger calculators. After we got out of tech school, one of the other guys in my class and I both wound up at the same base. He was sorta a tech geek and got one of those HP wonders. You had to enter the calculation in Polack (reverse polish) notation.
eon, I, too, learned programming (COBOL) on punch cards but on a Burroughs B3900. I am a lousy typist and could only average 1 good card per minute. Since you cannot do anything in COBOL in under about 50 lines it took a while to key in the cards. Add to that the Burroughs compiler’s odd way of indicating where the errors were in a program (as likely to indicate the error under the line before or after the line with the error as under the line with the error) and debugging could be very “interesting”.
Still have my HP-45 on my desk at home. Pickett LogLog is in my tool chest in the garage. My kids won’t believe me when I tell them that the HP cost over $300 when new… Just bought my 9th grader a TI ‘equivalent’ for $20
I spent a year as an undergraduate teaching assistant at college, teaching “Physics Laboratory”. One of the students walked in one day with a backpack full of brand-new slide rules. He handed me one and said that the University Bookstore had put all their slide rules in a bin at the door, labeled “Take One”. I’ve been tempted to hang it in a shadow box frame with a glass cover, and the label “In Case of Power Failure, Break Glass”.
Holding the tablet, and accessing Google. In school (before all of the above), we used to call that “cheating on the crib sheet”.
Aaaannd. . . I see that Sam, not Skye, is doing the work.
(I wonder if Skye would know what “work” is, even if it came up and bit her on the ass)
To be fair, if I were Sam, I wouldn’t want to hand the knife off to Skye just yet either. Not until I were sure she had an idea of what she was doing, and wasn’t going to ‘accidentally’ injure herself to get out of doing anything else.
Skye would probably need to google which end of the knife to hold…
“I an Skye, just another airhead who can’t get through life without a teleprompter. Just like my supreme leader.”
The one point in Skye’s favor is that this shows she has some native intelligence. She is simply ignorant and easily duped. These are correctable conditions. As they say, “stupid goes all the way to the bone.”
Ignorance always makes it easier on ruling despots. All that learning makes control much harder…
“You can’t fix stupid … Stupid is for evah!” — Ron White
http://youtu.be/QDvQ77JP8nw
Ignorance and stupidity. One is curable.
“Queen of Google”?
On exams for aircraft systems, you are handed the books…the idea being that you have to know where the answers are in real life…systems are so complex that you cannot know everything, but you HAVE to know where the details lie(the devil is in the details)
Same way for naval combat systems equipment… Some shit ain’t on google, not that you’ll always have that, if you’re in the middle of the pacific…
WiFi on Pitcairn Island.
O Dear Lord!!
I will NEVER read “Pitcairn’s Island” again.
Ditto for Air Force tech school. Tests were “open book”, where the books were the official manuals – sometimes a three foot stack. You needed to find the information in the manual, NOT to rely on memory. Do you want to fly an airplane after it’s repaired by a guy who thinks he remembers the correct torque settings?
Because it was open book, they expected the scores to be high. IIRC, the cutoff to pass was 85%. Most of the trainees scored in the low 90’s. I was second in the class at 96-point-something, losing by just by 0.1% .
But think about it – do you want to fly in a supersonic fighter that’s been repaired by a guy who gets it right 96% of the time? (And that applies even to electronics – civilian electronics generally won’t kill you if it malfunctions, but I worked on terrain-following radar, which means that if it fails, the airplane might smack into a hill. Or maybe the self-test detects the problem and pops the plane up a few thousand feet, where it’s safe from crashing but an easy target.) That’s one reason that we had a long on the job training after tech school. The Navy has a slight advantage in that most mistakes won’t sink the ship right away. OTOH, Navy techs have to fix almost everything on the ship while it is underway. Air Force techs get plugged into fairly narrow specialties, and most of the work is done in shops. I could say “I’m the radar tech, for intercoms you talk to Airman Reed over there.” As I understand it, in the Navy, aside from parts such as propellers that are too big to change without dockyard equipment, if it’s broke and no one is qualified to work on it, _someone_ is going to read manuals and learn how.
It would be so disruptive if her power failed and her battery was dead.
Exactly.
As the legendary Commodore John “Gutsy” Grimes was known to say, “Never put yourself at the mercy of a single fuse.”
Beat me to it, but nice to see someone else knows his “ABC” (A. Bertram Chandler)
Books require nothing but ambient light to use. They are portable, durable, easily “accessed”, and the most useful ones have a menu that tells you where everything is instantly. It’s called the “index”, and is generally found in the back.
If computers had come along first, the book would have been hailed as a marvelous achievement in mobility and energy conservation.
And if things “go down” and don’t come back, books will still be here when the WWW isn’t.
It’s happened before; a civilization-wide communications system collapsing along with the civilization. See “fall of Rome”. The system there was the Roman mail/courier system, but the principle is the same.
The Alexandrian Library was very useful- until nobody could send a request for a copy of a book. And that was before it was destroyed.
What goes around, comes around.
cheers
eon
There goes her sex life…
Google “If Google was a guy” and watch all three.
Or, go here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuKg-Whduhklge1dMCGsemN1Qr_ODqjtZ
Witch? Was that a typo?
Hmmphfff. If you are gonna trim the insulation off the ends of the black and white wires to connect them, who cares if you nick the ends? Then starting at the end you just peel the plastic back. Never believe Google or Skye.
Anything much above 14 gauge, that way is mighty hard for a woman to do, seeing as how you only want to strip 1/2″ bare.
Try doing a whole house your way, then let me know how your fingers feel.
Sam should check with Zed about the inexpensive cable sheath rippers available at the Homey Despot. Under two bucks and you never nick a conductor. Razor knives aren’t the best choice for what she’s doing. I’m surprised she doesn’t know about them.
Yeah. Box cutters can also be used to castrate. Ask John Bobbit……
Still think Lorena should have used pinking shears instead of scissors. Then she shoulda dropped it into the garbage disposal instead of tossing it out the car window.
I once told a young “stud” that if I caught him around my house again I’d turn him into a Ken doll. He replied that if I did that I’d go to prison. I said sure, but I’d get out before his junk grew back. Don’t recall ever seeing that one again.
Didja hear the one about the Chinese guy who sexted his girlfriend with his wife’s cell phone?
She cut it off with scissors.
Doctors sewed it back on.
She cut it off again in the hospital and made it disappear.
I had something similar happen last weekend. The grandkids were over (daughter and son-in-law, too, course) and my 12 yo grandson was trying to get his 4 yo brother to sing the ABCs. I started singing the Big Bird song where he sang the alphabet as one long word. Everybody looked at me like I was nuts. I tried to convince them that the song was real. Suddenly we all heard Caroll Spinney singing the song. My 8 yo (2nd grade) granddaughter had googled it and found the clip on YouTube.
But I still think kids in school shouldn’t be allowed to use a function on a calculator until they demonstrate that they can do it – RELIABLY – with pencil and paper first. I have a couple of slide rules put back along with a couple of books with trig and log tables. If things go totally into the dumper I’ll at least have a fallback.
When I graduated HS, I could do most basic math in my head, including extracting cube roots up to some limit which I’ve forgotten along with the ability. Great way to amuse oneself while maintaining a serious expression during those times one would otherwise fall asleep during mandatory attendance listening to bafflegab. Today’s youth can’t make simple change even when the computer tells them how much! Sad.
Yep, worked at a gas station in the early 60’s, made change out of a cigar box.
At the end of the day, the gallons pumped had to match the money.
There were no calculators, no time for hand with cars waiting.
I knew a fellow engineer who had the trig tables pretty much memorized.
When I retired, all the new engineers knew was CATIA. It was so much fun seeing the young wise guy computer wiz stumble over a compound contour fuselage lines drawing.
If the POS machine goes down while you’re in the drive-thru at Mickey D’s, hope you ain’t hungry.
Yup, my millennial son is still amazed I didn’t die of boredom as a child without video games…I told him I had a creek in my backyard…best multi-media entertainment ever.
We used this thing called our imagination as kids…
Video games? We didn’t have a television until I was about 9! (We didn’t have a childhood obesity problem, either…)
When I was in Saudi Arabia the offices all had the old Osborne portables, which looked like a fat little suitcase that folded open to a monochrome screen at the top and a keyboard at the bottom. We had nothing up where we were. Then the offices got the IBM 286, and put all the Osbornes in a closet. I expropriated three Osbornes, taught myself how to use them, and gave them to my Bangla clerks, who thought that was really neat, and saved me a lot of time and effort.
A person can read about brain surgery on Google too, but I wouldn’t trust them to perform it on me… Just because Google can show you how to do something doesn’t mean you have the eye-hand coordination to duplicate it…
Or the experience.
(Anything that can go wrong, will, and at the worst possible time)
I just hope that if they let Skye do any wiring they have their fire insurance paid up !!!
OK, that is — or should be! — 12/2 Romex, in that the outside sheathing is yellow. You must show a 20 amp receptacle attached to that, and not the more common 15 amp. It is still safe as long as you use a 15 amp breaker, but it’s a waste of heavier gauge wire.
Not necessarily. Putting a 20 amp breaker on 20 amp capable wire, you could run two 10A appliances at once on two different 15 amp outlets and not overload the circuit. (Because you (hopefully!) wired your outlets in parallel (by running pigtails to the connectors on the device), each one is only carrying 10 A.)
The problem is that there is nothing to prevent an idiot from plugging one 20A appliance into one of the 15A outlets. Common sense as well as the Code requires that the entire circuit be sized to the breaker.
I thought 20 A plugs were shaped differently and only went into 20A outlets. If I was wrong, I was wrong.
Burn her anyway!
Oh inexpensive eletro-shock therapy, tattoo removal and a pretty funky hair perm…just add water
for all you oldies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo have fun. ‘Luxury.’