Circa late 1981, my brother-in-law was a lieutenant commander in the US Navy’s Supply Corps, and he had to be fairly mobile for the job, so he was issued an Osborne 1.
The next year, my brother got himself a Kaypro II, which was even swankier and almost 5 lbs heavier.
We bought the 1976 edition of the World Book encyclopedia new, and that’s what my sister and I used for school research up until I graduated from high school in 1988. She hung onto them and her kids used them, up until her dog started eating them (long story) and she threw them out… around 2007!
One of the things I found striking about them: shortly before she threw them out, I looked up the word “Computer” in the old '76 World Book, just for shits & giggles. Sure enough, the expected picture of a wall-size edifice with tape reels and blinking lights and some bespectacled dude in a lab coat was the primary illustration. But the last subsection was entitled something like “The Future of Computers,” and went on to describe how, in the not-too-distant future, computers would be small and powerful and cheap enough where most everyone would have one of their very own, and they’d use them to talk with each other all over the world, and do most of their shopping on them, and eventually there would have to be privacy and security measures put in place…
“Damn,” I thought. “That was a pretty good encyclopedia article for 1976.”
My first L.A. phone number when I lived behind the Chinese Theater in 1991 was HOllywood-74144. A gratifying number of Hollywood landlines still begin with 46.
I believe I had the same set at the house. I vaguely remember a few years after I’d left home they had moved from the built in bookcase in the living room to the basement.
Did you subscribe and get the yearly updates that came with the stickers you were supposed to add to the original articles to say there was updated info in “Yearly Update 1979 Page 111”??
I worked at BellSouth Cellular’s R&D Labs in the early days of cell phone adoption. I had a t-shirt and other swag from the world’s first smart phone, the Simon phone. I worked with the engineers that developed it. They were so disappointed that it had not been more widely adopted.
As someone who works in R&D, the fact that predictive typing was invented for this phone and is now used in smartphones everywhere, has taught me a lesson about how sometimes you don’t know what tech will survive and go on to change the world and what will die.
I remember when you had to stand by the plotter adjusting the offset before the computer drew the graph.
An unfortunate friend worked in a lab where the plotter was in the basement (to reduce vibration) and the terminal was three floors above. The result was a shouting relay every time a plot was needed. “Is it zeroed?” “Yes” “Starting run” “It’s drifting again…” and so on. It could take half an hour to get the plot out.
My father’s practice bought a Wang system a few years before he retired. The printers were so noisy that they had to be installed at the end of the long dark corridor with shelves full of case files. It was not popular with the secretarial staff.
We kept up with the annual updates (both the Year Books and the Science Year Books!) through 1983 or so, I believe, but I don’t remember the stickers. Our set came with its own little bookcase, with a long shelf for A-Z on top, and room for the annual update volumes beneath. I think we stopped getting the updates when we ran out of space on that lower shelf.
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I also don’t understand that expression - I know it’s an Americanism but not how it works. Is it like “bomb” which means exactly the opposite on different sides of the Atlantic?
Yeah the business case went away as soon as cellular coverage got more affordable and widespread. I think there were variations of it going longer than I thought it would, under various marketing names.
The best use case for it was with another technology for small networks in stadiums, hospitals, college campus, where someone could use their cell phone as a landline on the campus, then have it switch to a cell phone when they traveled out and about, then it would switch to their home number when they arrived at home.
I suspect (and, having looked it up, have confirmed) that it originates from rap battles and similar exchanges. Each person takes their turn to say what they will (generally bragging and insults), and then the other responds (generally with more bragging and insults), in a game of one-upmanship.
If you feel like you made a particularly strong statement, dropping the mic is basically leaving yourself defenseless to whatever is said next, so it indicates that you have complete confidence that your opponent is unable to top or meaningfully reply to what you just said.
Functionally, it’s equivalent to saying, “This discussion is over: I won.”
For an example, you can watch Obama at the WHCD at 2016 (obvs., skip to near the end if you just want to see the part with the mic drop):
Nowadays, of course, I can put my 5,000 title ebook collection and thousands of music files on a thing the size of my fingernail… but there’s no way to read it on a PDP-11/34.
How long until “graph paper” becomes “yraf paper” due to assimilation to “gif”?
Relatively recent, but I use button-based e-readers because I can’t use touch-based ones. It requires a lot of pdf conversion. I sometimes also use an older 10.6.8 Mac for some of the pdf conversion, because it’s more aggressive with quartz filters, and will convert incompatible jpeg-2000 images into readable images.
