Comments on: Pop quiz

By: robin g

robin g — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:56:40 +0000

Well, it’s obvious that you totally stumped me…

By: cynthia

cynthia — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:38:57 +0000

Hey, Robin. They’re discussing how nerds used to catch mice, and it involved a lot of wheels, or finally picking up a great big hunk of iron and bashing the poor little thing over the head (which was usually my choice).

You guys know that Altos (with an S) is still around, right? They’re doing Unix boxes for Acer. That ain’t it, either. (heehee)

Me, I’m just baskin’ in the glory of finally stumping somebody on one of my silly quizzes.

By: robin g

robin g — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:00:24 +0000

What on earth are you guys talking about??? You lost me with all this nerdy stuff. Wasn’t that the question??

By: gary

gary — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:12:08 +0000

Like I said… Leetle Grey (or is that Gray?) cellllllllsssss…..

gcb

By: chaniarts

chaniarts — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:54:50 +0000

cymbals, not cymbols

By: gary

gary — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:19:21 +0000

*sigh* Thee Leetle Grey Cellsssss…. They are going Fizzzzzzllleee….

Aww… sheesh. “CYMBOLS” not “SYMBOLS”. Duh!

By: chaniarts

chaniarts — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:09:19 +0000

maybe it was 5 key chord keyboards. the mouse had 3 buttons on it, and with the 5 keys, one could type 8 bit ascii using the 3 mouse buttons as 3 different shift keys. you had to use 2 hands to do that, but you could get pretty fast at it with enough practice.

a local wag glued a small piece of leather shoelace on it, but i’m taking who it was to the grave. the base commander didn’t appreciate it at the time.

yes, i remember plato. remember those weird ray trace crt tubes that were round and orange? i disremember what machine they were on, but we had a couple that we developed some of the first ray tracing graphics packages. we used them to display data for the joint chiefs of staff when they were doing worldwide manpower allocation graphs (this was way way pre-powerpoint).

we also had a pdp-11, which we loaded up unix site license #7 on. that was in 1975 or 76. of course, we had multics license #3, 4, and 5 there too.

btw: alto came before the altos, which was a different machine.

By: Cynthia morgan

Cynthia morgan — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:06:08 +0000

Uhm, guys? The Alto was never commercially available. And, sound effects aside, there’s a more fundamental problem with the last quiz entry…

By: gary

gary — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:06:03 +0000

“6 key chord keyboard”. Remember the funky keyboards that came out that you could also use your feet with? (Hey… do you remember PLATO?)

By: chaniarts

chaniarts — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:26:35 +0000

2: alto is not altos, although both of them existed. the alto preceded the altos by about 5 years or so.

http://www.maniacworld.com/alto-computer-video.html
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archives/Kay/07_Alto.html