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Things your kids will never know - old school tech!
40hz:
Nah, it's longhand/cursive itself. Sure, some people write (a lot!) more incomprehensible than other, but in general I find it ugly and harder to read than normal writing.
-f0dder (October 28, 2008, 12:38 AM)
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Check out somebody who has mastered Chancery Cursive Italic handwriting before you wash your hands of all forms of handwriting. Sometimes referred to as the Italian Hand, Chancery Cursive was developed by Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi (1475 – 1527), a Vatican scribe who needed a form of writing that was beautiful, legible, non-fatiguing to use, and very fast to write with.
Looks like this (formal and informal versions shown)
I had a friend who was a wizard at it. She used it for everything -class notes, letters, personal checks (it used to be a riot when she would hand one of those to a bank teller!), grocery lists... and she could easily write two to three times faster than anybody else we knew. She won more than one beer bet at our campus watering hole with that boast. She could even give a few decent typists we knew a run for their money.
People must have liked it. It's now digitized as a font family for those of us who, though mildly arthritic, still appreciate fine letterforms.
8)
zridling:
I remember punchcards in school from the 70s. It did not make computer science "exciting" by any measure.
Edvard:
<EDIT> Actually, something just occurred to me. The one thing these cards were really good for was their ability to be used as building blocks. Literally and metaphorically!
If you had a good routine coded on those cards, you could always just drop it into a new 'stack' (i.e. program) and reuse them. Everybody who did a lot of "card work" had a shoebox full of neatly rubber-banded routines and subprograms they could "compost" (as we used to say) into their latest project. There was even a feature on the keypunch machine that would allow you to make duplicates of a stack of cards with just the push of a button. Great for archiving and version control purposes. So I guess you could say that punch cards were one of the earliest examples of reusable code and software repositories.
-40hz (October 28, 2008, 12:51 PM)
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That's it. If I ever get around to writing the Grand Unified Linux Package Management System, I'm going to call the repositories "Shoeboxes"
:Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:
Clive:
Who remembers valves in radios, etc? Lead in paint? Unsprung clothes pegs? Crystal sets?
When I was in high school we had an excursion to the local university to visit the computing centre. The building which housed it was built over a river which ran through the campus. Why? All the cabling was submerged in the water to help keep it cool!
zridling:
Who remembers valves in radios, etc? Lead in paint? Unsprung clothes pegs? Crystal sets?
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Everything but the valves. Do tubes in TVs count?
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