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Things your kids will never know - old school tech!
CWuestefeld:
There was a time not so very long ago when being able to write "in a fair hand" was considered a necessary accomplishment for anyone who professed to have an education.
-40hz (October 27, 2008, 06:26 PM)
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It wasn't all that great a time. My grandmother is left-handed, and they tied her left hand behind her back so that she'd learn to write "properly" with her right.
Anyway, there's a reason we move on. I can type much faster than the majority of people can write. And why don't we all still use quill pens, or animal blood on the walls, for that matter?
Darwin:
My grandmother is left-handed, and they tied her left hand behind her back so that she'd learn to write "properly" with her right.
-CWuestefeld (October 28, 2008, 09:01 AM)
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Heh, heh, my dad is ambidextrous and got in trouble for submitting "someone else's work" when he switched hands to write. That happened a couple of times and he switched to the right only - got yelled at and disciplined for using his left.
As for hand-writing - I love it! My penmanship is crap, for reasons well articulated by others, particularly 40hz, but there is something rewarding about the tactile sensation of writing by hand. Even if I, too, can write far my more quickly (if not accurately :-[) when I type. I also find handwriting to be less inhibiting - I can just write and edit later. When I type I am self-editing on the fly, which gets in the way of creativity at times.
cranioscopical:
And why don't we all still use quill pens, or animal blood on the walls, for that matter?
-CWuestefeld (October 28, 2008, 09:01 AM)
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Speaking for myself, because I've plucked my goose bare and, no matter how hard I bang it against the wall, no more blood comes out.
We have no more writing fluid available, except for one tiny bottle that remains in that room where we do the cooking.
I can't find anything else suitable in the house, and I've tried everything but the kitchen's ink.
Darwin:
So... wrt writing, I guess you could say that your goose is cooked?
40hz:
Anyway, there's a reason we move on. I can type much faster than the majority of people can write. And why don't we all still use quill pens, or animal blood on the walls, for that matter?
-CWuestefeld (October 28, 2008, 09:01 AM)
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Agree. Unfortunately, the reason most people seem to move on is that they are either trying to forget about something - or they just plain forgot.
And with regards to the quill pen and animal blood on walls... Well yeah! Why not?
Actually, I think the first program I ever wrote was done that way. It was in Fortran and I wrote it either using buffalo gall on a piece of birch bark; or on an IBM 5801 80-column card with a keypunch machine. (Small difference in the relative degree of sophistication when you think about it... ;))
Speaking of which:
The IBM Keypunch Machine and 80-column "5801" card
Good Riddance!!!
Developing code on one of these made EDLIN look like science-fiction.
<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.
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