Monday, January 30, 2012

Space Crusades

"Religious" wars abound in all kinds of ways.  Take a look at this post on Slate.  The war?  One space or two after a period.

What is interesting to me is not the article, in which the writer is clearly full of himself,  but the comments -- nearly 3400 at last count.  Clearly spacing after a period stirs up a lot of passion.  :)

Sunday, January 29, 2012

First Post

Call me a grouchy old cat with speckled gray fur... at least where I still have "fur."  I assume, without any research whatsoever, that I'm probably relatively old to be starting a blog.  Been reading various online missives for years, since long before the term "blog" sprang into existence -- in fact, since before the days of the Internet when Bulletin Board Systems were cool -- but I've not thought about starting one of my own until now.

So this is an experiment for me, to get a feel for what it's like. 

How old am I?  Old enough to have used a manual typewriter while in college.  Having a typewriter in those days actually gave you a leg up, because most students wrote their essays and term papers by hand.  You could make a bit of money typing term papers for other students.

While new to blogging, as hinted at earlier, I'm not new to IT.  While many people these days have grown up with a PC at home, that wasn't always true.  My first introduction to a computer didn't happen until college, when I took a course in BASIC as an optional credit.  "Computer" usually meant a mainframe, in this case a Univac 70/7 running TSOS (Time Share Operating System).  I don't know now much RAM that 70/7 had; I do know the upgrade replacement mainframe that came along a year later -- a Univac 90/80 -- had all of 3MB RAM.  That's less memory than the phone in your pocket.

We also had access to a minicomputer, a DEC PDP-11 running the RSX-11M operating system.  We didn't take it very seriously as a computer.  From my point of view, the PDP-11 was good for one thing only -- playing Lunar Lander.