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Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 12:33:07 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Chris Chiesa <lvt-cfc@SERVTECH.COM>
Organization: LVT / Eastman Kodak Co., Inc. Subject: CM> Re: rapid arm movements; more calculator stories
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Oh, goodie, I just found in my unread-and-undeleted mail pile, a few digests
I hadn't seen before...
>From: keith reid-green <kreid-green@ETS.ORG> Subject: CM> Rapid arm movements
>[...] when we got the TV I noticed
>that if I moved my hand quickly in front of the set [...] I would see two or three silhouettes of my hand.
Try holding a ruler (or other very straight-edged, tall-and-skinny object) as
nearly vertical as possible, in front of the screen and moving it back and forth
rapidly in as nearly horizontal a direction as possible. You'll see that it
"looks skinnier" when moving to the LEFT, and "looks wider" when moving to the
RIGHT. From this we can deduce that the horizontal scanline is drawn in a
left-to-right direction.
For a REAL visual trip, find a medium-strength rubber band, stretch it out
(between your thumb and forefinger works pretty well), and hold it in a vertical
orientation in front of the TV screen. Then "twang" it and watch the funky
sinewaves!
>The first calculator I had wasn't electrical. It consisted of a set of toothed rods that were moved by a stylus, and a bar that would reset the apparatus to zero.
Hey, yeah! I still have two or three of these! The oldest one used to be
my Dad's, of course, but as a small child with technogeek leanings :-) I used
to play with it from a very early age, just moving the rods up and down and
watching the numbers change. By the time I was ten or twelve I had dis- covered that it was a calculator per se (before that, it was just a cool thing with movable parts and numbers that you could change), and was really
pleased with myself when I "got good at" doing addition and subtraction with
it. (The "newer" one actually came with instructions, which I think was WHERE I learned to operate these things. And if I recall correctly, Keith,
the instruction sheet included instructions for multiplication and division
by essentially the same methods YOU deduced.)
We also had (and I still have) a Monroe calculator -- a fifty-or-sixty- pound, electrically powered mechanical monster. Alas, it never worked right (which is probably how WE got it; someone was just going to throw it away... today they do that with VAXstations), but it worked well enough
that I was able to go through the examples in the books: addition and sub-
traction, multiplication and division (with a truly impressive mechanical
"place shifting" of a complete five-or-ten-pound CHUNK of the machinery),
and a thing called "proration and distribution" which I didn't understand
but which put the machine through some really interesting paces and pro- duced numbers that magically added up "just right" (I forget exactly what
"just right" means in this context, but it was cool). Anybody know whether
anybody still fixes THESE? I've probably missed my window of opportunity
on this one, eh?
>From: David Watson <watson@WINK.CORP.SGI.COM> Subject: Old calculators
>
>Among the (15-year-old) circles I traveled in back then, a 4-function calculator was a real conversation piece!
"Conversation piece," eh? Then I should have been born a little earlier. By
the time I was 15, in 1978, a calculator was proof of nerdhood and would get
you beaten up. Naturally I walked around with an HP-25 programmable calcula-
tor strapped to my belt. HP calculators used RPN ("Reverse Polish Notation")
rather than "algebraic," syntax-- instead of "2, +, 3, =," you had to press
"2, Enter, 3, +"; this often put me into an awkward position, when someone
would ask to "borrow my calculator. If I said, "sure," and gave it to them,
they'd look it over for a few seconds, look puzzled, ask me "where's the EQUALS
key?" and I'd have to explain RPN, whereupon they'd look disgusted and hand
the calculator back to me. If I tried to anticipate this by explaining up
front that "I don't think you'll like it," they took me as being snobby and
got angry over THAT. I couldn't win!
>That winter, someone threw a snowball through the open window of my dorm room and it landed right on top of my prized calculator, which promptly ceased functioning.
I had lots of battery problems; I must've sent the HP-25 to HP for repairs
two or three times while I had it. Ultimately, someone stole it from the top
of my stack of books, one day after school while it was sitting unattended for
a moment in the front office of the high school radio station. I've gotten
what satisfaction I could, out of knowing that the perpetrator was probably
never able to make heads or tails of his ill-gotten booty. ;-) (Incidentally,
I still have the HP-25 power supply and all the manuals. Anybody have an HP-
25 they want to sell-or-trade? Or want a power supply and manuals for one? :-) )
I replaced the HP-25 with an HP-33C (had my eye on the LCD-rather-than-LED-
display, plug-in-module-and-lots-of-peripheral-capable, alphanumeric-display-
capable, and all-out cool-as-Hell HP-41C, but couldn't justify it at $795.00...)
which I still have.
One of my college roommates had an HP-41C and some of the plug-in modules. One
of 'em was a clock, and you could program the calculator to "wake up" at a par-
ticular time, execute a program, and "go back to sleep." The evening before a
big physics test, while my roommate was studying but had left the room for a
few minutes, I wrote a program that would "wake up" the calculator at 4 AM and
add 0.0001 to all the physical constants (gravitational constant, Planck's con-
stant, etc.) stored in the memories. It was my evil intent to throw off all his
answers on the test, but alas, he recognized that Planck's constant didn't look
quite right, and discovered my scheme in time to correct everything. Darn it.
Oh, and remember THESE puzzles/games?: "A new oil field was discovered in the
Middle East. 142 Arabs <punch in '142'>, 154 Israelis <punch in '154', so
that the display now reads '142154'> and 69 Palestinians <punch in '69' so
that the display reads '14215469' went out to the site and spent 5 months
<press "X" (times) and punch in '5'>. Who got the oil? <Press "=" and turn
the display upside-down>."
It's quite amazing how many of these stories I haven't thought of in YEARS.
Chris Chiesa
lvt-cfc@servtech.com
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Chris Chiesa <lvt-cfc@SERVTECH.COM>
Organization: LVT / Eastman Kodak Co., Inc. Subject: CM> Re: rapid arm movements; more calculator stories
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Oh, goodie, I just found in my unread-and-undeleted mail pile, a few digests
I hadn't seen before...
>From: keith reid-green <kreid-green@ETS.ORG> Subject: CM> Rapid arm movements
>[...] when we got the TV I noticed
>that if I moved my hand quickly in front of the set [...] I would see two or three silhouettes of my hand.
Try holding a ruler (or other very straight-edged, tall-and-skinny object) as
nearly vertical as possible, in front of the screen and moving it back and forth
rapidly in as nearly horizontal a direction as possible. You'll see that it
"looks skinnier" when moving to the LEFT, and "looks wider" when moving to the
RIGHT. From this we can deduce that the horizontal scanline is drawn in a
left-to-right direction.
For a REAL visual trip, find a medium-strength rubber band, stretch it out
(between your thumb and forefinger works pretty well), and hold it in a vertical
orientation in front of the TV screen. Then "twang" it and watch the funky
sinewaves!
>The first calculator I had wasn't electrical. It consisted of a set of toothed rods that were moved by a stylus, and a bar that would reset the apparatus to zero.
Hey, yeah! I still have two or three of these! The oldest one used to be
my Dad's, of course, but as a small child with technogeek leanings :-) I used
to play with it from a very early age, just moving the rods up and down and
watching the numbers change. By the time I was ten or twelve I had dis- covered that it was a calculator per se (before that, it was just a cool thing with movable parts and numbers that you could change), and was really
pleased with myself when I "got good at" doing addition and subtraction with
it. (The "newer" one actually came with instructions, which I think was WHERE I learned to operate these things. And if I recall correctly, Keith,
the instruction sheet included instructions for multiplication and division
by essentially the same methods YOU deduced.)
We also had (and I still have) a Monroe calculator -- a fifty-or-sixty- pound, electrically powered mechanical monster. Alas, it never worked right (which is probably how WE got it; someone was just going to throw it away... today they do that with VAXstations), but it worked well enough
that I was able to go through the examples in the books: addition and sub-
traction, multiplication and division (with a truly impressive mechanical
"place shifting" of a complete five-or-ten-pound CHUNK of the machinery),
and a thing called "proration and distribution" which I didn't understand
but which put the machine through some really interesting paces and pro- duced numbers that magically added up "just right" (I forget exactly what
"just right" means in this context, but it was cool). Anybody know whether
anybody still fixes THESE? I've probably missed my window of opportunity
on this one, eh?
>From: David Watson <watson@WINK.CORP.SGI.COM> Subject: Old calculators
>
>Among the (15-year-old) circles I traveled in back then, a 4-function calculator was a real conversation piece!
"Conversation piece," eh? Then I should have been born a little earlier. By
the time I was 15, in 1978, a calculator was proof of nerdhood and would get
you beaten up. Naturally I walked around with an HP-25 programmable calcula-
tor strapped to my belt. HP calculators used RPN ("Reverse Polish Notation")
rather than "algebraic," syntax-- instead of "2, +, 3, =," you had to press
"2, Enter, 3, +"; this often put me into an awkward position, when someone
would ask to "borrow my calculator. If I said, "sure," and gave it to them,
they'd look it over for a few seconds, look puzzled, ask me "where's the EQUALS
key?" and I'd have to explain RPN, whereupon they'd look disgusted and hand
the calculator back to me. If I tried to anticipate this by explaining up
front that "I don't think you'll like it," they took me as being snobby and
got angry over THAT. I couldn't win!
>That winter, someone threw a snowball through the open window of my dorm room and it landed right on top of my prized calculator, which promptly ceased functioning.
I had lots of battery problems; I must've sent the HP-25 to HP for repairs
two or three times while I had it. Ultimately, someone stole it from the top
of my stack of books, one day after school while it was sitting unattended for
a moment in the front office of the high school radio station. I've gotten
what satisfaction I could, out of knowing that the perpetrator was probably
never able to make heads or tails of his ill-gotten booty. ;-) (Incidentally,
I still have the HP-25 power supply and all the manuals. Anybody have an HP-
25 they want to sell-or-trade? Or want a power supply and manuals for one? :-) )
I replaced the HP-25 with an HP-33C (had my eye on the LCD-rather-than-LED-
display, plug-in-module-and-lots-of-peripheral-capable, alphanumeric-display-
capable, and all-out cool-as-Hell HP-41C, but couldn't justify it at $795.00...)
which I still have.
One of my college roommates had an HP-41C and some of the plug-in modules. One
of 'em was a clock, and you could program the calculator to "wake up" at a par-
ticular time, execute a program, and "go back to sleep." The evening before a
big physics test, while my roommate was studying but had left the room for a
few minutes, I wrote a program that would "wake up" the calculator at 4 AM and
add 0.0001 to all the physical constants (gravitational constant, Planck's con-
stant, etc.) stored in the memories. It was my evil intent to throw off all his
answers on the test, but alas, he recognized that Planck's constant didn't look
quite right, and discovered my scheme in time to correct everything. Darn it.
Oh, and remember THESE puzzles/games?: "A new oil field was discovered in the
Middle East. 142 Arabs <punch in '142'>, 154 Israelis <punch in '154', so
that the display now reads '142154'> and 69 Palestinians <punch in '69' so
that the display reads '14215469' went out to the site and spent 5 months
<press "X" (times) and punch in '5'>. Who got the oil? <Press "=" and turn
the display upside-down>."
It's quite amazing how many of these stories I haven't thought of in YEARS.
Chris Chiesa
lvt-cfc@servtech.com
______________________________________________________________________
