On 3/12/2012 12:08 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Mar 12, 12:16 pm, The Daring
wrote:
On 3/12/2012 9:45 AM, Han wrote:





The Daring wrote in
:

On 3/12/2012 9:01 AM, Han wrote:
Jim wrote in
:

On Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:09:34 -0700, wrote:

On 11 Mar 2012 21:34:04 GMT, wrote:

If you had a gas leak in your house, could you get to the meter
quickly to shut it off?

If I had a bad gas leak, I'd leave the house and call 911 from a
safe distance.

Folks, we have a winner.

+1 [but have to ask. . . are there *good* gas leaks?]

Jim

Ok, English is my second language - I was going for the idiomatic
"bad leak" meaning much more than just a little bit of leaking.

Han my friend, if you didn't grow up speaking English, you sure do a
lot better with it than many of those who have. ^_^

TDD

Thank you! I do appreciate that compliment. I must admit that I have
experience speaking English since 1967 when I was assigned (I requested
it) to an American to do research on blood platelets for my Biochemistry
masters degree. Since coming to the US in 1969, I have helped write and
have written many grant applications, most of which were (eventually)
funded. For that to have happened my English would have to have been
acceptable to the reviewers, not just the science behind the words.

I helped my mother get her masters in psychology by doing her computer
statistics homework for her back in the late 60's. She would hand me a
big stack of punch cards and I would take them to the computer center
where the college had a shiny new IBM 360/50 RAX system. Oh yea, the
computers I played with in my youth took up whole floors of buildings.
Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it when it comes to data
processing and retrieval. I wonder how many have spent the day in a
library reading a stack of books just for fun? ^_^

TDD- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Punch cards? You had punch cards?

How about hundreds of feet of paper tape like seen here?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...letype1964.jpg

I like to remind the kids that I was IM'ing long before they were even
born. We used Telex machines to communicate between
stations...essentially on-line typewriters. There were even standard
abbreviations to make the messaging faster.


The computer the university was replacing was a UNIVAC. It was a
classic science fiction computer with lots of glass and lots blinking
lights. There might have been paper tape used with that one and I
think there was a thing called a drum memory the size of a 50gal drum
that was like a hard drive. It had a capacity of 16 to 32kb as I recall.
I don't know if it was a FASTRAND drum unit which are huge
because I never got to see a lot of the old UNIVAC. Of course there
were a number of tape drives but it was a long time ago. ^_^

TDD