An oldish Corona word processor (a.k.a. typewriter). Note that the apostrophe, quotation mark, and underscore are in the place we now expect to find the asterisk, at sign, and caret.
Tagged With: Technology
Old Phone
I’m not going to pretend that most of my followers have never seen one of these before, because it hasn’t actually been that long since there were rotary phones in every house. In the 1960s, mom took Ralph and me to the New York World’s Fair and we got to time ourselves dialing our home phone number on both a rotary dial phone and a touch tone phone. Needless to say, the difference was pretty significant. I remember how you hated having to dial numbers with a lot of 9s or 0s in them. We also talked to each other from different booths on a video phone. That took a little longer to pan out, but now, that’s here, as well. The phone pictured here is probably from the 1950s or possibly the 40s. On the other hand, I suspect it still works.
Resistance is Futile
“Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated.” So spoke the Borg when meeting other species. Scott Adams used a variation—“It’s useless to be a resistor”, if memory serves— in one of his Dilbert strips. There are t-shirts with the phrase “Resistance is Futile (if < 1 ohm)” (with some variation in the actual number of ohms required for resistance to be futile). Those, I believe, are aimed at the intersection between Star Trek fans and electrical engineers (or whatever the category would be that will get the electronics reference). Anyway, this is a multi-meter showing a hair over 50 ohms of resistance.
Internet Outage
I ran an errand today, going to pick up the trailer from the shop where it was getting new lights. When I got home Cathy told me our internet connection was down. I did a fair amount of checking, since it’s usually something on this end but this time I’m pretty sure it’s Verizon’s fault. We have business FIOS and it’s pretty reliable, I have to say. In fact, since we got that here in 2006 I don’t think I’ve had more than a few small outages until today. I spent a good while on the phone with them and by the end of that I thought the problem was in the wire leading from their box on the outside of the house into our computer room. That turned out not to be the problem, but not until I’d drilled another hold through our exterior (brick) wall. By the time I’m posting this, of course, out internet has been back up for a week, but it was out from Thursday shortly after mid-day until Saturday in the middle of the afternoon.