When I took my post-high school gap year, 1981-82, I was a keypunch operator, and we were rapidly phasing out the oaktag punch cards in favor of magnetic tape. I later returned to that company in 1987 and worked there for 3 years as a data entry operator before going to pharmacy school, and the keypunch department was already phased out.
What’s the difference, some of you may ask? Keypunch means that information is keyed onto cards or magnetic tape, and then fed into a computer which processes the information. Data entry means that the information goes straight into the computer.
p.s. I actually saw 8-tracks earlier today! I stopped by my favorite thrift store here in town, and they do have them on display. I’ve heard that people who buy them mainly do so as gag gifts or other novelties, and occasionally for stage props. For that matter, I had a VHS copy of “E.T.”, in the shrinkwrap, listed in my Amazon account, and someone bought it a few months ago. I did send her an e-mail confirming that this WAS a VHS tape (I learned my lesson about THAT) and she said she did indeed want it. Like I said, stage prop is the most likely use I can think of for why she ordered it.
The place we go to is nowhere remotely close to a Jewish area. It’s an extremely popular all-you-can-eat buffet in Shoreline, barely outside the Seattle city limits. I have never seen another Jewish family there, ever. (I’m of a Jewish atheist mixed-race family.)
I’m guessing there are Chinese places open in Seattle’s International District, as well, but I haven’t ever checked.
I didn’t realize about lack of options in Olympia.
DPRK’s post was a joke. That’s a picture of a Roman dodecahedron. A number of them have been found, but no one knows what they were used for. There’s a current thread about them in Factual Questions.
When the son of a friend of mine was about thirteen, circa 1985, he developed a fascination with slide rules. His dad looked around and couldn’t find any for sale so he approached me. “You’re the only on I could think of who might have one.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or not, but I did have a Pickett in my box of not-used stuff, I had the instruction manual.
I dunno about ubiquitous, but how about a manual drafting pencil sharpener?
Hand boilers are filled with methylene chloride which boils at just above room temperature and so react from just holding the lower chamber. They are still available today.
Retailers or restaurants? There are not that many retailers open on Christmas in my area - supermarkets/grocery stores and drug stores and not much else. Maybe the non-chain dollar stores. There are more restaurants open than there used to be - but still not nearly all of them.
When oil in bottles first came out, I wondered about the raised dashmark calibrations on the side, and how they’re supposed to work on an opaque bottle.
I was an engineering undergrad in the late 80s and early 90s, and during my freshman year my drafting class was the last one to use paper, pencils, and straightedges - perhaps more importantly, the last one NOT to have had any formal training on how to use any CAD software. I had to figure that stuff out on my own in grad school.
My wife and I got some of those for a trip in the mid-2000s, but never used them. I cashed most of them in at our bank a few years before the pandemic - and last week I found a couple more in the back of a drawer, and will be cashing them in the next time I visit my bank.
I used an HP-48 all through undergrad and grad school, and continued after that. I’ve had an emulator on my PC for years because I’m so used to using RPN that I struggle with a conventional (non-RPN) calculator. When I got my first smartphone in the mid-2010s, one of the first apps I searched for (and found) was an HP-48 emulator, which appears (visually and functionally) to be a high quality replica of the real thing.
Re: slide rules, my dad gave me his several years back. I knew of them at the time, but had never handled or used one. I quickly found the “International Slide Rule Museum”, which hosts this tutorial, which contains a link to this virtual slide rule you can use as you work through their tutorial. It’s a long tutorial, which is to say that a good sliderule has a lot of functionality built into it.
Me too. I think most of them would be tech objects that only some types of scientists of a certain age would know about at all. That’s not exactly everyone except ‘youngsters’.
They are on my car as we speak, I have a set of snow tyres mounted on steel wheels and swap them over with the normal alloys, on continental Europe that is very common indeed.
Guess not. I knew the word, but devices like that come and go and I don’t pay attention to them. I imagine someone I knew had one … those are the things you have to plug into your ears, right? I don’t plug things into my ears.
