My Grandfather the engineer invented many wonderful things, including that washing machine that does the tumble-agitate thing with the continuous water flow you’ve seen the commercials for (forgive me, it’s been a really long week, and I can’t remember what it’s called for the life of me!). He was also involved in the development of the dry cleaner.
He worked for Ford when the Mustang first came out. When asked what he thought of the car, my grandfather told the president of Ford motor company that it would never sell.
He is a wonderful and brilliant man, but perhaps his finger was not right on the pulse of the american car-buying public.
I was the staff duty officer at Ft. Leonard Wood the night Martin Luther King was murdered. A message came in by teletype in the early evening that the post should go to an alert status and that our regular army engineer battalion should be ready to move to St. Louis by midnight. About all I had to do was make phone calls to the people in charge of the various functions and then get out of the big brass’s way.
Some of my classmates at the Judge Advocate General’s School were solicited to become Richard Nixon’s “plumbers.” Since I was not a Republican and not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, I got no invitation.
My father claimed to have given Mrs. Eisenhower her physical and overseas vaccinations when she went to England to join General Ike at the end of WW II. The story is that Dad and the other medical corps types were so afraid that the Supreme Allied Commander-Europe’s wife would have an adverse reaction to the injections that they shot her up with sterile water. After all, what could she possibly be exposed to, other than English cooking?
Hmm. Only Tommy Griffith I come up with played from 1913-1925, for the Braves, Reds, and Dodgers. Closest he came to leading the league in hitting was third in 1915, when he hit .307 (source: entry on Tommy Griffith at Baseball-Reference.com). He finished second in total hits, as well as third in total bases, triples, and RBI that season. He did lead the league in games played in 1915 (along with teammate Heinie Groh, who also played every game for the Reds that season). Larry Doyle of the New York Giants lead the NL in 1915 with batting average of .320.
>>>red_dragon said: My bro (threll on the boards) says he was commander of the Luftwaffe. Himmler founded the Gestapo.My bro (threll on the boards) says he was commander of the Luftwaffe. Himmler founded the Gestapo.<<<
My best friend’s father once lent his car to a friend, and while it was loaned out a Mafia hit was performed in it…
My grandfather was on submarines in the Pacific Theater during WWII. He was on the sub that sunk the most enemy ships in the war, and got off another one due to injury just like two weeks before it got sunk.
My father helped design the parachute systems for the Murcury space program.
My great great great uncle, Charles Goodknight, was the first citzen of the Texas panhandle and blazed cattle trails into Kansas and Colorado. He noted that the scrotum of the bulls tends to chaffe when driving cattle, causing infection and death, so he invented the procedure whereby the scrotum is opened, the nuts are pushed up into the bull, and the scrotum is sewn shut. This procedure is called “Goodknighting”. I believe this is the same procedure used on Michael Jackson.
OK, here’s a good one. I invented Desktop Publishing, and I gave it away for free and never made a dime off of it. Now it’s a $10Billion/year business.
In about 1978, or thereabouts, I worked at a little computer store in Dubuque, Iowa. I was teaching a class in BASIC programming on the Apple computer (not even the Apple II yet!) and I had to make fake diplomas for the class graduation. We had just received the new Apple Graphics Tablet, the first vaguely mouse-ish graphics input device available for desktop computers. I had a system with the tablet, an IDS Paper Tiger color printer, and I added a set of Beagle Brothers fonts. I used the tablet program to lay out a diploma in color graphics with lots of nice color borders, and big bold color fonts reading “Certificate of Achievement.” Then I signed the image with the stylus, and each student signed their own name with the stylus. Then I printed it out in color. So, this fully qualifies as the first DTP document, because:
Produced on a desktop computer
WYSIGYG
Interactive positioning of elements with a cursor driven by a stylus
Selectable fonts
Mixed text and graphics formats in one document.
Graphic printing on a bitmapped printer.
So… what did I do with this amazing document? I gave them to everyone for free. And when my Apple Rep came by, I did what all cool hackers did, I showed him my cool hack. The next week, he brought an Apple regional VP and asked me to repeat the demo while he took notes. A month later, I received our monthly Apple dealer newsletter, with a detailed description of my demo and a step-by-step procedure showing how to do it. I didn’t even get credit for it, my name was not mentioned.
And thus, DTP was born. And the worst part is, I didn’t even keep a single copy of any of my DTP documents for myself, so I have no way to prove it. I’ve dug through my storage boxes for years, I’ve failed to find even one remnant of my brilliant achievement.