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Anybody else live back in time??

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Agent Orange said:
Sorry, but I need one to keep in contact with others that I know here on planet earth.
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You dont NEED one, you are missing the point. A land line would suit your needs (as it suited everyone's needs for decades). You CHOOSE to have a cell phone.

SomeGuy said:
I'll be at my desk with a normal desk phone that doesn't make me sound like a robot trying to rape your ear. And if I'm out driving, well leave me a message or send me an e-mail. I'll get back to you whenever. :P.
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Im with you on that one.. You know what erks me? Peoples lack of shame these days. I NEVER have a cell phone conversation in public. IF I answer I state I cannot talk and will call them back. I dont want anyone hearing me while I speak. Why does noone else feel this way? Why do stupid middle aged women carry on full phone calls at the grocery store.. I hate cell phones and think they are the worst thing to happen to society... worse than the holocaust as we havent felt all the repercussions yet.. And they will be long standing..
 
Phones and tablets are pretty much the same now. And you can run whatever software you can find. You can build your own Android version if you want and use one of the alternate software repositories and have nothing to do with Google.

I like old computers and land line phones. But the fact is that to get by in the modern world, you need a cell phone and a modern computer. But you can use a good cell phone or tablet to replace that computer.

You think you can go round without a cell phone. But have a car breakdown sometime. No one will stop to help you no matter what you do, and you're not going to walk somewhere with a payphone.

Or drive somewhere far away and end up on a broken detour. This actually happened to me last year. I could've driven round all day trying to find someone who could direct me back to the highway. But I had a cell phone with Google Maps. I punched in my destination and the drove in the right direction until I got a cell signal and a route. Sure I could've had a pile of maps too, hopefully they're current. Then I could stop and figure out where I am on the map.
 
VERAULT said:
You dont NEED one, you are missing the point. A land line would suit your needs (as it suited everyone's needs for decades).
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I appreciate your candor. However, if you're coming from downtown Detroit's Comerica Park after a ball game on some dark Saturday night and suddenly have a blow-out on the Ford or Chrysler freeway, you're sure as hell going to wish you had a cell phone in every pocket or at least a long extension cord on that land-line back home.
 
ncherry said:
A mostly true story (we didn't order it yet).

Yesterday, a gentleman asked me for a pencil sharpener (which I didn't have with me this time). So I decided to bust on him a bit and handed him my mechanical pencil from 1983. He liked it so much we went up online and found him one, then ordered it. He should have it today. :-)
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I had a huge smile on my face when a local office chain store went bankrupt around 2000 and they were ditching Pentel made in Japan 0.5 mechanical pencil sets (2 per container) for next to nothing and I snagged them all including enough lead refills to last my lifetime. Still might have some in the wrapper but most are around my desks in my room and the basement lab plus I lost a few here and there. I just love the rubber finger grip and the push button built into it to push out more lead (better design then the ones you needed to use your thumb at the back end where the thin eraser is). I wish I knew where to get cheap click erasers like I had in college in the 80's.View attachment 46628s-l640.jpg
 
Agent Orange said:
I appreciate your candor. However, if you're coming from downtown Detroit's Comerica Park after a ball game on some dark Saturday night and suddenly have a blow-out on the Ford or Chrysler freeway, you're sure as hell going to wish you had a cell phone in every pocket or at least a long extension cord on that land-line back home.
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yeah... Im not gonna argue with you on that situation.
 
I suppose I could use a slide rule again, but calculators are so much more convenient.

This brings up a point--we have inventions that improve on an idea by improving the tools. For example, a typewriter instead of a pen.

Then we have new entities that are the real agents of change--video games, "social media", etc.

And then there are things that we accept now, but have not accepted earlier. For example, usury -> payday loans.
 
Usury is not new, just more publicised.

I still use slide rules. Sure I could write a calculator program to give me spindle speeds for different cutters in different materials, but a slide rule is handier.
 
Any math I can't do in my head (or simple math using paper and pencil) I tend to either pull out a calculator or fire up a spreadsheet for.

I tend to like multiple methods to calculate the same thing so I can double check my work before it gets costly. For example I liked using a program for calculating orifice hole sizes for industrial differential pressure flow meters and I would double check those calculations using an old fashioned cardboard slide rule calculators venders used to hand out.
 
Unknown_K said:
... Still might have some in the wrapper but most are around my desks in my room and the basement lab plus I lost a few here and there. I just love the rubber finger grip and the push button built into it to push out more lead (better design then the ones you needed to use your thumb at the back end where the thin eraser is). I wish I knew where to get cheap click erasers like I had in college in the 80's.View attachment 46628View attachment 46629
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Dang, nice job on the pencils, Pentel made good pencils. I like their high end stuff. I prefer the clicker on top (metal cap) but the erasers do dry out and become useless. I have the the eraser block (also from the 80's) and the 'mechanic eraser' (from 2000).
 
Chuck(G) said:
I still do calculations using pencil and paper at times. I suppose I could write a program to do the same, by my brain is handier.
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I have a program from 1988 I pulled off comp.sources.misc called rpl (supposed to emulate an HP28, not really close). I basically do something like this from the command line (HP48 emulator on my phone from traveling):

hp28 <<< '20.9 15.5 / 60 *'

That gives me my minutes if I travel at 15 mph over 20.9 miles. I can't even use a normal calculator.

But back to the back in time. I live at the command line all day long (Quality Assurance - I break things!) so I don't know what this Windows stuff is. ;-)

Oh and I had 10/5 cable in 1998, beta site for the @Home service. :-)
 
I've been using the same Pentel mechanical pencil for probably ten years now, and it's still going strong. I just wish it wasn't so hard to come by the simple, no-nonsense top-clicker designs these days...and don't get me started on the weird thin little twist-out erasers the new ones all use that seem to be made out of soft plastic and are only good for smearing graphite across the page...
 
commodorejohn said:
So, uh, how many millions of people have cell phones rounded up and gassed to death?
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cell phones, smart phones,... easy access to the internet... has changed our behavior as people.. For the worse. The holocaust was a horrible display of how bad people can really be to one another, and as sad as it is to say we came out stronger because of the whole horrible war..
We are not coming out stronger because of cell phones. People have lost the ability to communicate with other people. Kids are growing up socially retarded. Common pleasantries and manners are a thing of the past.. And thats just the start, like I said long lasting consequences.. IT will only get worse.
 
I have a slide rule. Its beautifully made. Came with one of those hip leather holsters with a belt clip.. real leather. ITs plastid inlaid over bamboo, made in japan.,. Quite nice.. I have no idea how to use it.
 
VERAULT said:
cell phones, smart phones,... easy access to the internet... has changed our behavior as people.. For the worse. The holocaust was a horrible display of how bad people can really be to one another, and as sad as it is to say we came out stronger because of the whole horrible war..
We are not coming out stronger because of cell phones. People have lost the ability to communicate with other people. Kids are growing up socially retarded. Common pleasantries and manners are a thing of the past.. And thats just the start, like I said long lasting consequences.. IT will only get worse.
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In WW1 and WW2 the US was dragged into going to war by other nations. We were mostly pacifists with a small navy and pretty much no army. Military spending was a small part of the US budget before WW1 and the period between the end of WW1 and the start of WW2. After WW2 we have spent trillions of dollars we don't have STARTING wars left and right for no national gain or reason. I would not call that being strong.

Texting on a cell phone is communicating, just like when I type a post here that you are reading. The problem we have is that technology is making us not need to interact directly with another human being. Younger people don't go out to eat anymore they just order food from an app and have it delivered. Want to see a a movie you just stream it. You can work from home now, and all our electronics, clothes, etc are ordered on the net and good luck finding a real person to complain to if the order is wrong. Sure there were pleasantries between people 50 years go, but that was only if you were of the same race, social class, religion.
 
"Dad" is here.

Here is the bottom line. This web forum is for discussing vintage computers. We allow for the occasional off topic threads because we are human, we have manners and behave civilly most of the time, and we expect others to do the same.

If in the course of a single day on a single thread (this one) the word "retarded" is used and cell phone usage is compared to the Holocaust, then those expectations are not being met. I'm sorry, but welcome to 2018 - the word "retarded" is quite offensive to a lot of people and we don't use it in polite society anymore. Cell phone usage has nothing to do with genocide. And quite frankly, how people use their technology is their business and not for anybody else to judge.

We want our web forum, and all of our activities to be open and comfortable for everybody. When people read this kind of garbage it looks bad on the hundreds or thousands of other people who know how to control themselves in public. I don't want it happening here. Our mission is to preserve computing history and enable others to enjoy it. It is not to provide off-topic areas for people who post using aliases to spew utter garbage.

You have the right to free speech, but you also should be willing to accept the consequences. This is not a free speech zone; it is a private web forum. Get with the program or decide you can't abide by our guidelines and leave. If threads like this keep happening I will just simply delete the problem areas of the forum. We had to do it with the politics section years ago. Do not make us put the baby gates up.
 
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