I used to run my mother's vacuum cleaner plugged into the same outlet as my C64 to keep it from crashing.

I have too many family stories of the things police used to do to believe that it was better back then. My gut tells me things are better now but maybe I am just not in the know.

I could not agree with you more.

I am replying to you from my third mac. I got it less than a year ago and it is the first Mac I have used since 2010 or so. Sure I am getting used to it but it does surprise me how different some things are from my typical XFCE/Win10 environments. I know unintuitive is the wrong word but at least for my own intuition, it is unintuitive.

When I was a kid I used to think that having variables A... without any gaps in the letters meant that I did a good job of thinking out the program in advance.

I was looking for a reference but I am afraid it is lost in some news group in the distant past but my understanding is that all of Meta Kernel was written directly on an HP calculator.

In the 90s there was a charge on my mom's phone bill for touch tone dialing. I called up to dispute the charges but the phone company wouldn't have any of it so I had them remove the "service" and they warned me that she wouldn't be able to dial out any more. I flipped a switch on her phone to simulate pulse dialing and a few months later switched it back. She was never charged again.

That pulse switch always felt so strange to me. It was the Rosetta of POTS.

I remember growing up our family got an extra phone we could use in the basement (I think it came with a magazine subscription oddly) . It had the keypad, but would just generate the pulses like a rotary phone. Very slow and felt wrong. I’m pretty sure this phone didn’t have the switch to go into “tone” dialing mode like our other phones which were only tone.

it wasn't the famous "sports illustrated" sneaker phone which some versions had the pulse/tone switch (see photos of 2 different sole keypads) .

https://oldphoneworks.com/products/the-sports-illustrated-te...

I don't remember the sneaker phone, but I do remember the football phone:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/the-funk...

I didn’t remember that one, pretty fun. I do remember the “nfl follies” game blooper vhs tape. Was pretty funny. I can’t imagine them doing another one.

So musicians should not be compensated when their old songs play on the radio? You made your money in 1974 now move along while my company exploits your work for free.

Nope, guess not

I am not sure that it is an issue with the origination point. In fact I just thought it was my ISP because my daughter's boyfriend was watching and doing facetime with her and my video was dropping but his was not. I have 2gb fiber and we regularly stream five TVs without any issue, so it should not have been a bandwidth issue.

I doubt it still works but things I needed to get through email I would embed in word documents.

Would probably still work. There's just too many formats which makes it very hard for a content blocker to really stop.

I pity the programmer that has to decode the 1000 versions of xls to find the binary blob that could be a virus.

1000? No. There's two. Openxml and the original xls. OpenXML can be scanned for issues like any other XML file.

Alas, it's more difficult to get excel to accept that it shouldn't delete leading zeros than it is to check a spreadsheet's sus-o-scale.

1000 is an over exaggeration, but it is not just 2 standards.

xls morphed with every version of Microsoft Excel. MS Excel has pretty good backwards compatibility, but making an xls parser is notoriously hard because of the many differences between versions.

A modern word document file (.docx) is literally just a Zip archive with a special folder structure, so unless your company is scanning word document contents I can’t imagine there’s any issue.