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Good Thing It Wasn’t an Eight-Track — Jon Gabriel
If you weren’t feeling old already, watch these kids trying to figure out a Walkman:
As an ’80s kid, I was very proud of my shiny red Aiwa portable cassette player, complete with auto-reverse and three-bar equalizer. I cut quite the figure with it hanging off my Bugle Boy jeans as I perused Member’s Only jackets at Chess King.
This video reminded me of my kids astonishment a few years back. After using a hotel’s restroom, my seven-year-old couldn’t find any soap. “It’s right there,” I said, pointing to a bar next to the sink. She held it up, shook it and said, “how do you get the soap out?”
Have any kids made you feel old lately? Spread the misery in the comments.
Published in General
Indeed! Creating magazines today is much, much easier.
1973. One evening, I was riding with a gal that I really liked and hoped to impress. It was her new car and had the latest gadgets. She handed me a cassette and asked me to play it. I couldn’t see very well and couldn’t figure out how or where to put it. (I had an after market, self-installed, 8-track player in my car and this thing wasn’t anything like that.) After a few moments she took the tape back and put it into the player and we had music. I was embarrassed big time.
Funny thing. I still have a cassette player in my current truck. I never use it though. No tapes.
We recently had a couple of senior engineers retire. I inherited a device whose name I don’t know. It is like a ruler, but it has a low-tension spring running its length, with an adjustable slider attached to the spring at one end. The coils of the spring are painted at regular intervals which line up with the inches when the slider is fully extended. You can move the slider to adjust the length of the spring, and all the painted coils move proportionally, to allow scale drawing.
I tried googling around for a picture but I couldn’t come up with the right combinations of terms. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Something sticks in my memory, but it slips as it sticks.
It’s not a slide rule.
Try googling “Tracing tools for drawing” and see if you see a picture.
Or “engineering tools for drawing.”
“Magazines”?
Again, you talk of sorcery!!!
Surprisingly it doesn’t show up in google. I did find this patent though. The device I’m talking about is most clearly shown second from the left in the first image.
Down the page in the table of patents cited, there is the Proportional Scaling Instrument. Is that what you have?
Is he calling for a nurse? And why are those men yellow?
Seriously, though, the Proportional Scaling Instrument was patented by one James D. Carter in 1922. With all the Carters we have around here, he could be related to one of ours.
I dug the instrument out to take a look at it. It’s a Gerber Variable Scale.
Looks like you already got your question answered somehow.
But here’s a link anyway, for next time.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/top/?sort=top&t=all
Misthiocracy: my brother and I were partners in a firm that developed for Commodore…though we were Amiga and CDTV era.
I hate Johnny Depp. I used to love the William Tell Overture until Depp made that stupid movie wearing a dead bird on his head. Now I can’t listen to the piece without thinking of Dopey Depp and his dead bird chapeau.
Sez they guy in the Micky Mouse hat (just ribbin’ ya)!
This is wonderful. Not lately, but a few years ago we visited the home of an older couple who only had for music one of those Realistic 8-track / Turntable / Radio all in one units. My son saw it and was just amazed. “What does it do?”
CDs and digital music players don’t amaze me. I get exactly how those work. I have no idea how they made records work. None whatsoever.
When I took typing, there was one (1) electric typewriter in the room. The best student got to use it for a while. The rest of us got by on manuals.
What wargames?
I have a few of those.
You had electricity? Kids these days are so spoiled.
We did, but it was a drag on the days it was your turn to power the generator.
Well, after ’52 when Dr. Franklin did his experiments, we assigned a kid to fly a kite each day to charge up the Leiden jars, but it only worked on stormy days. After a few times out there, we started calling him Curly. Yep, Curly Fry. I hear they have a lightbulb named after him now.
Pretty much all of them at the time. We are talking 1975-79. The ‘zine was Ann Arbor Wargamer, which had a circulation of about 350 and a print run of 500. Did it while I was in college. So . . . board wargames (including Avalon Hill and S&T), role playing, miniatures, you name it.
I did naval stuff mostly. We had another guy that did PanzerBlitz/Panzer Leader variants, someone who did fantasy role playing, another guy that was into Napoleonic and Civil War miniatures, and a big Drang Nach Osten group as I recall.
Hey, image posting is back, although I had to do some weird cropping of the original – the upload process truncated the first attempt (the pic was portrait, yet the upload process cut off the top and bottom as if to force it landscape). Oh, and image upload wouldn’t work with IE10. Had to use Firefox. Anyway, Walkman still works, and even has that switch for “metal” tapes.
Kingmaker! Those were the days. (I still have it in my closet.)
Ah yes. At college I had a friend that was a play-tester for Machiavelli, a Diplomacy-style game set in Renaissance Italy. I heard of him a few years later in 1979, after we had both graduated from college. We were not best buds, just wargaming buddies. He was Richard Queen. I saw him on the nightly news we he was released by the Iranians after having been taken in the US Embassy in Tehran.
My contribution to history and wargaming has been a bit more modest, although I did playtest Wizard’s Quest (a cross between Diplomacy and Risk, sort of.)
I forgot all about zines — I had a short-lived one as well. I entered the graphic design world right on the cusp of the digital revolution. Thankfully, that allowed me to learn about the old world of “camera ready art”, non-photo blue pencils and proportion scales, and the advent of digital layout. I still use some of the old techniques of which the newer designers are unaware.