davebindy

>One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing.

It isn't. In the mid-1970s I worked in the office of a company that sold term papers to students. We had a huge catalog of them, on about every conceivable topic. And we weren't the only company in that particular business.

It wasn't a particularly lucractive business, and the guy who owned the company closed it fairly quickly. He was an interesting guy - after that company, he spent a year or so developing a solution that would fade denim in your washing machine (I worked for him in that company as well), which he sold for a bundle (at the time) to a major detergent company. Later he became a mover and shaker in the autograph/original document field.

It looks like these publications may have been a precursor of click-bait web sites. Look at the second sample page from Comfort - one column of content and three columns of advertising.

For much of my working career, I worked off and on as a graphic artist. In the 70s for an advertising agency and a typesetter. In the 80s and early 90s, for a flexographic printing plate manufacturer. There, about 80% of my job was to replicate already printed material (primarily food packaging) exactly which, of course, meant identifying type. We had a fairly impressive library of type catalogs - everything from hot type specimen books from the 30s and 40s through the latest catalogs of transfer type. I can't even begin to imagine how many hours I spent over those years trying to identify an obscure face. And if we couldn't find it, or it was no longer available, we would have to replicate it by hand, either using photostats from the catalog and assembling them into what we needed, or just plain drawing the letterforms. (Sometimes we'd "fudge" and use a face as nearly identical as possible, and hope the customer didn't complain. I suspect we were more obsessive about it than most of them were, since I don't recall a customer ever complaining that the type didn't match...)

mattkevan's comments are a good primer for quickly identifying one font over another, and are pretty much what we would have done for the "first cut" to disqualify similar faces.

It isn't a job I'd relish today. Back then, in essentially the pre-computer days, you were dealing with thousands of fonts. Today, the choices seem almost infinite.

As someone from Indiana, and a person of faith, I've followed this fairly closely.

To call the response "seemingly-exaggerated" is an understatement. Frankly, I wonder if Mr. Benioff has even read the bill that Gov. Pence signed today, or whether he's relying on the rhetoric of those who oppose it, who claim it will inevitably lead to discrimination. What the bill actually says is that the state government can't (with some exceptions) enact a law that curtails religious freedom.

In the 20 or so other states that have very similar laws model after the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Act, the courts have ruled in the cases that have been brought forward that it isn't an excuse by the private sector to discriminate. (One assumes that no Salesforce personnel are allowed to travel to those states, either...)

You can love your neighbor as you love yourself, and still not condone or participate in or approve of activities that contradict your faith, just as on a purely secular level you might like an individual but find some of their behavior distasteful.

Silence, and specifically unnecessary "chatter" is also a major tenet of the Benedictine rule. Some monasteries follow it more strictly than others. (I believe the Trappist and Carthusians in particular are "reforms" of Benedictine practice.)

The documentary was "Into Great Silence" by Philip Groning. For those of us who live "in the world" it can be a challenge to watch because it moves at a really glacial scale, but ultimately, I think, it's very rewarding to see that life doesn't have to be led with so much hustle and bustle.

Monks tend to live by a completely different sense of time than the rest of us. It's been said that they don't think in terms of years, but centuries. I've managed the site for a Benedictine monastery for almost 20 years, and I've long since learned that even the smallest things are very, very carefully considered. For example, it took them nearly two years from the time I proposed it to okay an email list for their publications. This is something that would have been a 24 hour decision for a "business." However, dealing with them and getting to know several of the monks pretty well (in person and via email), they've taught me that sometimes slowing down is definitely a good thing.

The items would have been lost (probably forever) when the LEM was crashed back onto the moon, so where's the harm? Other people did know that Armstrong had the items - as the article states, he reported the bag to Collins, who in turn told NASA about it, so he wasn't exactly being sneaky about it. I suppose you could argue that it wasn't really "trash" but NASA obviously considered the articles "disposable" once they'd served their purpose.

Armstrong stuck the bag in a closet for 40 years. At least he didn't try to sell them. NASA turned a blind eye to Mercury and Gemini astronauts taking personal items (and things like stamps, paper money and coins) into space, because they gave them to family and friends. Only when these "space flown" items started being sold for considerable sums of money did NASA try to put a halt to the practice. I'm sure Armstrong's "mementos" could have been sold - either above or below board - for large amounts, but I doubt that's something Armstrong would have ever considered.

Even more fun was the Compugraphic Junior. It didn't use disks, but film strips with the font. Then your had to switch out some gears to change the font size.

Seemed pretty futuristic at the time though.

Your comments brought back a lot of memories for me.

I worked as a production artist (someone who takes a designer's idea and turns it into somethng that can actually be produced, hence the name) off and on for 15 years, starting in the early 1970s and ending about 1991. I worked for an ad agency, typesetter, publisher, and finally in the art department of a flexo plate maker. When I first started, we used drafting boards, T-squares, X-acto knives, and rubber cement. Type was of the hot variety - photo type was only for display type, not body copy. In the late 80s I was trained on two SOTA production machines: a DuPont VASTER system (used both vector and raster graphics), and later a Context system that ran on Sun workstations.

The typesetter your parents bought was likely either a Compugraphic or A/M (Adressograph Multigraph) - in the pre-DTP days, they seemed to have most of the market for phototypsetting systems (at least for smaller businesses). I worked with both, and your description would fit either of them.

I guess I would somewhat dispute your assertion that layouts (or paste-ups/mechanicals as they're more properly called) took "forever" or that it was a "very long" process. Using the "Thin and Pretty" layout in the article as an example, the last place I worked we probably would have budgeted an hour for the job - typesetting, mechanical, camera work, and (maybe) printing plates (all done in-house). I don't think that's terribly out of line with the time it would take using DTP. (That doesn't include design time!)

When we were first making the switch from the old manual operation to digital, we often found it took longer to do the work using DTP; it wasn't unusual to hear an artist say "Screw it" and go back to his light table to finish a job. But that was to be expected - unfortunately, a number of my co-workers had little or no computer experience. Over time that ended, although the company did keep two full-time artists on staff who did nearly everything the "old" way until about 2000. The huge advantage of DTP, especially early on, was that changes/additions/corrections were so much easier. And in our case, it was considerably easier to actually find artwork on the computer. All our paste-ups were done on #20 illustration board (for dimensional stability) and they were filed in row after row after row of architectural file cabinets. Unfortunately, no one had ever devised a good filing system, so it would often take 2 or 3 or 4 times as long to find the freakin' art you needed to make a change on as it took to actually make the change...

Your description of SV startup culture isn't unique - it seems to be pretty much SOP for virtually any company these days. Lose your job after 50 and finding an equivalent position can be daunting.

>I suppose SV companies are going to tend to solve young adult problems because they are composed of young adults. It's what they know.

It's not only what they know, it's what they think is cool as well. And that's okay - I think a lot of the software I look at today is cool, too. But is it useful to me? Nope.

I'm no student of business, but it does seem to me that historically an awful lot of companies have been started by young people who saw a market or niche that needed to be filled, and filled it. How hard would it be for a start-up (or existing tech company) to get a couple of panels of 50-80 year olds together and find out what they'd find useful, and then produce it? You can make the argument that 20-somethings have more disposable income, but I doubt a couple dollar smartphone app or ten buck piece of desktop software is going to break any senior citizen's budget.

Twenty years ago, this might have been true. I don't think it is today.

I'm 60 years old, and while I'm somewhat unusual in that computers and tech have been part of my life, both personally and professionally, for half my life, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with someone in my circle of friends and relatives in the 50-80 age range who doesn't use the Internet. My 80 year old aunt has a desktop, an iPad and an iPhone. My 81 year old landlady spends an average of 4 hours a day online. Just examples.

We could debate their "expertise" in using the Web or software/apps in general. On the whole, given the kinds of questions I end up fielding from them and others, it isn't particularly high. But then again, that may actually be the fault of the software itself, much of which is difficult for someone for whom tech is not an abiding interest to understand. I spent 10 years reviewing software full-time, and it was often a struggle for me to forget what I knew and judge it from the standpoint of the average Joe.

At any rate, I think it's a canard to say that older adults (or even senior citizens, since I guess I am one now) don't use the Internet. They may not use it the way someone younger does, but that doesn't mean they don't use it.

Appreciate the reminder from you and others re: books by/about Kranz. Back in the 60s (I was 16 when Apollo 11 landed) I would not have cared for his no-compromise/no-bullshit approach. These days, that's exactly what I would appreciate about him, since it was necessary.

And I'd recommend "Apollo - The Race To The Moon" by Murray & Cox. Unlike most books about the US space program, this deals with everything except the astronauts. I've read it so many times my copy is falling apart...

I tend to add feeds only when the site doesn't generate either a significant number of comments or comments that are actually worth reading. Sites like HN I'm often as (or more) interested in the comments as in the actual article, so I'll just visit the site for that reason instead of using RSS.

Coming from a somewhat different viewpoint other than as a developer, I spent 10 years working as a full-time reviewer for one of the largest shareware disk vendors, Public Brand Software, and then later for Ziff when they bought PBS. (In fact, my first day at PBS was also the day Ziff took over the company...)

There was a lot of money being made from shareware in the 80s and 90s. I was involved in the Summer Shareware Seminars (later rebranded Shareware Industry Awards) and got to talk to quite a few developers/authors who were making mid-6 figure incomes from shareware, and of course there were a handful that had made their million(s). They were pretty aggressive marketers, though, and not the kind who just wrote a program, distributed it through the BBS ecosystem, and waited to see what would happen.

Disk vendors could make a considerable amount of money, as well. PBS was no Mom-and-Pop affair. Thinking back on it, there were 25-30 full-time employees (office staff, order takers, tech support, reviewers, catalog editors, in-house disk duplicating staff, 20+ line BBS, etc.) I have no idea what type of revenue the company generated, but it was a bustling place!