inetsee

If it is true that frequent, brief, moderately intense exercise is that beneficial, I can see several ways that office workers can fit that into their workday.

If you work in a multi-floor office building: when going to the restroom, walk up stairs to a restroom on a floor above the one you work on; if you go out for lunch, walk to lunch, then walk up the stairs when you get back; if you are going to a meeting, leave you desk a couple of minutes early and walk up and down the stairs before going to the meeting room.

All of these ideas have something in common: walking up stairs is as close to HIIT that most people get during their day.

When I was about 13 years old (60 years ago) I discovered a programmed instruction text that taught machine language programming. Not assembly language, machine language. It would have a page of explanation, followed by a multiple choice question. Your choice of answer would direct you to another page in the book. If your answer was correct, you'd see the next page of instruction. If you were wrong the page you landed on would give an explanation that would hopefully clear up your misunderstanding. I gave a book report on the book which cemented my nerd cred for the rest of my time in high school.

It was another 4 years before I was in college and was able to run a program on an actual computer. An Algol program on a Burroughs B5500 mainframe, complete with punched card reader and line printer. After I graduated I got a job with a defense contractor, and spent the rest of my career working for defense contractors. At one of my jobs I worked on the flight computer software for the Air Force C-130 cargo plane and I would never fly in one of those planes, but that's a story for another day.

My first job after graduation was programming and running a PDP-8 in a Psych lab (my degree was in Psychology with a minor in Computer Science). Data transfer was interesting from today's perspective. I would have to print out data to a teletype machine with the paper tape writer turned on, then take the paper tape to the computer center (where the Burroughs B5500 lived) load the paper tape into a teletype machine connected to the mainframe, and after that the mainframe would output the data on punched cards. After all the typos were corrected on the punched cards, the Psych Grad students could run their data analysis using programs also on punched cards.

One interesting episode I remember to this day was when we got some error messages from the PDP-8. I ran a diagnostic that said the one of the boards in the computer was experiencing intermittent errors. I ran a diagnostic which said yes one of the boards was failing. We had a maintenance contract, so I called DEC and they sent out a repair person. He ran the diagnostic again and confirmed that a board was failing. I expected him to just replace the board. But No! He pulled the board out of the computer, unsoldered a transistor, and soldered in a new transistor. After running the diagnostic to confirm that the problem was fixed he went on his way and we were back in business. Nowadays if you get a hardware failure you have to replace an entire Motherboard, or a memory board.

I'm wondering whether they could ship the film masters to the Internet Archive. They might even pursuede the Internet Archive to pay the shipping costs.