seoulbigchris

This was back in the early 90s. Our company used DOS and Windows machines for the most part, but we had a brand new Sun workstation for an advanced PCB layout tool (Cadence?). One day my buddy was working on the Sun, and wanted to make a backup before starting a new task. He did something like `mkdir backup` and `cp -r * backup`. It started churning away, and we went to lunch. Came back from lunch, and the machine was frozen. It took us a few moments before we realized what went wrong. He had copied recursively forever, or rather, until there was no more free disk space. In our defense, we were new to Unix and still learning.

Korea does this, also. Sometimes I'll get confused at a restaurant or other sign that is just 2x2 array of syllables. Is this horizontal or vertical? Even more confusing is when it can be sensibly read either way.

In the mid-90s I taught a night class on Unix, and was experimenting with shell scripts from The Unix Programming Environment. There was an example using a loop and the who command to alert you when someone logged onto your local system. My cousin was a professor at a university several states away, and we had already figured out the talk command. So I decided to expand the examples in the book to use finger. By parsing the reply, somehow I could tell if my cousin was logged on, and I would send myself a notice. There was an ISP in the same building, and one day the ISP engineer came to visit me with a stern look. He asked, "By any chance are you sending a finger command every two minutes to this university's mainframe?" I proudly answered, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am!". I eagerly got out my Unix book to show him what I was doing. He just said, "Stop doing that. They have a system console logging program that has churned out dozens of pages of paper printouts because of you". I sheepishly acknowledged my mistake and quit running the script.

I knew a few ham radio guys who could copy Morse code at greater than 20 WPM and simultaneously carry on a conversation.

At first, I thought you meant restaurants which had a big scrolling ticker along the wall so patrons could watch the market while they dine.

I felt the same way. At some point shortly after graduation, I found a heavy plastic Smith chart that was designed to be written on with a grease pencil, and erased with a cloth when you're done.

I just did a spot check, since I live very near an airport. The airport is blurred / obscured on Naver and Kakao Maps. Google maps and Google Earth still show the actual imagery. I guess Google's blurring hasn't begun yet.

Most of our professors did allow them. As they explained their reasoning, the information you could store in your calculator memory at that time was roughly equivalent to what you could write on a single piece of paper. So they would usually allow either a cheat sheet or a programmable calculator, and designed the tests accordingly.

I have a product labeled Boogieboard that I bought on a whim at Costco years back. I want to say it was less that $10? Really simple, no connectivity, it does really seem like an etch-a-sketch with a stylus instead of knobs. Stuck it on the fridge with tacky-tack and it’s been going strong for many years. About the size of A5 (or half an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper).

EDIT: looking at the link above, it is called the Jot and sells for $18. Still made apparently.

A long time ago, a colleague and I visited a supplier in another state. While we were waiting alone in a conference room, we noticed an unusual looking note taking device at the front of the room. It was a very large easel that looked like a white board, with a tray of markers and an eraser. But it was clearly electronic because it had stuff attached to the top and bottom, some buttons, and was plugged in. We walked up to the easel, drew a large circle on it, and pressed what looked like a COPY button, curious how it was going to perform that task.

The machine whirred into action, scrolling the white board material (which turned out to be a flexible plastic-like film) over the top of the easel, and paying out fresh whiteboard up from the bottom. A perfect duplicate of our circle on paper spat out of a slot in the machine, akin to a FAX machine. As the scrolling came to a stop, it revealed a previously hidden drawing -- someone had drawn a large "X" in the middle of the page. I guess we weren't the only ones who were curious how the machine worked.

When I first was exposed to Lynx, I was also working on a project using the Lynx realtime Posix OS. To my knowledge, the two aren't related other than by name. I checked a couple of years ago, Lynx OS still exists but under a different name.

Here in South Korea, everyone who uses online banking has to renew and reissue banking certificates every year. While I'm not convinced the certificate process is 100% safe, using certificates is one good concept in the sh*t show of Korean online "security" malware users are required to install.