I'm sooo old!

[yesthattom]

Today I was about to explain the term “batch processing.” I was going to use an analogy and almost used the example of how word processors didn’t used to spell-check in real time. You had to press a spell-check button and the entire document would be checked.

Then I realized that nobody I was talking may have experienced such a word processor.

Ugh.

Comments

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure WordPerfect did when I first used it.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I was using WordPerfect in 1987. It was text-based and spell check was SHIFT-F2 or something.

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

Spell checking in real time is so not an improvement that it makes me scream.

But why is a package like Microsoft Word not a word processor? Do we now call this desktop publishing? I'm confused.

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

Oh, never mind, you said "such a word processor". I get it.

Sorry.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Heh. Spell check, word count... those were the days.

Today, I'd probably use a supermarket analogy; you go around collecting all the stuff you need ("collate the job") and then take it to the checkout to be rung up ("job execution").

[spaghettisquash.livejournal.com]

Nooooooo. You can spell check many times, but only jerks get rung up more than once.

[vees.livejournal.com]

Ah, for a return to the magic of "Reveal Codes." It was like your very own evil remover for when you got too carried away and needed to bring your document formatting back to the plane of reality.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Ahh... Reveal Codes. So fantastic. Solved so many problems with that, plus I got to be totally OCD about details :-)

[kingfox.livejournal.com]

Jeez, I feel old now. Ghaaa.

[cos]

Do you realize there are sysadmins working on the major sites of our times, who don't have any idea why all the printer commands start with "lp" - and wouldn't know what it meant if you told them?

[geekosaur]

Worse, try explaining to them where "tty" came from.

[cos]

Worse? or.. better? :)

Actually tty's expansion and meaning seem to have survived, the way some archaic things do (people who never used or saw a record player still often know what they were, for example).

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

We do an in-house "shell programming study-hall" and one week I volunteered to be the instructor. I got into a tangent about ttys and how serial consoles used to be all we had, and modems then the evolution to terminal servers and other things. At one point I paused and apologized for the tangent. Everyone in the room blurted out, "No, that was great! I always wondered about those things!"

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

Were these the same people who listened to "old music" like Nirvana and Soundgarden?