Piers Hemy wrote:
> Go on, it's the weekend already, we aren't in a hurry...
-----------------------------------
I'll tell a short one. It was probably 1969. I had written some
production planning programs and needed to teach our secretary, Candy,
to do data entry on an IBM 2741 typewriter computer terminal.
Candy had never used anything but an ordinary typewriter but the 2741
was just a fancy Selectric typewriter. The continuous fan-fold paper
and pin feed platen was probably a bit strange to her but she seemed
comfortable with it from the beginning. I started the program and
explained how she was to enter the data. All was going swimmingly until
she finished the first page. At that point the program recognized the
end of page and automatically spaced up to the next one.
At that point, Candy literally leaped up out of her chair and backed
well away from the terminal totally terrified. She started looking all
around her as though some invisible intelligence was watching her and
started crying; "How did it know to do that; how did it know to do that?"
It took quite a while to explain it to her and get her calmed down. We
tend to forget how even simple, common technology wasn't always so.
ps: She was a great typist and went on to enter vast amounts of
error-free data.
Chuck Norcutt
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