Mezcal Old-fashioned

[dillon]

If crime is down so far I guess that brutal blue army you keep complaining about has been doing its job. and its hard to run at even 64 k when you have to spend so much time dealing with all the mis punched cards

Please cite the post where I complained of a "brutal blue army"? Or any mention of the police? I will have you know that I am the son of a police officer who was shot in the line of duty. My late father could have told you pretenders a thing or two about your ignorant hypotheses. The extent to which the right wing demonstrates themselves propaganda dupes is simply sickening.

[crfriend]

Forgive me. I learned Fortran in high school on punch cards and wondered how it would ever amount to anything but a novelty. But when i next took up the PC, post college, it was at 256 k.

No worries. It's just that the modern mentality that considers the modern computer to have sprung from Bill Gates' mind fully-formed really pains me because nothing could be further from fact. If anything, Microsoft set the industry back at least a decade, and perhaps more.

True, do do much with a computer in the 1960s or '70s took skill, diligence, and patience; however, that is vastly more rewarding than watching porn interlaced with ads on an iPad. The real inspiration of the machine is how wonderfully flexible it is, yet at the same time being remarkably rigid -- and it's mostly done with programs (gone are the days where is one wanted an instruction that the machine couldn't execute one could design the logic to implement it and wire it into the hardware). Or the hilarity that can ensue when the unfamiliar come across the concept for the first time as exemplified during the Apollo Programme when the guys at Draper Labs were getting hassled by some guy from NASA who was watching spacecraft weight demanded to know how much the flight software weighed.

As far as the "brutal blue army" crack was concerned, that was likely aimed at me and I wasn't going to dignify it with a response.