Lent/Mothers Day /Easter

It has been noted by many that if you swap each letter in HAL with the next letter in the alphabet you get IBM, which at the time of writing 2001, was the computer manufacturer that really was taking control of everything. Even modern pcs are descended from 'IBM compatible personal computers'.

 

I was a software architect when there weren't any pc's, just main frame system. They didn't call us architects back then, we were on the "steering" committee.

I had the use of the first pc in the company... really showing my age here....

 

Did you have to make holes in cardboard for input? And 24 hours later did you get your error code print out on ticker tape

 

Yup. And when we sent a telex, we could put a "bell" on it

 

I entered the industry somewhat later, but as a trainee, I did discover a good geek prank I could do. You could send ascii 7 over the network to the dot matrix printer in the next room. I wrote some code that simply did this, then paused for a random number of minutes before looping round again. It was a couple of days before someone from the other office finally came in to see if any of us might know why their printer would randomly beep at them for no reason.