Throwback Thursday
and Even MORE Favourite
Posters and Cartoons!
So many websites! So much information! So many ideas! If you aren’t a bit overwhelmed each time you GOOGLE, then you aren’t searching enough!
Some new cartoons, posters and stuff to quickly peruse today! Nothing earth shattering and sometimes you just go where Google takes you!
And just some random favourite sites that I use or like! A totally random post, and since there is no such thing as truly random …. I have NO idea why!
Some future posts will be about ‘The Greatest Computer Ever Built‘, ‘Old Computer Textbooks‘, ‘CALL Hall of Fame Software‘, ‘A Brief History of Time and Space … and The CALL Facility‘, ‘Legacy Photos of The CALL Facility‘, ‘More Puns‘, ‘More English Words‘, ‘CALL Haiku of The Day‘, ‘Cartoon of the Day‘, ‘Poster of the Day‘, ‘TED Talks about Languages‘, ‘Training Links‘, ‘Best Language Quotes‘, ‘Language Podcasts‘, ‘Throwback Thursdays Encore‘, ‘Terrific Tuesdays Encore‘, ‘Weird Word Facts‘ and …. that is just what I thought of this morning!
Sometimes I make up a topic the morning of my post and just go with the flow! I have always like Einstein’s quote:
Imagination
is more important than knowledge.
Imagination
is the language of the soul.
And on a far more philosophical note, my favourite quote of ALL TIME is atributed to Robert Brault:
Enjoy the little things,
for one day you may look back
and realise
they were the big things.
Enjoy!
- Einstein Quotes from Good Reads
- Itchy Feet – The Travel and Language Comic
- Doctor Who – BBC
- Comics Kingdom
- History of Computers
- The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English
- Dilbert
- XKCD
- Dictionary and Thesaurus (I use almost every single day!)
- Top 10 Monty Python’s Flying Circus Moments
As long as there are words out there, there will be a site that Google finds!!
ENJOY!
TTFN!
Over the course of the next 2 years or so, I wrote numerous manuals, guides, workbooks, handbooks and even a manual for SpeedScript, a free word processor for the C-64! Hint: That might even be a future Bog Blog post!
I produced a series of Conference Programmes, booklets and proceedings over the next 3 years as The CALL Facility became a focus of literally, world wide attention – thanks to the efforts of Mary Sanseverino and Dr. Peter Liddell. Yup, using their names here, as they deserve all the credit for pulling this off!!! 
One of my favourite movie computers is WOPR (pronounced ‘WHOPPER’ in 
Secret computer designed to run scenarios of ‘games’ including ‘Global Thermonuclear Warfare’, except … they aren’t GAMES! His hardware – a modem and smarts to figure out what the backdoor password is! There are SO many memes about this movie and it is a hoot to watch. And the ending is actually very good! I highly recommend it!
absolutely amazing! Simply put, Obie is designed by an ancient race called Markovians … to manipulate the basic fabric of the universe. Imagine the monthly updates with Obie!
Another helpful computer is HOLMES IV (Mike), in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘
And perhaps one of the most obscure computers comes from the first ever release by, of all people, George Lucas!
Arthur C. Clarke wrote
through the youth program at my church. We were in this huge room and a giant golden tube was behind glass. The ‘terminal’ was a teletype style typewriter and … we played 
Turns out, I used it in my student teaching practicum year and absolutely transfixed all the staff and students in the school I was a Student Teacher in! 
And my first ‘real’ job was working with the finest (and cheapest!) home computing power that has ever been used in the history of computing – COMMODORE COMPUTERS! My first classroom had 
echo …. I STILL HAVE IT AND IT STILL RUNS!
Fast Forward to working at home now! Thanks to Allison, Patrick, Adam and everyone AT CHD and I have a nice Dell Latitude laptop, my daughter’s old ‘
Full Disclosure
Yes, the first ever computer program that was used in The CALL Facility was a package of 4 languages – French, German, Italian and Russian! And the operating system used was called 
How can an operating system from the mid-1980’s, still be operating on MACINTOSH COMPUTERS, which did not even EXIT until 1984, and still be useful? It is technological MAGIC!
And this computer record will never be broken – McMaster French has been running for over 30 YEARS and has never once crashed! NEVER! And it has served its’ purpose well – Beginner French, simple text correction, grammar rules and instant feedback! ALL STATE OF THE ART back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s!
I always enjoyed introducing this software to French students as they would be ‘Time Travelling’ to a distant past where Bill Gates was only a MILLIONAIRE, when the only mouse in the room was a biologic, and that they really needed to know where the arrow keys, CTRL, ATL, DEL and ESC keys were on an ACTUAL CLICKY KEYBOARD!
fonts, .exe, .bat and .cnf files and making sure our ‘network’ of computers were all working! AND THEY DID! Mary did back then, what Patrick does no! LOL!
Once you booted to DOS, you than would ‘run’ WINDOWS as an executable file! WOW! And then, the rest is history!
And I even own a book on puns, entitled ‘
At the point of hesitation, I repeat the request, ‘Count for me”. Now, about 50% of the time, I get the same response, but the fascinating part of this is that now, I can get a 
You now need to see the ‘new language’ (code) that I was introducing to my computer science class at the time.
The hardest premise to learn, is always the 
Many years ago, I remember teaching a Beginner’s Computer Science course at night. And one topic was always how computers do the wrong thing. Apart from the discussion that computers only do what the programmer coded, the one actual event (apparently) was when a computer transation program was used at an Engineering Symposium and all of a sudden, the transcript included the term ‘Water Sheep‘. And it wasn’t wrong! It was a literal translation of … HYDRAULIC RAMS! It was right in a computer codey kind of way! Helpful? Not so much! LOL!
Many blogs now add a 
That is actually amazing! Part Scanner. Part Google Translate. Part Dictionary. Part Internet. Part …. United Nations, all in the palm of your hand!
