Throwback Thursday . . . or . . . Laughter and Chuckles!
Why did the chicken cross the road? Error 404. Road can not be found. ALMOST a … Dad Joke! Years ago, I once ‘collected’ cartoons from the comic section of newspapers or editorial pages, specifically looking for Math, Statistics or Numbers in general – for use as motivation in my classes! I probably still have them somewhere in ‘The Garage’ and will look for them one day and have a post dedicated to really old math cartoons!
Once, I included a funny math cartoon at the very END of a printed math test for my Grade 12 Math 31 (Advanced) class. This was during my Student Teaching year at U of Calgary.
I had the opportunity to teach ‘Probability’ to my highly motivated International Baccalaureat program at the school I was assigned! Well, this threw them for a loop! “Is this a question?“, “Is this for marks?“, “How do I answer this question?” and ‘What is this for?”
And to his credit, my Supporting Teacher let me do all kinds of crazy things in all my classes! This will be a theme for another OAC post one day!
One small amazing Fun Fact: I ended up being paired with not one, but TWO of my OWN High School Math teachers from my high school years … just by chance! What are the odds on that !!! Well, that is what statistics are for! LOL!
So, some Throwback Thursday humour and random images, YouTube videos and cartoons to maybe provide a chuckle or two!
And that is about it for today! A busy day with some meetings, documents and workshops at the speed of Self Pace too! I might throw new stuff in later! You just never know!
I’ve Got a Problem with My Apple
The One Ronnie – BBC
One Day, A Computer Will Fit …
… On A Desk – Arthur C. Clarke (1974)
Computer Joke of the Day
May 1, 2020
Modern Upgrades
for Classic Computers
15+ Funny MS Windows Jokes
That Will Make You Laugh
10 Funniest TED Talks
Compilation
Computer Predicts the End of Civilization (1973)
Arthur C. Clark
Predicts the Internet (1964)
A Funny Look at the Unintended Consequences
of Technology (TED)
BYOD issues were an even bigger problem in the 1950s.BYOD was not as much of a concern in the office as BYOG.
‘Well, for starters, I’ve never seen a laptop in Roman Numerals.’“It’s a fantastic computer! It’s so old that none of today’s hackers know how to hack it!”“That old computer we recycled in 1989 is now worth a fortune.”
Old-fashioned computer
“Don’t worry Mac, I’ll have that happy face back in no time.”
My first computer I EVER purchased! I think I might even have my original receipt! I will have to dig around my own computer archives aka ‘The Garage’ and see if I can come up with that papyrus document! And … drum roll …. I FOUND IT! Click on the image to see it in a bigger tab!
And why did I buy a C-64, specifically, the SX-64, the World’s First Luggable Computer? It cost me $901.95 (note there was no tax!) and that was a huge amount, in today’s dollars! Actually, it works out to be …. $1,962.18 in ‘today’s’ money! I used the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator, which I did not know existed until this morning!
SX-64
There were a few reasons – I had just started to work in a classroom that was FILLED with Commodore-64 computers, I was taking a graduate course at the U of C about Technology/Computers in Education and … a buddy of mine could buy it through his company AT A DISCOUNT! But none of those beat out … THIS IS SUCH A COOL COMPUTER! So had to buy the Commodore SX-64, which was also known as the Executive 64 or VIP-64 in Europe!
So it got me to wondering about how the Commodore became, at the time, the single best home computer EVER SOLD! And I came to the conclusion that … I don’t know why! LOL! Oh, well, maybe marketing has alot to do with it! Just look at Apple! I have posted about how Apple have made such fantastic ads before! (Yup, product placement!)
My ultimate, non-academic conclusion is that …. EVERYONE COULD OWN A HOME COMPUTER!!! And if Commodore could make it cheap, easy, small, available and FUN – then they found the magic recipe to sell MILLIONS OF THEIR COMPUTERS! And, literally:
The Commodore 64, also known as the C64 or the CBM 64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 byCommodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, January 7–10, 1982). It has been listed in theGuinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, with independent estimates placing the number sold between 10 and 17 million units. (From Wikipedia)
And it is a bit unknown as to how many SX-64 computers were sold. There was a rumoured DX-64 with dual floppy drives, but that never appeared.
The exact number of SX-64 sold from 1984 to 1986, when it was discontinued, is unknown. The serial numbers of over 130 SX-64s from series GA1, GA2, GA4, GA5 and GA6, with serial numbers ranging over 49,000 for series GA1, 1,000 for GA2, 17,000 for GA4, 11,000 for GA5, and 7,000 for GA6 have been reported. (From Wikipedia)
I will have an SX-64 dedicated post in the future, showing how fast it booted, cartridges that I have and how I can connect it to my Toshiba large screen tv too!
It really was an amazing computer! And speed – it boots up in about 5 seconds! And it only had the one floppy drive! Remember sorting through floppy disk banks! Good times, good times!
Commodore 128
Fun Fact – did you know that Commodore actually made other computers, including a Commodore PC compatible and another one called the Commodore 128? Fun Fact!
Commodore PC Compatible
Be sure to look closely at some of the vintage print ads I included after all of this! William Shatner HIMSELF – CAPTAIN KIRK – was a spokesman for the Commodore VIC-20 – the computer that came out BEFORE the C-64!! I can legitimately say – I own an Official Star Fleet Computer!
And that is about it for today! Lots of meetings and workshops! I might throw new stuff in later! You just never know!
Terrific Tuesday . . . . ENCORE . . . . MORE Computer Humour!
Let’s take a breather today and just have a few chuckles about computers and our digital lives! That and I have multiple meetings, training sessions AND I get to pick up a refreshed laptop today too! So I just want to chuckle and laugh today!
There is no doubt working from home or remote working, continues to be very challenging!
So a little diversion is very welcome, at least for me! And for me, meditation, getting up and walking around, stretching, a walk in my yard, tea and honey, scheduled and impromptu chats, coffee breaks and conversations with my colleagues are SO important to me! I haven’t quite reached the stage of throwing my computer across the room yet!
Bold Italics Comic Sans . . . or . . . Word Processors Through the Years
Typewriter! Whiteout! Ribbon! Carriage Return! That was MY technology when I was writing term papers back in 1975-1982 at the University of Calgary!
Those late nights AND early mornings, pounding away, literally, on my Smith Corona typewriter – trying to balance SPEED with ACCURACY! There was no such thing as DELETE or UNDO … unless you count going through gallons of whiteout! BUT, I had a very HI-TECH version of correcting mistakes!
Basically, it was a dry ‘tape’, with dryer white ‘chalk’ on one side, and a more inert opposite side. But first, you had to recognize that you did INDEED make a typo, AS YOU WERE TYPING! There were no spellcheckers back then! And then, backspace manually TO THE MISTAKE, insert the correction tape, powder side TOWARDS the error, TYPE THE ERROR AGAIN to literally WHITE OUT the mistake, backspace AGAIN, and manually type in the corrected letter! Good times, good times! All this with a single, ORIGINAL, piece of paper in the typewriter! ARGH! And no automatic page feeds so I often ran out of room on my PRISTINE and ORIGINAL PIECE OF PAPER! DOUBLE ARGH!
And then I took my first computer science course! Although technically NOT a word processor, a massive desk with a punched card reader could be consider an early form of a word processor! Every mistake in code (FORTRAN!) I made, took about 30 minutes to actually DISCOVER from the Punch Card Elders who took my deck and ran it into the giant Punched Card Monsters! Then I had to dig out the SINGLE CARD that had a typo or bad code, and type it in again!
The day I discovered the ‘Function Switches’ feature, which would mirror all the text was like a miracle! I would press the copy button, then STOP, type in the corrected command or typo, then continue with copy and the card would appear at the end! Reinsert, hand over the deck and … ANOTHER TYPO FURTHER INTO THE DECK! Repeat as many times as necessary! Good times, good times!
Commodore SX-64
And then, I graduated, not only from U of C, but onto SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY! Well, at least, at the time, it certainly WAS superior technology! My first teaching gig was not only teaching a Beginner Computer Science course, but DESIGNING IT AS WELL! I earlier posted about Desktop Publishing, but … it was really just basic Word Processing with Apple and Commodore Computers!
Yes, that is the manual for my own Commodore SX-64 that I used for some Grad courses at U of C! And I used the worlds best FREE word processor at the time … SPEEDSCRIPT! A future post will discuss just how amazing the SX-64 computer was! AND IT STILL WORKS!
SpeedScript was free, had a spell checker and even had a PREVIEW of the final page, which was YEARS ahead of anything else out there! And did I mention it was … FREE! YES FREE! And amazingly, it used a markup language that is INCREDIBLY SIMILAR TO WHAT HTML IS NOW! Commodore computers were definitely ahead of their time!
And then a commercial word processor –PaperClip came along and … well, due to budget cuts, only 1 copy was purchased for me! Free is free, right!
And the first ever ‘office suite’ was actually a cartridge based system for .. you guessed it … my SX-64! It was called VIZASTAR and had … EVERYTHING you ever needed for what is now considered an ‘Office Suite’ – Spreadsheet, Database and Graphics … but no word processor sadly!
Why here? A future post will be about my SX-64 AND the cool software I still have, including one of he worlds first ever … LIGHT PEN called Flexidraw! VERY COOL even by today’s standards!
I brought up my Commodore SX-64 to our Systems Open House a few years ago! The theme was ‘Time Travellers – Meet the Team:Systems Through Time‘ Click here to see some photos from a previous post! (Yes, always, more Product Placement!)
And then .. progress marches on. The next generation of hardware and software was WordPerfect on a Commodore IBM clone. What? I bet you didn’t know that Commodore made IBM clones! THEY DID!
And I might start an argument, but I always preferred Corel WordPerfect (MAC) to pretty much any flavour of Word through the years! Okay, so maybe now Office 365 is better! But when I was helping to publish our CALL Proceedings, I made WordPerfect the recommended application. Of course, everyone ignored it, but WordPerfect did Word, BETTER THAN WORD back then! AND IT WAS CANADIAN TOO!
And then there is another package that I have briefly used, and is free for both current WIN and MAC platforms called Libre Office, which was once known as Open Office. I have only used it sparingly, basically enough to answer basic questions about it, and I am not sure it is installed on any computers at UVic anymore, with Office 365 kinda taking over … for free for students and staff! Which, by the way is a VERY GOOD THING!
And then there are now Text Editors – basically a blend of raw ASCII text with minimal word processing features. So, yeah … they are word processors! There are SO many of them, we all have our favourites and they are quick and dirty to see CONTENT as far as I am concerned. If you are using a text editor for word processing …. then let’s talk! LOL!
Old School Cat
And if you think about it, creating a post here on OAC is a perfect blend of word processing AND text editor! I can switch to Text if I want to change some nuts and bolts thing with HTML, or just use the New Post and … see what happens! YAY FOR OAC! Many thanks to “mvh” for his patience whenever I have an OAC question for him!
Some interesting links to tickle your funny bone or perhaps feel compelled to put pen to paper – in a manner of speaking! Remember, I am old school!
I Excel at PowerPoint . . . or . . . Computer Puns and Jokes
Taken
I don’t know who you are or why you stole my copy of Microsoft Office …. but I will find you. You have my .. WORD! I hope I have ‘Taken‘ your attention away from whatever you were doing! Just when you thought it was safe to blog again … COMPUTER PUNS AND JOKES!
CALL Facility Klingon
I always try to sneak in jokes, puns or riddles into many of my CALL Facility orientations and handouts too! I once included ‘Klingon‘ in a handout of languages that The CALL Facility had resources for! And it is still at ZOHO!
Soothsayer Cat
And then UVic goes and offers a course in Alien Languages (Klingon & Sindarin!)! That makes me a soothsayer! I wonder if that means a pay raise or not! My guess …. NOT!
The best part of puns are when they are impromptu and happen instantly! All too often, my eyes widen or roll about and that is an early warning system for colleagues … PUN ALERT! PUN ALERT! People know me all too well! I would be horrible at poker! LOL!
I found one site where a computer was programmed to CALCULATE the funniest puns and it came up with the following….. and …. yeah, NO! Even I have lines I do not cross … and they are often … lines of code! LOL!
I often say that if I am having fun, then the students are having fun too! There is so much stress nowadays that humour IS good medicine! I won’t bother telling you my absolutely favourite jokes and puns other than …
… it is always my NEXT ONE!
Some interesting links to tickle your funny bone, or perhaps, seek medical attention afterwards!
Think Different . . . . . . or . . . Apple Commercials Through the Years
Think Different
Think Different. As iconic as the ‘1984’ Mac commercial is, this may be one of the most remembered Apple campaigns … EVER! Well, at least for me. I have this poster in my office at home. I uncovered a bunch of them years ago, doing an annual cleanse of some closets we once used as storage! Serendipitous for me!
There is no question that Apple has one of the best marketing programs … in history! This post is predominantly about their ads in video format, which range from poignant and dramatic, to humorous and sometimes silly! They truly do …. Think Different …. all the time!
The BEST ads are cast with actors who don’t take themselves too seriously and actually parody their on-screen presence … and blend it with their off-screen personality!
The Rock x SIRI
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson did this perfectly in his ad for Siri a few years ago. I doubt Apple could afford him now!
What Will Your Verse Be?
My absolute favourite commerical of ALL TIME is probably not what you might think. Oh yes, I do like the 1984 commercial (Directed by Ridley Scott – Gladiator, The Martian, Thelma & Louise, Blade Runner, Alien .. yes THAT Ridley Scott!) but my favourite is for the iPad Air with Robin Williams narrating his poetry speech over some amazing world moments. Do you remember which movie this came from? HUDDLE UP!
As a summer project many years ago, I decided to find as many Apple Commercials on YouTube as I could and learn how to create movies and burn a DVD, dedicated to only Apple Commercials!
YouTube was relatively new and it might not have even been bought by Google yet! Still, I learned how to create and edit movies, burn DVDs and improve my knowledge of various video formats, editing techniques and making movies!
iMovie HD 2005
A future post, once we return to UVic, will be about using iMovie HD! What? You have never heard of that version? That doesn’t surprise me!
iMovie HD was one of the very first versions (2005!) and can only
MovieBox DV
run under a macOS that is named after a kitty! But it is surprisingly robust, has simple and intuitive editing controls and works with some old hardware called MovieBox DV (2003!) that can digitize VHS cassettes! Sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks!
And one more thing … Apple has long been the target of parody ads! There is one for a new iPhone at the very end of the videos below. But the BEST one is called ‘The Power to Crush the Other Kids”. It is nowhere to be found on the internet and YouTube has pulled it due to copyright infringement concerns, by NBC’s ownership of Saturday Night Live. If you can find it, it is truly hilarious!
Some interesting links below with even more background to Apple’s numerous ads throughout the years!
As long as there are words out there, there will be a site that Google finds for each of us!
This will be my list of my favourite computer/AI voices from Movies and TV shows that I have seen and grew up with! They can be human or actually computer generated. So some of them will no doubt be VERY obscure for many of you young folks! LOL! But that does not mean you should disregard them! They might prove to be dated, but they have all influenced how we percieve computers and AI, to this day!
The voice of EVERY computer in every episode and movie of Star Trek is Majel Barrett, who was married to Gene Rodenberry! She even voiced the computer in the Star Trek:The Animated Series too! Outside of Michael Dorn (Worf), Majel Barrett has appeared in more episodes than ANY OTHER ACTOR!
Robocop morphed a critically injured policeman with state of the art technology to enforce police protection. What could go wrong? Well, more than you can imagine, including a horrible remake of this classic movie!
And at the time, TRON was the greatest computer movie OF ALL TIME! The graphics were amazing, the storyline was new and amazing and I remember watching it multiple times!
And then they made a reboot of it TRON:Legacy .. and I liked that one too! It got bad review, but I still liked it! And the graphics were amazing too!
And how could ultimate cuteness and the end of the world combine any better than in WALL-E! Eve and WALL-E have instant chemistry, albeit confrontational at first, but it is still one of my favourite animated series and WELL ahead of its time in terms of environmentalism!
And probably the most iconic computer/AI interface, at least recently is the combined character of Vision in theMCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). Vision is ‘powered’ by the Mind Stone, one of the Infinity Stones.
And … if you got this far, then you have seen the movies! Vision is a weird blend of the personality of Tony Stark (Iron Man), Ultron (his ‘Frankenstein-like AI), JARVIS (his own AI ‘butler’) and the power of Thor to kick-start him! Yeah, you had to be there … multiple movies and multiple personalities … what could go wrong! Actually, he is a pretty good character and very strong too!
And the rebooted series is fantastic too! The new robot, although not named Robbie, is unique, integral to the storyline and has amazing graphics! And it is filmed in Vancouver too! But only one season left! Sigh …… I remember building a model of this robot too!
Another TV show ahead of its time was Knight Rider! A virtually indestructible AI car (K.I.T.T. – Knight Industries 2000) guided by a secret organization dedicated to fighting injustice! Whoa, wait … NOT ELON MUSK! LOL! It kind of looked like a cross between Elon Musk and a Cylon! And we don’t want to go THERE either!
And having mentioned HAL 9000 above, did you realize that there was a SEQUEL to 2001? 2010: The Year We Make Contact featured SAL 9000 (voiced by Candice Bergen) as the upgrde to HAL that did not quite meet factory specifications! LOL! The most obvious difference (no spoilers here!) is that SAL is a blue orb’!
And coming up to just a couple more examples! There are SO many, that I really did limit myself this time! I had previously written posts about favourite computers in all kinds of media at “Shall We Play a Game . . . or Fictional Computers” but that did not focus on anything but the computers themselves. This post is on their actual voices used! Okay, a small distinction! So that does mentioning a previous post count as … Product Placement or what! LOL!
War Games! Just go find it somewhere and have a great popcorn time! A young hacker breaks into a High Security computer, unknowingly trying out a ‘game’ called Global Thermonuclear War and … well, the use of the modem is hilarious! But the voice of WOPR is amazing! If it makes you think of Stephen Hawking …. no spoilers here! A great, great movie!
And I will never hear the end of it from all my colleagues if I don’t include those two wacky robots from a relatively unknown cult classic … C-3PO and R2-D2. Did you ever wonder WHY they are called … R2-D2 and C-3PO?
Perhaps the quintessential use of voice to convey language! C3PO is designed to be able to talk to ANYONE with his linguistics programming and R2D2 happily whistles, clicks, bings and we can all understand exactly what is going on! The classic straight man out of vaudeville humour and it works so well! Arguably the best parts of Star Wars are those two! Note: Yoda is NOT a computer! LOL!
All the voices mentioned above are in YouTube videos below. I hope I got them all! I might even do a sequel to this in a future post – there were many I have left off and they deserve a listening to as well!
!NEW!
The CALL Facility Furniture
HAS ARRIVED! !NEW!
All the new furniture has arrived in CALL! Many thanks to Marcus and Adam for arranging all of this! Adam was up on campus yesterday, social/physical distancing of course, putting the new furniture into CALL, and taking these photos too!
The students will certainly be in for a nice surprise when we are all back at UVic and their favourite lab now has spiffy furniture! We will work on the best layout and with wheels on the upright stations, students can move things around to suit their needs! I can hardly wait to get back to UVIC … for even more reasons than just new furniture!
Thanks everyone who helped out on spiffing up The CALL Facility for students so they can colllaborate and thrive in their studies even MORE!! And a comfy chair suits the bill!
Ah, those were the days! Where were YOU in ……. ’84!
I was just starting teaching in Calgary, and had started my long and illustrious ‘MacCriminal’ career by bluffing my way into Apple’s ‘Test Drive A Macintosh’ promotion! And the rest is hysteria, I mean ….. history!
Who needed more than 1MB of RAM, 1 floppy, 1 mouse, the single greatest clickety-clacky keyboard EVER invented …. and only a couple of nifty programs like MacWrite, MacDraw and MacPaint!!! I stopped using my Commodore-64 right then and THERE!!!!
A few great articles to take you down Memory Lane here:
Once, I included a funny math cartoon at the very END of a printed math test for my Grade 12 Math 31 (Advanced) class. This was during my Student Teaching year at U of Calgary.
Math teachers from my high school years … just by chance! What are the odds on that !!! Well, that is what statistics are for! LOL!
And that is about it for today! A busy day with some meetings, documents and workshops at the speed of Self Pace too! I might throw new stuff in later! You just never know! 
So it got me to wondering about how the Commodore became, at the time, the single best home computer EVER SOLD! And I came to the conclusion that … I don’t know why! LOL! Oh, well, maybe marketing has alot to do with it! Just look at 
The 
about it, and I am not sure it is installed on any computers at UVic anymore, with Office 365 kinda taking over … for free for students and staff! Which, by the way is a VERY GOOD THING!
And … if you got this far, then you have seen the movies! 
And a childhood favourite that I waited for each Sunday night was Robbie the Robot from 
And the 
Another TV show ahead of its time was 
All the voices mentioned above are in YouTube videos below. I hope I got them all! I might even do a sequel to this in a future post – there were many I have left off and they deserve a listening to as well!
