Tag: Language Lesson

Terrific Tuesday … already? Working From Home Humour!

Terrific Tuesday
. . . . already?
Working From Home Humour!

Working from home is like reading ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens ……

And yeah, a bit of both!

So today, a plethora (I like dictionary.com!) of comics, cartoons, YouTube and other appurtenances  (I like thesaurus.com too!)

I had started off with a theme of MS:Office and my long history with Excel, Word and PowerPoint. But I quickly found a far more interesting topic for today … Working From Home! I am forever the optimist (I hope!) and try to find the humour in most things (I try!) and quickly changed topics!

And today is a fairly busy day with some creative work in Teams for a Poll (Thanks to Kelly, Gary, Tomoyo and Heather!) and trying to be creative, relevant, funny, factual and learn a few new things every so often! Maybe this old dog CAN learn a few new tricks!

Some funny cartoons, websites and truly miscellaneous items for a quick post today.

Enjoy!

  1. Wrong Hands – Comic Strip
  2. Off the Mark – Pinterest
  3. The Work at Home Comic Strips
  4. What You Need to Know Before Using a Cartoon in Your Presentation
  5. Foxtrot – Comics
  6. Working From Home – Pinterest
  7. Tech Comics – Microsoft Office

As long as there are words out there, there will be Terrific Tuesdays!

ENJOY!

 TTFN!

And This Happened
BEFORE Covid! CLASSIC!

The Differences of
Working From Home vs Office

Work From Home
FAILS!

Work From Home
Bloopers

Working From Home
With Pets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b0yorOPHQE

 Our Favourite News Reporters
Working From Home Bloopers

      

Pandemic

Open Book Exams … or My Favourite Textbooks

Open Book Exams
. . . . or . . . .
My Favourite Textbooks

This may be the FIRST and ONLY blog post on the internet about … Favourite Textbooks! Textbooks are usually the bane of most students! LOL!

But I really enjoyed getting new textbooks, especially in Grade 12! For the first time, we had to venture to DOWNTOWN CALGARY to actually BUY AND OWN our textbooks! Previously, we were issued them, had to guard them throughout the semester and RETURN THEM at the end! But now, we could OWN THEM!

And what a great textbook for Grade 12 Math – ‘Modern Intermediate Algebra‘! And the trick was, to buy the book that had the ANSWERS IN THE BACK! Only a few of them DID have the answers, and I was lucky enough to get one of those! Quite an adventure for me at the time! 

And if you haven’t figured it out by now, I still have these textbooks! Yup, weird, but … I collect books of all kinds! A future post will be on REALLY OLD TEXTBOOKS that I have! 

The next 4 textbooks are all from when I attended the University of Calgary from 1975-1982. Yup, some gap years in there to travel, live and work in Banff and explore the world! Might sneak an old photo of me in there somewhere too! LOL!

And how boring – a book on .. evaluating student progress? And even more boring, THAT IS THE TITLE TOO – ‘Evaluating Student Progress’!

And here I thought I would finally find out all the tricks and secrets of passing exams … and for the most part, I did pick up some ideas, especially when my first job out of university was evaluating exams, something called Item Analysis! And it was fun! Basically, how does an exam actually MEASURE student knowledge! Yeah, boring, but at the time, I actually USED this textbook in a real life setting!

And then one of my All Time Favourite themes – STATISTICS titled ‘Elements of Statistics‘! All kinds of neat formulas, algorithms and magical numbers with REAL WORLD RESULTS! And for the first time – a new studying technique! We were allowed to bring in a small 4×6 recipe card with ANYTHING WE WANT WRITTEN ON IT! This was such a great learning tool, that I used it in all my future classes! This forces you to actually STUDY and WRITE DOWN anything you were not as confident with, thus FORCING YOU TO RECOGNIZE AND STUDY YOUR WEAK POINTS! And it worked flawlessly! (At least, for me!)

This has been a bit of a ‘Top 10 Favourite Textbooks‘ countdown, except only a ‘Top 5‘ of them! My bad! And the next 2 textbooks bring back fond memories … and some not so fond …. of courses I took … sometimes twice and three times! How about them apples!

The BEST stat course EVER was on games of chance! And the Instructor LIVED HIS TEXTBOOK – ‘Basic Probability and Applications‘! When introducing himself, he said he might be late for some Monday morning classes as he would be enroute BACK FROM LAS VEGAS as he spent most weekends there …. GAMBLING! That is one amazing course intro! And he had his own TEXTBOOK TOO!

And my FAVOURITE TEXTBOOK OF ALL TIME is entitled ‘Excursions Into Mathematics‘ for the exceedingly misnamed course ‘Elementary Mathematics From and Advanced Viewpoint‘!!!

I took this course
… THREE TIMES …
before I passed it!
HARDEST.COURSE.EVER!

First time was with a friend and BOTH of us dropped it at Christmas as it was just too freaking hard! Second time was with my entire Education Year colleagues (9 of us!) and the 10th student in the class dropped it too – and he was in Honours Math at the time! Why did HE drop it? It was lowering his GPA!

Finally, passed the course in the summer, and all I did was Math for a solid month, literally every day, and got a B+ on it! YAY! The Instructor apologized to me .. I was literally ONE POINT AWAY FROM AN A- …. but I did not care. I HAD PASSED THE COURSE and could now graduate! WHEW!

Still, the textbook is awesome and even though I may have ONCE understood many classical concepts – it is like Quantum Physics, another favourite topic! I may not understand ANY of it … but it is as close to MAGIC as we will ever get in this crazy world/universe/multi-verse we live in! LOL!


Oh, and whenever there was a so-called ‘Open Book Exam‘ – they were the toughest exams in the history of education. You better KNOW YOUR STUFF, because if you spent the time looking for the answer in your ‘textbook’, you wasted so much time, you never finished the exam!

And as Steve Jobs liked to say … ‘… one more thing….’!

My favourite math book was my ‘Mathematical Handbook‘ that had all kinds of formulas and simplified explanations of my favourite theorems and numbers! Served me well all through High School and University!

And one more …. one more thing! If I didn’t include a dictionary … ANY DICTIONARY in this list, then I would be remiss! I had ve saved many of my old dictionaries, including my pocket French/English dictionary, but I now tend to use dictionary.com and thesaurus.com on an almost daily basis! Big thumbs up to both of those sites!

 

 

Enjoy!

  1. 20+ Funny Textbook Doodles That Are So Clever, Teachers Won’t Be Mad

And not that many funny extra sites out there. I found most of them quite rude and in bad taste and many offensive. The only funny one is above. And just doodles on existing images in each book. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes … it rains! (Ask me about THAT quote, which literally comes out of … right field!)

And same with videos. Lots of bad taste ones out there, sand offensive ones, so today, only a compilation of Steve Jobs ‘One More Thing‘ below, to wax nostalgic today!

As long as there are words out there, there will be a site that Google finds!! 

    ENJOY!
            
   TTFN!

Steve Jobs …..
History of One More Thing

 

 

Throwback Thursday … A Stroll Down RAM-ory Lane

Throwback Thursday
A Stroll Down
RAM-ory Lane

How about some computer cartoons and other media today! Maybe some old ones that make us chuckle from where we have come from! And a busy day today too! LOL!

To start, my favourite scene from Captain Marvel! Many of us from The Computer Help Desk went together to see this movie together (Thanks again Marcela!) and this scene was THE funniest for me!

Remember, it takes place in the 1980’s and Captain Marvel is from an incredibly technologically advanced planet! And even today … I often get to use the classic phrase … ‘It’s loading“! LOL!

The single greatest comic in the history of HISTORY is Calvin & Hobbes. And that is an understatement! So many years ago and still relevant and still … Calvin & Hobbes! The official Calvin & Hobbes site is here.

And what would a Bog Blog Post be without some Homer Simpson memes!

     

   

And some Classic Bloom County from WAY BACK WHEN that many of you probably will never have heard of! My first car was a Black Subaru that I named … OPUS!

And Foxtrot always had a befuddled Dad playing around with their newest iFruit computer! The usual assortment of familh members, all with varying degrees of computer expertise from genius to … less than genius!

Enjoy!

  1. XKCD
  2. 38 of the best xkcd comics about the internet, computers and programming
  3. The Definitive Collection of XKCD Comics for Programmers
  4. Computer Comics – Pinterest
  5. IT Comics – Pinterest
  6. 7 tech comics that will put a big smile on your face
  7. Dilbert – yes, mentioned here but WORTHY OF A BOG BLOG POST DEDICATED JUST TO DILBERT!!!!

As long as there are words out there, there will be a site that Google finds!! 

    ENJOY!
            
   TTFN!

And then some random-ish comics that are currently located on … The World Wide Web! LOL!

“Then the hard drive says to the floppy, 110010001110011…”
“It’s a fantastic computer! It’s so old that none of today’s hackers know how to hack it!”

Computer Sale.

 

Cool Picture . . . or Infographics and Language Learning

Cool Picture
or
Infographics and Language Learning

A picture is worth 1000 words. Never more accurate with Infographics! And INFOGRAPHICS ARE about words AND languages.

FULL Disclosure: I have zero artistic talent!

DOUBLE Full Disclosure: I once took an art class and … could barely sharpen my sketching charcoal!

I just missed out on a course about Infographics at the library yesterday. I am hoping they offer it again! And just what ARE Infographics? Well, according to Wikipedia:

Infographics (a clipped compound of “information” and “graphics”) are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly.[1][2] They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends.[3][4] Similar pursuits are information visualization, data visualization, statistical graphics, information design, or information architecture.[2] Infographics have evolved in recent years to be for mass communication, and thus are designed with fewer assumptions about the readers’ knowledge base than other types of visualizations.[5] Isotypes are an early example of infographics conveying information quickly and easily to the masses.[6]

All those cool combinations of statistics, images, ideas, trends and INFORMATION in one, easily understood picture! Literally, a picture is worth 1000 words!

I have liberally saturated some posts with Simpsons gifs and memes, and I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to find some Simpson infographics! LOL!

   

But why use Infographics? Basically, and I am truly over-simplifying, but … we areALL  students of VISUAL learning! Visuals can improve learning by over 400%! AND ‘The average person can recall 65 percent of visual information ten days later (only 10% of what they heard)‘. Those are astonishing numbers for success in learning … ANYTHING and EVERYTHING!

Confucious was right ….”I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

The topic of student teaching (practicums) came up at Digital Coffee today and the best and most powerful teaching lessons I remember, not only when I was a student teacher, but also AS A STUDENT, were always the most visually stimulating, interesting and sometimes, confusing lessons! But their impact is long-term, at least on me!

Oh, the stories that … could be a future OAC post about teaching ‘BG’ …. that is short for … BEFORE GOOGLE! LOL! Or even ‘BtI’ – Before the Internet!

Yup, I grew up when Amazon was ….. a river! And Social Media required … leaving the house!

And one of the most famous of ALL Infographics is something ALL of you have studied in school, potentially from about Grade 6 on … maybe even earlier – Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, 1869!

And I also discovered some ANIMATED Infographics, which takes visual learning to a whole new level! Okay, so the last one is a .. penguin! LOL! I bet you will remember THAT one, if only because it is such a black and white issue! 

Click on each one to open in a new tab.

Visual Learners
Muscles
Penguin

And the usual assortment of recently searched interesting links, videos and other cool stuff – but beware, you may now have an overwhelming urge to discover a new element and add it to the Periodic Table!

Enjoy!

  1. Infographic – Wikipedia
  2. 5 Language Infographics
  3. All the World Languages in One Visualization
  4. Infographics on Canada’s official languages
  5. Infographic: Benefits of Language Learning
  6. The Best Language Infographics & Interactive Tools on the Web
  7. 6 Language Infographics for National Foreign Language Week
  8. National Foreign Language Week
  9. 50+ Fascinating Language Facts You Didn’t Know
  10. INFOGRAPHIC: The world’s most spoken languages and where they’re spoken
  11. Infographic: A World Full of Languages
  12. The World’s Most Spoken Languages
  13. Language infographics – Pinterest
  14. The Simpsons: 30 Years Young – Infographic
  15. 6 Reasons Why I Won’t Look at Your Infographic
  16. Why infographics matter in the classroom
  17. 12 Groundbreaking Infographics That Changed the World
  18. A Collection Of The Best Infographics
  19. Life before Google: What was it like?
  20. 15 Examples of How Different Life Was Before The Internet

As long as there are words out there, there will be interesting topics! 

    ENJOY!
            
   TTFN!

 

Using Visual Language
in Infographics

Infographics
How to Learn a New Language

10 Easiest Languages
to Learn

Most Popular
Programming Languages to Learn
1965 – 2019

 

 

 

Terrific Tuesday and and BONUS Cartoons and Posters

Terrific Tuesday
and BONUS
Posters and Cartoons!

Back from a few days off! Lot to catch up on and rejoin Teams! Tuesdays will have a ‘Terrific’ Theme of just about anything … TERRIFIC!!

I have been planning a retro look at all the Apple/Mac operating systems since the first Mac, but might do that later on this week, or just … later! For now, some computer cartoons, language posters and other random chuckles!

But will include a bit of a preview with one YouTube video about the history of Mac Operating Systems!

As long as there are words out there, there will be interesting topics! 

    ENJOY!
            
   TTFN!

Evolution of Mac OS
(Mac OS 1.0 – Mac OS X 10.11)

 

Throwback Thursday and Even MORE Favourite Posters and Cartoons

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!

  1. Einstein Quotes from Good Reads
  2. Itchy Feet – The Travel and Language Comic
  3. Doctor Who – BBC
  4. Comics Kingdom
  5. History of Computers
  6. The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English
  7. Dilbert
  8. XKCD
  9. Dictionary and Thesaurus (I use almost every single day!)
  10. 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!

 

Remember Aldus PageMaker . . . or Desktop Publishing

Remember Aldus PageMaker
or
Desktop Publishing

Excel might have put the Mac on everyone’s radar, but PageMaker put the Mac on everyone’s DESK!! SPOILER ALERT – I once went to a demo by Microsoft unveiling a new product …. EXCEL 1.0 ON THE MAC!

FULL Disclosure: My first thought on using Excel was for keeping track of … HOCKEY POOLS!

DOUBLE Full Disclosure: And the first PageMaker project I worked on … was for Musical Scores! And I can’t carry a tune in a bag .. but I could print out the concert songs!

Desktop Publishing was THE hot concept in the 1980s! But I was doing the “yet to be named”, Desktop Publishing, even BEFORE it became a buzzword application! Yes, I formally declare that I now claim to have invented Desktop Publishing! But I chose to release it into the free range, organic wild and thus everyone benefits to Infinity … AND BEYOND!

VIC-20
Commodore 64

My first teaching job after graduating was quite unique – I helped to run a small computer classroom of VIC-20 and Commodore 64 computers, teaching a module of Computer Literacy for adult students. There were minimal course requirements, other than .. computer literacy! I was literally designing courses, teaching them and re-designing them ON THE FLY!  I was doing this during the day at my regular job and then doing it AGAIN AT NIGHT for what was very similar to what Continuing Studies is now at UVIC! It was absolutely thrilling and terrifying … AT THE SAME TIME! Good times … good times!

So, faced with NO curriculum, NO textbook, NO workbook and … NO INTERNET – I had to improvise on a daily basis … actually more of an HOURLY BASIS! Once I found out I could DESIGN AND ‘PUBLISH’ my own resources in-house – Desktop Publishing was born!

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!

They were all tailored for the academic units I worked for! I literally used cut and paste OLD SCHOOL with scissors and tape, cutting out cartoons, printing text on dot matrix printers and handing a final mock-up version to the Printing Department in the basement! Then and only then I could exercise final creative editorial decisions such as .. colour of the front cover and colour of the magic coils to bind them all! The magic of double-sided tape is severely under-rated!

A few titles are below and you can click on each one to get a larger image in a new tab. But come back here!

CCIS Computer Class Workbook
YTO Computer Literacy Handbook
Business Education Computer Literacy Instructor’s Course Handbook
ESL Teacher’s Operation Manual
Hotel and Restaurant Projects Handbook
Hotel and Restaurant Computer Literacy Student Handbook
SpeedScript Manual

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fast Forward a few years to working at UVic in  the relatively new CALL Facility and Desktop Publishing has a brand new KILLER APP – ALDUS PAGEMAKER! And then it became ADOBE PAGEMAKER! Nothing like re-branding a product after it is bought out!

And how did I get involved in even MORE ‘Adventures in Desktop Publishing’? I was the only one who knew how to use a Macintosh at the time – a screaming fast Mac II!

And how did I actually LEARN how to use PageMaker at the time? I had a Secret Plan which I will now share with you! I was given about 42 academic papers to be published. And they literally came in on paper, floppies (Mac/WIN), 5.25″ floppy and in every possible format at the time – text, Word, WordPerfect, email, etc. My only recourse, which proved successful, was to pre-select which paper to work on FIRST!

I ranked all the papers from what I thought was EASIEST to HARDEST and jumped into the deep end of the Apple Laserwrite Toner Pool! AND IT WORKED!

I taught myself one new technique, one new feature, one new .. SOMETHING with each and every new submission that required special editing! Image placement, borders, indents, importing, saving, data recovery and the single most important feature I already knew – BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!

It may seem trivial now in the age of 128G  USB thumbdrives, but I only had a single CD-ROM burner to make backups on CD! And so it would take about an hour to prepare a weekly, or sometimes daily, backup to make sure nothing was ever lost!

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!!! And that includes INVENTING THE CALL FACILITY TOO!

TRIPLE Full Disclosure: Mary hired me way back in the Fall of 1989 and Peter had hired Mary only a few months earlier too! And the rest is history!

If you were to go up to a current generation of digitally saavy and internet trained students from birth, I bet they would not have even HEARD of the concept of ‘Desktop Publishing’! But OH, do they know everything about social media, Insta-everything, searching and RELYING on the internet for education, training and careers! And that is a VERY GOOD THING!

Students can whip up an absolutely jaw-dropping webpage with so many applications (computer, phone, tablet) that I won’t even bother listing them. There are websites that help you make websites! And companies that specialize in publishing with free software! You can design and print your own book in a fraction of the time it took me!

Absolutely astonishing! It took me 6 months the first time I put together the CCALL2 proceedings. And about half that time, the SECOND proceedings! I am definitely ‘Old School’ – digitally!

And the usual assortment of recently searched interesting links, videos and other cool stuff – but beware, you will probably never ever use PageMaker …. but you never know!

 

Enjoy!

  1. Desktop Publishing – Wikipedia
  2. Adobe PageMaker – Wikipedia
  3. Aldus – Wikipedia
  4. Aldus Pagemaker 1985
  5. 30 Years Ago, Aldus PageMaker Changed Life on Planet Earth
  6. Aldus PageMaker 5.x
  7. Aldus PageMaker 1
  8. Aldus PageMaker: The First Widely-Used Desktop Publishing Program
  9. Aldus Pagemaker: The Mac’s Savior?
  10. Aldus PageMaker Introduced
  11. Aldus Pagemaker
  12. Four reasons the LaserWriter mattered
  13. Apple Laserwriter – Wikipedia
  14. List of Apple printers – Wikipedia

As long as there are words out there, there will be interesting topics! 

    ENJOY!
            
   TTFN!

 

“If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”

 

 

72 Short Cut Key
Adobe PageMaker

History of Desktop Publishing

History of Desktop Publishing (DTP)

The Computer Chronicles
Desktop Publishing Part I (1986)

The Computer Chronicles
Desktop Publishing Part II (1986)

The Dawn of Desktop Publishing
Computerphile

The Apple IIC and Imagewriter II
Desktop Publishing in the 1980s

The Font Wars
Postscript, TrueType, the Mac
and the Success of Desktop Publishing

 

“Your son carved his initials in his wooden classroom desk and argued he was doing desktop publishing.”

Terrific Tuesday and and More Favourite Posters and Cartoons

Terrific Tuesday
and More Favourite
Posters and Cartoons!

Another very busy day this morning! I started with a different OAC Bog Blog Post about Desktop Publishing!

But soon, we were TEAMing more test scripts for Adam! I am testing scripts in Mail using macOS Catalina  So the Desktop Publishing Bog Blog will be tomorrow … unless more stuff comes up! And a full CHD Training Session after lunch too! AWESOME!

And just a peek at a Desktop Publishing cartoon too! And, so true … so very, very true!

So some fun posters and cartoons over the past few years to round out the day and keep my daily OAC Bog Blog post going!

Sometimes the image has to be reduced in visible size, to meet the installed theme here. Just click on the images and a bigger, original sized graphic will appear in a new tab.

 


 

Throwback Thursday and Some Favourite Posters and Cartoons

Throwback Thursday
Some Favourite
Posters and Cartoons!

A really long day, intensive TEAMS work testing out Mail scripts and TOTES THANKS to all my TEAMS-mates for helping out!

So some fun posters and cartoons over the past few years to round out the day and keep my daily OAC Bog Blog post going!

 

 

 

Shall We Play a Game . . . or Fictional Computers

Shall We Play a Game
or
Fictional Computers

None of these computers actually exist except in the imaginations of the authors! SPOILER ALERT – hard to distinguish between fictional computers and Artificial Intelligence – so …. no critics and besides …. my blog!

Full Disclosure: I have collected and read science fiction for most of my life and consider The Matrix to be a documentary, not a movie! LOL!

DOUBLE Full Disclosure: As far as these OAC Bog Blog posts go …. ‘I’ll be back’!

So I WILL mix media here, including movies, television and literature! 

One of my favourite movie computers is WOPR (pronounced ‘WHOPPER’ in WarGames from 1983! Think about it – a movie BEFORE Apple invented … THE MACINTOSH!

A teenage hacker finds the backdoor password to a Top 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!

Even ‘The Avengers’ has made a sly reference to it from Black Widow and Captain America!

Shall we play a game?

In the scene where the Black Widow boots up SHIELD’s supercomputer from a bygone era, she asks Captain America, “Shall we play a game?”, with Captain America replying, “Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?” This is a reference to a line from WarGames, a 1983 Cold War sci-fi film

So as to destroy ANY sense of mystery or surprises, my favourite science fiction computer is named ‘Obie’ from Jack L. Chalker’s ‘Well World‘ series.

Obie is one of the rare fictional computers that actually are at times, more human than humans. Obie is kind, smart, confused and self-aware. SPOILER – he was ‘killed’, then came back and then …. one of the best parts of this series! Check it out! 

Yeah, not many of you have probably heard of these books, but they are 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!

Chalker was a PROLIFIC author, but the first book in the series, ‘Midnight at the Well of Souls‘ then you will be hooked for life on ALL of his books! AND THERE ARE MANY!

Another helpful computer is HOLMES IV  (Mike), in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress‘.

Okay sure, he helped a lunar revolution but he has a wicked sense of humour and becomes friends with Mannie! And for why HOLMES IV is referred to as ‘Mike’, well let’s just say it was part of Heinlein’s wicked sense of humour!

The most well known computers in film include HAL-9000 (2001), ‘The Matrix’, the Holodeck and Data (Star Trek), Cerebro (X-Men), Skynet (Terminator), Arnim Zola (Captain America), Jarvis/Ultron/Vision (Iron Man(s)+), Mother (Alien) and Deep Thought (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and there are so many more in the popular genre, both recently and for many years. Here is a List of Fictional Computers , that is also at the bottom of this post.

But I want to point out a few obscure computers, such as:

KITT (Knight Rider) in Knight Rider – Elon Musk has NOTHING on this vehicle! Snarky, sarcastic AND can catch criminals too! Basically the Love Child of a Cylon and a TESLA!  I will buy the first vehicle from TESLA that can do this! (Batmobile aside…..)

Colossus in Colossus! This computer was Skynet before Skynet! It ws the first of a trilogy and was one of the first science fiction books I read AND collected as a kid! It was even turned into a movie, Colossus: The Forbin Project! One of those ‘so bad it is good!’ kind of movies – if only for the technology!

And perhaps one of the most obscure computers comes from the first ever release by, of all people, George Lucas!

Yes, THAT George Lucas famous for that Star thing series! OMM in THX1138 by George Lucas! It was basically his thesis from USC and I remember GOING to this movie in 1971 and coming out thinking this was the weirdest movie I had ever seen! But, he ended up making a few more lesser know movies too! LOL!  

THX 1138 OMM – On the other hand, maybe too much benevolence is a bad thing, too. Before “Star Wars,” even before “American Graffiti,” George Lucas created this highly experimental and hallucinatory filmed dystopia, all the more striking for being done on a small budget (exactly $777,777.77) with mostly found locations. His sterile and drug-controlled future world has one spiritual dimension, a sort of cybernetic father-confessor figure named OMM, with whom one communes in a chapel that resembles a phone booth. The feedback one received from OMM was reminiscent of the old AI program ELIZA, where soothing generalities and “but what about you?”-style questions sufficed to convince some people an actual human being was at the other end.

And one last one that you might never have heard of from the SEQUEL to 2001! Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2010: Odyssey Two and it was turned into a movie as well, with SAL-9000 the ‘upgrade’ to HAL-9000 who had terrible social skills. But was always willing to go on a ‘bicycle built for two‘ – perhaps the first ever Smart Car technology?

And the usual assortment of recently searched interesting links, videos and other cool stuff – but beware, most of the computers are .. bad, very bad!

Enjoy!

  1. List of fictional computers – Wikipedia
  2. Holodeck – Wikipedia
  3. WarGames – Wikipedia
  4. 7 (Fictional) Computers That Changed Our World
  5. In Pictures: 30 Famous Fictional Computers
  6. The top 50 robots and AI computers in the movies
  7. The 19 Best Artificial Intelligence Characters in Movies
  8. 12 Fictional Supercomputers I Hope Never Materialize
  9. The top 10 coolest supercomputers in movies (with video)
  10. 12 of the Most Evil Movie Computers
  11. Ghosts in the Machine: Female Computers in Science Fiction and History
  12. HAL’s Pals: Top 10 Evil Computers
  13. Computers In Science Fiction – Novels and Short Stories
  14. Badass Fantasy Machines: 6 Most Influential Computers in Sci-Fi
  15. Scenes from WarGames (1983)
  16. 7 Things You Might Have Missed During Captain America: The Winter Soldier

As long as there are words out there, there will be interesting topics! 

    ENJOY!
            
   TTFN!

 

 

 

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