Tag: Nostalgia

Throwback Thursday . . . Language Quotes!

Throwback Thursday
. . . or . . .
Language Quotes!
(and a bit of nostalgia!)

Learning another language is like becoming another person. One of my favourite quotes, ever!

Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami

You can take the boy out of The CALL Facility, but you can’t take The CALL Facility out of the boy!

I have been around for a few days … since October of 1989! Whoa, that seems like yesterday to me! A future post will have some slightly grainy images of what CALL once looked like  … well before numerous renovations (scheduled and unscheduled!) and before The Great Flood of 2015! That was some kind of day! There are a few images in a previous post, which includes a pdf of exactly what CALL is!

CALL Jeopardy: REBOOT VERSION

And the most recent version of my CALL Jeopardy file is here. ALL of the files are there too, including old photos of CALL, the Great Flood and the rebooted CALL!

 ‘State of the Art’ in 1989!

An earlier post mentioned the 30th Anniversary of The CALL Facility! Technology certainly has changed!

And changes are still coming! Just AFTER we started working remotely from home, NEW FURNITURE ARRIVED FOR THE CALL FACILITY!

I was VERY BRIEFLY back at CHD earlier this month, to upgrade my remote laptop, and went in to look at the new furniture … AND IT LOOKS FANTASTIC! I sure hope we can get back to using our facilities, classrooms and ALL OF UVic soon, but in a safe, VERY SAFE manner!

A fairly busy day today, so some quick quotes about learning languages. I also include quotes in each slide when I give my CALL Facility orientation, so you can click HERE to see those too! They are current to January 2020!

Mostly, these are new, but there are a few favourites in here too!

And some Albert Einstein quotes too! After all … on the Quantum Level … everyone speaks the same language … and other magical things like that! Yeah, too many Marvel movies clunking around my head! But that is a GOOD THING!

All the usual  Daily Links and YouTube videos are after the language quotes below!

Enjoy!

  1. Language Learning Quotes – GoodReads
  2. 50 of the Best Quotes to Learn a Foreign Language
  3. 25+ Inspirational Quotes About Language
  4. The 5 Best Inspirational Language Quotes
  5. 10 Inspirational Quotes for Language Learners
  6. Light Up Your Brain with 10 Quotes About Language Learning
  7. Inspirational Quotes for Language Learners
  8. 42 Awesome Inspirational Quotes for Language Learners
  9. Language Learning Quotes

As long as I have words at my disposal … … and Google, there will be
Throwback Thursdays!

 

ENJOY!

 TTFN!

 

Top 20 Quotes
About Language

Inspirational Quotes About Learning
A New Second Language

Quotes About
Learning Languages

Learning Quotes About
Learning a Second Language

Language Learning Quotes

Inspirational Quotes
for English Learners

Language Quote #9

The Best Quotes From
Albert Einstein

Top 20 Amazing Quotes on Patience
From Famous People

 

 

Pandemic

 

Where Are My Keys . . . or . . . Forgotten Computers and Software

Where Are My Keys
. . . or . . .
Forgotten Computers and Software

Where are my car keys? I can just ping them, right? Ah, if Life were that easy. Wait a minute, some car keys DO have bluetooth and only need to be close to the car to open and start it! Remember when car keys were actually … KEYS! LOL!

Full  Disclosure – I still have car keys that look, act and FEEL like car keys! Most now have bluetooth and all you have to do is be NEAR the door, NEAR the car and the keys open and start the car! Ah, the good old days of fiddling with multiple keys … good times, good times.

So how many computers have YOU worked on and have … forgotten about! I had a post awhile ago about just that topic, ‘Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL“.

Whether you bought them or used them at school or work, there are probably a dozen or more … Forgotten Computers and Software over the years. Me? Maybe a couple of dozen computers and many, many more software programs or applications!

ENIAC
ENIAC

Remember when the ENTIRE COMPUTER was one huge modular unit! And the very first computers I worked on at U of Calgary, were either hidden from site and you presented your punched cards (FORTRAN!) and waited for  the output!

Then when I started taking ‘Computers in Education’ courses, I was handed the keys to The Vault! I had access to the ‘teletype’ room where I could code in BASIC and run the output on rolls of newsprint! Good times, good times!

ENIAC
 ENIAC

The first program I worked on was for Probablity with a simulation of pulling coloured balls out of a ‘Greecian Urn’. And it even printed out an ASCII Greecian Urn! Yeah, I have a printout, somewhere in  ‘The Garage’ and will look for it one day! LOL!

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a lecture given by Grace Hopper. And you might rightly say … WHO? Well, she was a TITAN OF COMPUTER SCIENCE! And she gave us all a … NANOSECOND at the  end of her lecture! Wait, what?

She concluded her lecture (best lecture of all time!) with how  she explained to her Non-Techie Supervisor, how fast light travels and how that impacts any lag or delay with satellite communications! She brought out lengths of ROPE to demonstrate how far light travels in a second and working her way down to a NANOSECOND or a BILLIONTH OF A SECOND! Turns out, it is about a foot!

Grace Hopper Nanosecond
    Grace Hopper Nanosecond

And she pulled out about 100 small lengths of multi-coloured wire and spread them on the desk for us to take as we walked out. Well, I have never seen such a rush of people to get their ‘Grace Hopper Nanosecond‘! Fortunately I was able to get one for myself! Unfortunately, it has disappeared in my many moves over the years! But what a memory for me!

And I bet I can name a MASSIVE computer related piece of ‘software’ that almost everyone will have forgotten about … Y2K! And if you have NEVER  heard of that term … then you are probably not much older than 20 years old!

Y2K refers to a software ‘glitch’ that did not take into account the calendar year 2000 in most computer code developed between 1980-1999. Basically, EVERYTHING!

Typically, amongst other problems, only 2 digits were used to indicate the calendar year, thus ’89’ and ’99’ were used for ‘1989’ and ‘1999’ in databases, calculations, spreadsheets, banks .. YOU NAME IT! So when the decade ended and we entered the year 2000 … uh-oh! Right back to the year 1900!!!!

I remember staying up, hoisting a glass of champagne and welcoming … ‘The End of the World’!!! But, or more punny, ‘Byte‘ nothing happened! LOL!

So that brings up … Y3K! LOL! I sure hope I am still around to toast 3000!

Grace Hopper Bug
Grace Hooper Bug

And this post quickly turned to Grace Hopper, didn’t it! I love telling people this story AND most people have never heard of Grace Hopper! AND an even BETTER Grace Hopper story! She is credited with the first EVER case of ‘debugging’ a computer …. LITERALLY!

She  crawled into a computer …  it  was that big! And she found a relay switch, an actual MOVING PART INSIDE A COMPUTER and a moth had become ‘trapped’ beneath the lever! She then proceeded to ….’debug’ the computer and documented it! That document, moth and all, are in the Smithsonian now!

I found SO many articles, images, cartoons and resources while doing my usual bit of research for my post, I have more links below than ever before!

Articles on ENIAC, UNIVAC, Personal Computers, COBOL and most especially, Grace Hopper. Take a trip through time, wax nostalgic, and think back to when a computer took up an entire room, if not an entire building!

Oh, and if you see an old, really old, Apple Computer at a garage sale … maybe think about buying it! It could turn out to be this one! worth almost HALF A MILLION DOLLARS!

What you hold in your hands now is not just a phone – it is the FUTURE that visionaries like Grace Hopper could only DREAM of would eventually be possible!

And as Arthur C. Clarke described in ‘Clarke’s Three Laws” at Wikipedia:

    1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
    2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
    3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke's 3rd Law
                                                     Clarke’s 3rd Law

We truly live in a Magical Time now!


Enjoy the Magic!

Grace Hopper
         Grace Hopper

 

  1. Personal Computer – Wikipedia
  2. Grace Hopper – Wikipedia
  3. Five Fast Facts About Technologist Grace Hopper
  4. Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992): A legacy of innovation and service
  5. Grace Hopper To Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!
  6. Nanoseconds Associated with Grace Hopper
  7. Untold History of AI: Invisible Women Programmed America’s First Electronic Computer
  8. 10 Oldest Computers in The World
  9. 10 Colossal Old Computers That Changed History
  10. Timeline of Computer History
  11. Computer History Museum – YouTube
  12. 11 Mind-Blowing Collectible Computers That Will Make You Nostalgic!
  13. Acorn, Sinclair, Amstrad and Epson: 10 computers that time forgot
  14. Rare Apple Macintosh prototype up for auction
  15. Ultra-rare Apple-1 sells for the price of 8 Mac Pro computers
  16. The Vintage Mac Museum – Rare Items
  17. Computer Collectibles
  18. Andrew Booth and the Forgotten Computers
  19. Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer
  20. The forgotten software that inspired our modern world
  21. PC Pioneers: The Forgotten World of S-100 Bus Computers
  22. The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems
  23. Alan Turing’s Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science
  24. 10 Ancient computers that are still in use today
  25. How Forgotten Legacy Systems Could Be Your Downfall
  26. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today
  27. Avoid the Trash Heap: 15 Great Uses for an Old PC
  28. I Wrote This on a 30-Year-Old Computer – And it was awesome!
  29. What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use?
  30. COBOLed together: the oldest legacy systems still in use today
  31. Meet the world’s oldest computer program that’s still in use today
  32. Brush up your COBOL: Why is a 60 year old language suddenly in demand?
  33. 5 ancient software programs we refuse to give up
  34. The 10 oldest, significant open-source programs
  35. Legacy systems: Too old to die?
  36. How Government Agencies Walk the Line with Legacy Software
  37. We care about old computers
  38. Candorville – Comics

As long as I have ‘The Garage’ there will be forgotten and old computers stored there . . . and magical OAC posts!

 

ENJOY!

 TTFN!

 

Computer Pioneers – Part 1

ENIAC – The First Computer

Apollo’s Forgotten Computer
The LVDC

Forgotten Fun
Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

Tano Dragon 64
Unboxing

Panasonic JR-200U

1983 Radio Shack TRS80
Color Computer 2

Tandy 1000

Sinclair ZX81 – British Computer

Why Apple Products
Use 30 Year Old Software

Evolution of Laptops
1975 – 2020

Top 10 Horribly Outdated
Technologies Still in Use Today

Quantum Computers
Animated

      

“Then the hard drive says to the floppy, 110010001110011…”
‘This is what people had to use before they got antennae.’

        

Pandemic

 

Famous Computer Quotes … or What Could Go Wrong!

Famous Computer Quotes
. . . . or . . . .
What Could Go Wrong!

Since the advent of computers and digital technology, there have been some funny, outrageous, prophetic and downright WRONG quotes about computers and technology. Let’s go down that winding path this morning!

I will just intersperse quotes with some images of quotes too! A mishmash of data, graphics and historical perspectives!


“Computers in the future may weigh no more than one-and-a-half tonnes.”
     – Popular Mechanics, 1949

“I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last the year.”
     – Chief Business Editor, Prentice Hall, 1957

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
     – Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

“There is no reason anyone in the right state of mind will want a computer in their home.”
     – Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977.


“Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop.”
     – Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
     – Brook’s Law

“An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.”
     – Anonymous

“BUG, n.: An undesirable, poorly-understood undocumented feature.”
     – The Devil’s Dictionary to Computer Studies

“640k is enough for anyone, and by the way, what’s a network?”
     – William Gates III, President of Microsoft Corporation, 1984.

“Microcomputers are the tool of the 80’s. BASIC is the language that all of them use. So the sooner you learn BASIC, the sooner you will understand the microcomputer revolution.”
     – 30 Hour BASIC Standard, 1981.

I want to change the world but they don’t give me root access.
     – Unknown

And these are just a few of my favourite ones! There are literally hundreds of amazing quotes out there, and I as usual, have put a bunch of links below for you to search, should you need that perfect quote about computers!

The single best quote, ever, and ever so true even now, came from John F. Kennedy …..


Enjoy!

  1. Computer Quotes
  2. Top 10 Computer Quotes
  3. 101 More Great Computer Quotes
  4. Top 20 Computer Quotes
  5. Ted Nelson Computer Quotes
  6. 776 Computer Quotes
  7. Computer Quotes – Good Reads
  8. 21 of the Greatest Computer Quotes Ever
  9. 11 Best Computer Quotes
  10. History of CPU Architecture


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


And videos too!

ENJOY!
     
TTFN!

Top 20 Quotes
About Computers

Top 10 Computer Quotes

Top 15 Quotes
About Computers

Computer Quotes

Top 10 Computer Quotes

Best Famous Quotes
on Life and Computer

Top 20 Quotes About
Computers and Technology

10 Quotes About
Computers and Technology

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

 

 

The CALL Facility – 30th Anniversary!

🎇 1989 to 2019 🎇
30th Anniversary of
The CALL Facility!

The CALL Facility was ….. UNLEASHED ….. upon an unsuspecting University of  Victoria audience in September of 1989!

And the rest ….. is history! Having survived multiple renovations, multiple floods (The Great Flood of 2015 was the worst!) and multiple MEGA-technological advances ….. The CALL Facility is still here!

Throughout 2019 I will have ‘Retro‘ posts, showing how much has changed in The CALL Facility! And starting with the original ‘newspaper’ announcement of the opening of ‘The Language Centre’ complete with memorable quotes such as:

” ….. one is reminded of a scene from Star Trek.”

“….. a screen is lowered from the ceiling.”

“….. combination of networked audio, video and computer equipment.”

“….. and eventually CD-ROM, an emerging technology which allows huge quantities of computer information to be stored on a single compact disc,”

and my favourite …..

“….. there may be a temptation to use a starship transporter system to get there …..”

Enjoy reading the first ever article about The CALL Facility, and more classic ‘technology’ quotes below, as we were just a part of, at the time, “The Language Centre“!

WOW! This was ‘State of the Art’ in 1989!