Days of Yore Post-Credits: Video Games

You know how the past few years, certain movies have enticed you to stay through the credits by including a scene at the end of the credits? It often reveals something you need to know for the sequel. (Pro tip: Pirates of the Caribbean and Marvel movies are never over until the credits have finished rolling!) Think of this post like that, except that this isn't necessarily important to understand for future blogs. But you never know!

Image by Sergey Nivens on Adobe Stock

As you may recall, I covered some aspects of video games in my post on computers, but there is more! We had games on floppy disks back in the '80s. When friends came over, sometimes they brought their games on floppy disks to play together. I loved playing games like Digger, Carmen Sandiego, Mario Bros, Arkanoid, Galaxian, Tetris, Pac-Man and others. I learned how to play Solitaire on the computer and have only played it a couple times with real cards.

At that time, most of those games could be played using the keyboard (particularly the arrow keys, and certain numbers and letters). Some could also be played using a joystick, a small hand-held device with a knob that looked a bit like a gear shift in a car. Joysticks were generally pretty cool, but could be frustrating as well. For example, if I accidentally moved the knob in the wrong direction playing Tetris, the blocks would drop where I didn't want them to drop. As I grew up with a tremor, involuntary movements from time to time could be annoying. (That can also be annoying at times when trying to hold a camera still to take a picture.)

Space Invaders
Jason Kotecki
Oil on canvas
Used with permission

Occasionally we would go to a video arcade where we could play games on bigger machines. Depending on the nature of the game, we would be standing and pressing buttons or a joystick knob built into the machine, or we might be sitting on a motorbike built into the machine. Or we could be seated and turning a steering wheel. Games like Duck Hunt involved a toy gun that you pointed at ducks as they crossed the screen. Last time I was at the Seattle Museum of Flight, I used a flight simulator that works very much like an arcade game, where you try to land a plane smoothly.

As I grew older, smaller devices became more popular, such as Game Boy, Nintendo DS series and others. There were also some tiny ones like Tamagotchi, which involved a digital animal or character that the user could feed and nurture.

Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro on Unsplash

Some of my friends in school got into Call of Duty, which I haven't tried. One job where I worked, a bunch of my coworkers were into World of Warcraft. As I am told it is very time-consuming, I haven't gotten into that one, but I'm curious. My brother Aaron works for Blizzard, who makes it. I did a seasonal job testing the French versions of games at Nintendo in 2009. That was when I got to know the Wii. This is a bigger console, and includes a board that you put pressure on in different places. The console also has other components. I tested Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort, which had exercises you could do on the board and it kept score. The player was represented on the screen by a customizable character called a Mii. I also tested the New Super Mario Bros Wii, which didn't use a Mii due to Mario, Luigi and Toad already being there. I then got to know Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks on the much smaller Nintendo DSi. I'm not sure why I didn't get into Zelda when I was younger, but it was fun! 

As time has gone on, video games have become more available. I even (I know this may be shocking) have some on my cell phone! (My favorite story there is one time when I downloaded a Mario Bros app. I can get very competitive, and I got so into it on my cell phone that my thumbs were sore the next day!) Pokémon Go was particularly popular a few years ago on cell phones. "Gotta catch 'em all!"

This seemed to be an appropriate way to end this post:

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Days of Yore: Office Equipment

As with so many other things, offices have changed a lot over the years. Ancient artists and writers used chisels and other instruments on rock. Cavemen chronicled their hunts and other events on cave walls. Eventually, people started using other materials such as papyrus, parchment, and eventually paper. Scribes copied down text by hand.

Image by Pavel Timofeev on Adobe Stock

Quill

Long before I was born, people used quills (made of large feathers) to write on paper. They had to keep their inkwell handy, as the quill didn't have ink in it, and they regularly had to dip the end of the feather in ink. Some quills had a metal tip. The man in the picture below is writing with one. (These days, they are hardly ever used, though if Harry Potter is to believed, wizards still use them.)

Fountain Pen

Eventually, fountain pens become more common, adding the new feature of ink inside the pen so it didn't have to be dipped regularly. It did have to be refilled from time to time, though. They were not typically made of feathers.

Image by Nomad_Soul on Adobe Stock

Typewriter

My grandpa and I had a running argument (in good fun) about whether the typewriter or computer was better. He insisted that his typewriter had always worked, and he didn't see why he should use a computer. He did comment once that he saw a typewriter in a museum that looked exactly like the one he still used. When I stayed at his house while I was in school, I enjoyed doing my homework on the typewriter because it was a novelty. But for me, being used to computers, it wasn't as efficient. (My grandpa eventually told me he wished he had been more willing to learn the computer, as he did realize near the end of his life that they are very useful.)

Typewriters had a roller on the back where you threaded the paper. There was a ribbon on a spool that you had to replace from time to time. They had the same keyboard (generally) as the average computer keyboard, but you had to push the keys a lot farther down, and it took more muscle. Each key had a corresponding striker that jumped up and hit the ribbon, placing ink on the paper in the shape of the letter you just typed. If you hit the key too hard, the striker could punch a hole in the ribbon, and sometimes the paper! Also, if you pushed too many keys at once, all the corresponding strikers would jump up and sometimes get stuck. If you made a mistake, you had a couple options: you could go back and type "####" over each letter that you accidentally typed, or you could move the paper up and put white-out over it to cover up the mistake, or you could go in after the fact and cross it out with a pen. Those options could end up looking messy, and the other option, which was neater but much more tedious, was to pull the paper out and completely retype everything on that page, hoping you wouldn't make another mistake. White-out came in a couple forms: a white fluid with a brush built into the lid of the bottle to brush the paint-like fluid over the text, or a roll that resembled white, opaque Scotch tape, but narrower, that you could draw over the text you wanted to hide. You had to give the fluid time to dry, but once you were done, you could go back and type over it. When you reached the end of a line, there was a lever that moved the roller and paper down a line and back to the other side of the paper.

For the most part, typewritten reading material looked like this.

Computer

Computers, so named because they compute, seemed much more practical to me than typewriters. I went over changes in computers here, so I won't go into great detail on how they have changed. However, I will say before I was born, they filled up a room and were very expensive. As they progressed they got much smaller, but still a good deal larger than they are now. These days, we can take laptops, tablets and cell phones with us most places we go. A small thumb drive can hold many times the data the massive computers of yesteryear could hold.

No more did we need to #### out mistakes, or white them out, or crumple up the sheet of paper, throw it in the trash, and retype everything. Now if we made a mistake, we could just hit Backspace or Delete. Computers offered so many more options. You can't play Mario Bros or Carmen Sandiego on a typewriter, now can you?

Calculator

I find it interesting that computers and calculators are not the same thing, but both words have similar meanings. Their root words, compute and calculate, are fairly synonymous. They have certain functions in common, as computers can also do math problems. Back in the day, though, an old-fashioned calculator was a lot more portable, and even if you had a computer handy, more practical for doing math.

Mimeograph, 1918
Life magazine
Public Domain

Mimeograph

I remember we had a mimeograph machine at our school when I was in elementary and middle school. I know that many have had varying feelings on machines replacing workers, but I can assure you that mimeographs do not do the function of a mime, and I doubt it could replace Marcel Marceau (though I imagine he may have used one from time to time). That's a mime-o-graph, and as far as I'm aware, it does not exist. It had a similar function to a photocopier, but involved a roller, and the copy was not the greatest quality. You could theoretically mimeograph pictures, but it came out very poor quality. At least in my experience, you could tell a mimeographed sheet because the ink was blue. At school, they generally used them to copy text, and sometimes we would get mimeographed quizzes. As I haven't used one or even seen one since the '80s (possibly early '90s), I forget how they worked, but I was able to use it at the time. 

Carbon Paper

Another way of making copies was using carbon paper. It was maybe half the thickness of a normal sheet of paper, and generally black or charcoal-colored, and glossy. You would put a sheet of paper on the table, put a sheet of carbon paper over it, then put another sheet on top. You could then write on the top sheet, and the pressure of your writing instrument would also place what you were writing on the bottom sheet thanks to the carbon paper in between. You could also thread a couple sheets into a typewriter with carbon paper in between to type two copies at once. If you were writing with a pen, you had to make sure to press hard to ensure that what you were writing would transfer onto the lower sheet. This was often used on contracts so you only needed to sign one sheet (and not again on other copies), and then you would keep a copy and the person you were doing the contract with would keep the other. It is still sometimes used with checks. These days, the word is generally used when you "cc" (carbon copy) someone in an e-mail. You can also "bcc" (blind carbon copy) people if you don't want your recipients to know who all is getting the e-mail.

Photocopier

In my lifetime, photocopiers have changed, but not as much as other machines. They generally produce higher quality copies now than they used to (especially with pictures), and some can now copy in color. They have also become more digital over the years. In my experience, they have always produced better copies than mimeographs.

Image by Nomad_Soul on Adobe Stock

Bookshelf

I covered books here, so probably don't need to repeat myself too much, but with ongoing automation and the internet, books aren't as common in offices as they used to be. The same goes for bookshelves. Someday I dream of having an office with a bookshelf that opens on a secret passage. I've never been in an office like that (as far as I know), but I love reading about them and seeing them in movies!

Filing Cabinet and Rolodex

I covered filing cabinets and Rolodexes here, but you don't see them in offices nearly as much these days as in the past, with computers, electronic files, and more people trying to conserve paper in an effort to help the environment. The Rolodex has largely been replaced by Microsoft Outlook on the computer, as well as cell phones.

Telephone

I covered telephones here. They were in just about every office in the past. Most offices still have them, but these days they are often built into the computer as software, rather than a physical device. It made the transition to working from home when COVID hit a lot simpler. It's also nice to be able to use headphones with a mouthpiece attached, rather than having to balance the receiver between my head and shoulder if I want to type with both hands!

Fax

I remember when we got our first fax machine (short for facsimile) in the Philippines. My mom was the secretary for our mission agency. Our office was in a Manila highrise, and while my brother and I watched the new machine in our office, the adults went to an adjoining office for another mission agency on the same floor. Pretty soon the fax machine came to life and a paper came out of it with a handwritten note saying something to the effect of "Hooray! It works!"

It was nice when we could fax things from our office for free. Most places charged per page, and that could add up. I'm kind of glad we don't use fax much any more, but it was pretty nifty. Early in my career, I had to fax timesheets at the end of each week. It was a challenge on the occasion where the person who approved the timesheet signed in red ink, which doesn't transmit well by fax.

Elevator

Storey time! (Get it? I'll see myself out.) While the elevator isn't exactly equipment, they have changed over the years. During my lifetime, they haven't changed much, but I once had a temp job in Seattle's Smith Tower, which still had the old-fashioned elevator with an attendant. (I hope they still do. It's an experience that I recommend.) Rather than pressing a button by the door, you would tell the attendant which floor, and they would turn a large crank to take you there. When I was younger, all elevators I used had buttons beside the door (inside the elevator) that you could press for the floor where you wanted to go. Outside the elevator, they have a button that you press to tell it whether you want to go up or down. (Side note: A fun conversation that sometimes happens in the Philippines: "Bababa ba?" "Bababa." ["Is it going down?" "It's going down."]) Most elevators are still like that. However, some of the newer ones have a bank of elevators, and the buttons are outside the elevator on the wall. You punch in the floor, and it tells you which elevator to go to when it arrives. It then whisks you where you need to go. As always, the elevator is a very uplifting experience, unless you're going down, which can be a bit of a downer!

Elevator Attendant, 1917
Martha Washington Hotel
Public Domain

These days, most of the above things can be done on a cell phone and/or computer. My phone has a scanning feature and a camera that often works really well for sending documents and other things that I would have photocopied, mimeographed or faxed in the past. With my Kindle and Audible apps on my phone and tablet, I can read and listen to books. I can file documents on the computer (and on my cell phone, though the computer is generally more efficient for that). While I still use pens (though not generally quills or fountain pens), I don't use them as much as I used to, though my phone has a stylus that works similar to a pen when I write on my screen. Not all phones have that. However, I have yet to see an elevator that operates by means of a cell phone. I imagine someday there will be an app for that.

Days of Yore: Computers

Many of us have heard about how our parents walked 5 miles to and from school, in blowing snow, uphill both ways...and they enjoyed it! Did they? I don't know, as I wasn't born yet, but they did teach me to be honest, so maybe? I know I did not. (That may be partly because most of my childhood was in the Philippines, just north of the equator, where they don't get snow due to the tropical heat. I ran 5 miles to school in pelting rain, uphill both ways, slipping and sliding all the way, arriving at school and home muddy and drenched to the bone, and I enjoyed it! My homework was so waterlogged that my dog ate it. OK, maybe that didn't happen, though occasionally some of the rain-related details came close to the truth.)

Another thing we often hear is "Kids today will never know the struggle..." I hope to go through a few things that have changed over the years in the next few blogs (between poems). I feel like "Days of Yore" may be exaggerating a bit, but I was going to call it "Before the Internet" and then realized some of the things I might want to include were when the internet was young.

Photo by Boffy b
CC BY-SA 3.0 license

We got our first computer in the Philippines in 1988. Once we turned it on, we had to know the codes to get around. (It's been so long that I had to look it up just now because I've forgotten a lot.) We didn't have Windows yet, so we had to learn a lot to navigate MS-DOS.

C:\> kljadh
Bad command or file name
C:\> cd games
C:\games>

Once we turned on our computer, we had to navigate to the program we needed. The <dir> command came in handy when we couldn't remember the specific file name that we needed to open. Our IBM computer at home informed us there was a "Bad command or file name" when it wasn't happy with what we told it. Our Apple computers at school preferred the term "Syntax error" instead.

When I was working on a paper for school, I would open WordPerfect and type it up. We didn't have font choices at first, and when they were introduced, a different font was indicated by a different text color on the screen. We had to print the document to see what the fonts looked like. I remember coming back to the US in 1991 and being amazed with the new-fangled computers that actually showed on the screen what the fonts looked like!

When we wanted to print, we used our dot-matrix printers. Sheets of paper were attached to each other with perforations. We strung the papers into the printer with strips of paper on either side of the sheet with holes down the side so it could go into the rollers in the printer. The printer made loud noises as it printed. Once we were done printing, we would tear the last sheet off the ream on the perforated line, and then tear each page apart. We then tore the sides off the page, which also had perforations for that purpose.

When friends came over, they would sometimes bring their large floppy disks (so called because they were, well, floppy) with games on them. We would insert it in the disk drive (the computer above has two such disk drives) to play games. We didn't have them on the computer, just on the floppy disks, so we had to have the disk if we wanted to play the game. I loved to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Digger (also called Dig-Dug), Tetris, Pac-Man, Mario Bros, and more. (Side note: Seeing some of this on Stranger Things in more recent years brought back memories.)

As technology moved forward, the floppy disks got smaller and rigid. However, as we learned at BCTI, they were still floppy if you opened the outer case (not advisable if you're planning to continue using them, but a great way to destroy them if you needed to make sure to eliminate sensitive data on them).

When turning the computer off, there were several ways. The "proper" way was to type "quit" in the DOS prompt. (I learned the word "acquit" because I accidentally typed "aquit" and thought it was funny, so I asked my parents what "aquit" meant. But as I was asking them verbally, they didn't hear the way I spelled it, so they told me the definition of "acquit." I was surprised it was actually a word!)

If necessary, you could do "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" to turn the computer off. Now that only opens a screen with choices to lock your computer, open the Task Manager, or other options. In an emergency (such as the Blue Screen of Death or the diabolical cascading error messages, see below), it was sometimes necessary to hold down the power button until the computer turned off.

There were several errors that got annoying. "Bad command or file name" was one. "Syntax error" was another. But with those, you just had to retype the command correctly. You never wanted to see the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which was when the entire screen turned blue and had text explaining that the computer would be turning off now (but in a lot more words), whether you liked it or not. But as computers continued to advance, nothing struck more panic and the idea of diabolic laughter coming out of the computer (not literally, but nearly) as this, which was the stuff of horror movies and nightmares:

Picture found here

An error message would pop up and start jumping pell-mell around the screen, leaving a long trail going everywhere. It was a bit reminiscent of a leprechaun gleefully jumping all over the room and causing mischief, mayhem and destruction of everything in its path. It moved too fast for me to try to click the button as I chased it around the screen.

In 8th grade, we started learning about a new concept called the information superhighway. At first I pictured a literal paved highway across the US with circuits running through it, where people could exchange information. That turned out not to be the case. It is now called the internet. Our first modems used the phone lines. We could connect to the internet, but we couldn't use phones at the same time. (This was an issue for some customers when I had an IT job helping with tax preparation software a few years later.) As the modems connected to the internet, they made very loud dialing noises and then a loud staticky noise. I'm glad that has gone away since then.

On the whole, I loved computers. But they had some quirks that I am thankful have been worked out over the years.

My grandpa and I had a running good-natured argument about what was better: computers or typewriters. He used his typewriter, and couldn't see the point of computers. I insisted that computers were better. Someone tried giving him a computer once, and it just sat there and collected dust while he used his typewriter. One time our power went out and I called him to ask if I could borrow his typewriter. He laughed for several minutes. Another time he commented he had seen a typewriter exactly like his in a museum. He didn't get an e-mail address until the last couple years of his life, and I helped monitor it. Toward the end, he commented that he wished he had learned more about computers sooner, as he was starting to see the benefits more.