meehawl

The Processor Technology SOL-20 came into my life when Darlene went out. … I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen … It is faster to type this way than with a normal typewriter, because you don’t need to stop at the end of the line for a carriage return … and you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line … My computer has a 48K memory … after allowing for the space that The Electric Pencil’s programming instructions occupy in the computer’s memory, the machine can handle documents 6,500 to 7,500 words long … I press another series of buttons and store what I have written on my disk drive … The system transfers data from the computer to the disk, or vice versa, at about 1,000 words per second, so it is no nuisance to pause after each fifteen or twenty minutes of writing to store what I’ve just done. Each of the disks in my system can hold about 100K of information … In addition to The Electric Pencil, I bought the software for a computer-programming language known as BASIC. The B in BASIC stands for Beginners (the full name is Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), but I have not yet found a mathematical project for which BASIC is inadequate … hoping for a world in which my sons can grow up to have a better computer than their father had.

Tags: 1980s, BASIC, Electric Pencil, home computer, James Fallows, PC, personal computer, Processor Technology, SOL-20, The Atlantic, word processing by mike
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Two men, one Christian and the other Muslim, commit murder just one day apart in the United States. Both appear to have been motivated by their religious beliefs. The Christian murderer is Scott Roeder and his victim is Dr. George Tiller, a physician from Wichita, KS who performed late term abortions. The Muslim murderer is Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad and his victims are Pvt. William Long and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula who were new U.S. Army recruiters … The Muslim murder suspect, Mr. Muhammad, is charged with terrorism along with first degree murder … the Christian murder suspect, Mr. Roeder, is not being charged with terrorism.

And of course, since this article was written, another Christian Terrorist (the acceptable term is “White Supremacist“) decided to go spree killing at a Holocaust memorial. Being out of power really seems to prompt the extremists to take extreme, direct action. Brand new, we’re retro.

Tags: Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, George Tiller, Quinton Ezeagwula, Scott Roeder, terrorism, terrorist, United States, US Army, USA, William Long by mike
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