Chuck Guzis wrote: Why bother ... they all play THUMP THUMP THUMP music. :( The same goes for microwaves, full of buttons. Commerical microwaves I have seen are different. One row of 10 buttons, 1 to 10 minutes. They don't have time to play the buttons, just use the product.

On Friday 07 September 2007 14:44, Mr Ian Primus wrote: Indeed. Seems to me I remember Ted Nelson talking about this very issue, way back in 1974! Worse yet, in those cases where the user interface is entirely done in software ("skins") it's difficult to find something without all that crap and that gives a basic user interface! I am getting SO tired of symbols on stuff -- just tell me WTF that does! Ick. Indeed they are. And things like quality switches and pots are getting ever harder to find. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

"Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at verizon.net> wrote: Some of the very-low end consumer equipment (e.g. grocery store $20 VCR's and DVD players) actually put a few truly functional buttons ("play", "stop") that can be used without any menu interaction at all. Of course on a consumer DVD it is likely to disable the buttons when the DVD content says the button must be disabled, but that's not the UI's fault, that's the DVD licensing. Get much above the bargain-basement stuff (like $30!) and you're into not creeping but exploding featuritis territory. Tim.

I agree that a certain amount of symbols may be required for the language barrier problem, and the fact that they take up less space. But, I was very confused recently - I rented a truck for a trip to pick up some computer hardware. On the highway, I was struggleing to turn on the headlights. Keep in mind, this is a GMC truck - an american made vehicle. The knob for the headlights was very confusing. On the dashboard, there was a little lit up picture that looked like a headlight with dots in front fo it. Dots? WTH? The knob was labeled with some symbols: 0 - Obvious, this must be off. Little picture of a headlight with dots in front of it - no clue. Little picture of headlight with lines in front of it, angled down. - regular headlights, I assume. Little picture of headlight with lines straight ahead - high beams, I take it. Little picture of two little lights - no clue. The problem was, turning the knob to the "headlight with angled down lines" did not give me a matching indicator on the dash. Not like "headlight with dots". Turning the knob to "0" resulted in the knob springing backwards a position or two. Sometimes displaying "headlight with dots" on the dashbaord, sometimes not. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the knob - why wouldn't it stick at the off position. Who in their right mind spring loads a knob? I played with it on and off on the journey. I don't know if my headlights were on or off, or what was going on. It's almost as bad on my father's van. Where the "0" position doesn't actually work half the time. If the van feels like turning the headlights on, it will. The knob serves very little purpose, other than if you really want the headlights on, you have to set it that way, because sometimes it decides that it wants to turn them off, even in the middle of the night while you're driving, and it will do so. This is in stark contrast to my Toyota. Which has a knob with three positions - Picture of headlight with lines, blank, and "OFF". The knob works, it works all the time, and it's consistant. The blank position turns on small yellow lights in the front. It's not obvious if you'd never used it, but it doesn't take control of itself, and I'm used to it. Pushing the stalk in turns on high beams. Again, not obvious, but I am used to it. Now, I would assume that something as important as headlights would have been standardized by now, but it's not. And they should really include words, (With the pictures, if they really want those damned symbols). I don't care if that means they need to make different panels for other countries. How much extra could it cost? I don't want to decypher symbols. I want simple, easily glanced at, words. Now, on an on-topic tangent. The symbols on the switches on the back of a Microvax are even more confusing. Why, on a COMPUTER of all things, couldn't they write a word, something like "AUTOBOOT", rather than this trangle/circle/dot thing? -Ian

On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Mr Ian Primus wrote: That is the control for the shower. Find the one with the picture of Towelie, first. In Microsoft Weird, what does the little picture of a brick do? or the building on its side?

On 9 Sep 2007 at 16:04, woodelf wrote: Keeping things on-vintage, when were icons first used on PeeCee hardware? I have to admit that I'm another one who's mystified by icons; unless they're part of some very specialized application. Such as in musical transcription software, where an eighth note (quaver for you in the UK) means just that--to write it out in words would take longer to interpret than "You want an eighth note? Just click on the eighth note." "Sixty-fourth note" or "hemidemisemiquaver" is just too cumbersome. Cheers, Chuck

Mr Ian Primus wrote: ... I'm of the impression the 0 and 1 for power switches is an IBMism, at least I think I first saw it on IBM equipment perhaps in the 70s, before others took up with it. Something makes me think I've seen it on IBM equipment older than that as well. 0 and 1 never made much sense to me for the power switch, inasmuch as 0 and 1 can refer to lots of things besides main power, and the 0 is typically more of circle than a 0. 0 and 1? Circle and stick?

On 10/09/2007, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Hmm... I've been mystified by strange symbols above connectors on the backs of machines for a while now... Especially when it's from a manufacturer I don't usually deal with. At least my own interest, the BBC micro, got this right! Proper words on the ports.. Music is a good example where the symbology has had a good time to develop and get standardised, so there's not a lot of choice when you want to depict a quaver, etc. Computers are so new, though, and the use of pictographs on them even newer, that there seems to be no standard for even typical items, never mind the esoteric ports for functions... I've seen "=" for parallel and "- - -" for serial on one box, and symbols reminicent from flow-charts for printers on another.. If you don't already know what a port might be, then you've no chance.. Just write "printer port" FGS.... (I had a light come on the car dash the other day. Looked a bit like the logo on some alien space ship in a Sci-Fi show. Nothing recognisable, nor memorable enough for me to describe it now. But it was yellow, rather than green, so I had to stop, dig out the handbook mysterious acronym that the description referred to. ["This indicates that the XYZ subsystem has activated" - almost as usefull as some PC BIOS handbooks. "FooBar activation option? - This allows you to enable or disable this option" Yes, I worked that out, but what does the option DO??] It took me a good couple of minutes to find out that it was nothing to worry about, and I wasn't being warned that the engine was about to blow up. Now where's the advantage in that??) I agree with Dwight; icons: nice idea.. shame it doesn't work... Rob

On 10/09/2007, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Only if you know what a printer is looks like. And I don't know about you, but the "little picture of a printer" on, let's say, the Print button in MS Word, looks absolutely nothing like any of the printers I have here. Now *I* know that it looks like a big old impact printer, with output coming from the top, but the vast majority of the general public these days will never have seen such a beast! A quick rundown of parallel printer ports here shows: - a symbol very like the MS word one. - the word "Parallel" - a rectangle with a knob on the side with an overlayed square with equal horizontal lines on it. - a rectangle with an overlayed square with different length lines - similar but looks more like paper falling out of a slot - a rectangle with a corner cut off above a horizontal line I couldn't find two that were exactly the same! And you think that makes it easier? I've come across connectors on machines in the past with cryptic symbols on them that I haven't a clue what they mean, so have no idea what the connector is for! At least with "IMPRIMATEUR" I can look it up in a dictionary, or type it into google! No wonder mass-market PCs are produced with *colour coded* connectors, and mass-market peripherals are issued with matching coloured plugs... Hey, we ruled half the world at one point...

Liam Proven wrote: A pictogram which is not obviously a representation of it's target is not a pictogram, it's a symbol. Learning to associate a symbol with it's meaning is pretty much the definition of literacy. The argument is that due to their diversity, inconsistency, and non-pictogram-ness (sorry), these symbols haven't solved anything (other than being politically correct in not giving priority to one culture's natural language), they've just become a new obscure language to learn. (A language which as someone else pointed out, is unsearchable, at least for the time being.) I would argue that your example of written Chinese actually makes the opposite point to your intent: one has to be literate in the now arbitrary association of symbols to meaning to understand the symbols. It may be freed from a spoken form but that's not the issue, the arbitrariness or non-intuitive-ness of the association is. To try to bring this back on-topic, I was hoping somebody would weigh in with 'earliest' examples of 0/1 on IBM equipment, which might be argued to be where the whole trend started.

I wasn't being nasty, there was no need for you to start. Be aware that while you may have intended that insult for me, you actually hit all those who had earlier expressed confusion over many of the 'few' symbols. It's also doubly cheap in that you yourself set up the conditions (relative quantity of symbols - irrelevant to the point being made) from which to derive it. You're responses to my points were all misdirections from the issue, except for the one in which you further undermine your own position (printer symbols). You failed to address the argument. (And wikipedia isn't exactly anything to rely on for precise definitions.) This is OT as I tried to point in my earlier message, and considering your approach to debating, I'm not interested in dragging it out further.

Liam Proven wrote: Whenever I'm making a statement similar to the one in your example, I always try to use the word "one" instead of "you". It's clearer and it sounds less accusatory. I forget sometimes, though. Peace... Sridhar

When you use the "impersonal YOU", you run a risk of offending those who take it personally.

On 10/09/2007, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: I think you have just made the point you were trying to avoid. You need to learn to associate the pictogram with it's meaning. So it matters not if it is one of a hundred unique visions of an obsolete printer, a pair of parallel lines(which I've also seen) or the sequence of mostly recognisable characters p, r, i, n, t, e and r.

On Sep 10, 2007, at 3:18 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Eh, I used to think that...but then I noticed how huge the impact printer business is in certain indusries such as auto parts stores and auto service centers. Pretty much every time I buy a part for a car, I see an Okidata 320 or similar. I have NO idea why they haven't abandoned that technology...it could be that it Just Works and doesn't give them any trouble. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL Farewell Ophelia, 9/22/1991 - 7/25/2007

Rob wrote: Valid point. I suspect impact printers handle a dirty / dusty environment a heck of a lot better than inkjets or lasers too. Plus given the high cost of toner / cartridges, there's perhaps still some cost savings in the old impacts where the line of work simply doesn't *need* to use anything else.

On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 03:26:33PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote: Try getting a (real) carbon copy with an inkjet or a laser ... and yes, the ability to print several forms with identical contents is important in some places (one for the customer, one for the archive, one for the guy handing out the parts from the warehouse, ...). Regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

Quite why I'd want illeterates to be connecting cables to my computer is totally beyond me... If you have to learn that $icon means 'connect printer cable here' you can equally easilly learn that you connect said cable to a connector labelled wit hte string of chracters 'printer'. Or 'imprimante'. Or 'drucker' or whatver it is in any other langage. Am English-language manual fro a French device could quite easliy contain the statement 'Connect the parellel printer cable to the 25 pin socket labelled 'imprimante'' . That would be as easy to follow as using the icon, with the benefit that if the manual got lost, a French-English dictionary would explain the use of that connector. -tony

On 11 Sep 2007 at 2:02, Liam Proven wrote: Symbols and labels on connectors on consumer devices have always smelled like a hack to me. It would seem that the optimal solution is to design the connectors so that it's IMPOSSIBLE to mate them up improperly. Why have a mouse that can plug into the same mini-DIN connector into which a keyboard can plug? Why not devise each connector with a uniquely-shaped and sized receptacle and plug (a simple receptacle collar and molded cable head would do) so that installation becomes a matter of plugging the triangular shaped plug into the like-shaped receptacle? I've never heard of anyone trying to plug an RJ-45 network connector into a DB-25 printer socket. For an extreme example of the wrong-headedness of thoughtless design, consider the lowly "wall wart" power supply. As an exercise, take all of the warts from all of the devices in your house and place them in a pile in the middle of a room. Draw the curtains and turn off the lights and try to match warts up with devices without toasting any. How the seeing-impaired manage in this world is beyond comprehension. Cheers, Chuck

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Liam Proven wrote: Why can't they just open the box and look at the circuitry? If it's got a UART, and maybe some 1488,1489 chips, then it is serial, etc. I don't know much of anything about electronics, but I can still usually recognize what ports are for. But, if a computer is made in a different country than the printer, then the pictures will probably not match. There is at least one documented case of a fatality from the frustration of "RS232" printer interfacing. That would be a nice item to have in a collection. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Liam Proven wrote: Why not a SymbianOS machine? Peace... Sridhar

Liam Proven wrote: You are aware that Blackberry came out for GSM before it came out for PCS, right? US GSM networks aren't all that different from European ones. Peace... Sridhar

On 11/09/2007, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Most people who use computers don't know what a "chip" is. If you are capable of identifying an integrated circuit from its part number, you are a veritable electronics guru compared to 5.9999999 billion people. Remarkable. Not heard that one before. OTOH, I have set up many a serial printer. RS232 was a complete pain in the **** and I am very glad to see it die. Start bits, stop bits, word length, parity, baud rate - hateful. Apple could do it right in 1984; there was no good reason for everyone else in the industry to screw it up. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

I wasn't aware RS232 had died, at least not on this list (I am on classiccmp, right?). Looking around me, I can see well over 100 RS232 ports, and _no_ USB prots (or indeed machines that could take USB ports). To be fair, the Apple serial printer interace was only easy if you wanted to link an Apple printer to an Apple computer. If you wanted to use some other printer on your Mac is was about as difficult as doing that with any other compter. Similarly, linking an HP computer (say an HP150) to an HP printer was alost as easy -- sure there were the various parameters to set up, but the manual took you through them (basically, 'set this option to this value, in the end the screen will look like this'). I've met only one device that strictly followed the RS232 standard, and that was the HP82164 interface. And a right pain it is too, since nobody else followed that standrd. -tony

I'm being deadly serious. If asomebody can't match up a 7 character word ('printer') no matter what their native language is, then I don't want them anywhere near any of my computers. So? I don't speak a word of Chinese. I can't read a single Chinese character. But if computer connectors were labelled in Chinese. I'll bet I could learn the necessary few chracters in a couple of days _at most_. [...] But that's exactly the point. The icons are not stadnardised. I have to recognise that the symbol that the computer manufacturer uses is, say, a 'prionter' Different manufacturers have different ideas of what symbol to use. OK, the user manual _should_ explain that. But you know as well as I do that manuals go astray. At least if the connectors are labelled with 'words' of a human language, I have a chance to find a dictionary of said language, or somebody who speaks it, or... You seem to be in favour of replacing a 'word' that a subset of the world's population understand naturally ,and which the rest have to learn, with an icon that nobody understands naturally and that therefore everyon has to learn. I can't see the benefit in doing that. It's the same sort of ridiculous idea that caused a bookshop I liked to have to close down because it couldn't provide wheelchair access. Apparently it's better that nobody can have access to said books than that a subset of the population can. And in all other countries the foreign word and the icon _both_ have to be learnt. This sounds like an urban legend to me. Like the one about the Chevvy (?) Nova not selling well in Mexico because 'No Va' means 'it doesn't go' [To go marginally on-topic, I once used that joke when I pulled most of a DG Nova 1200 out of a skip. SInce there were bits missing, including the lights-n-switches board, I said 'Nova -- It doesn't go'] Are you seriously telling me that version 4/model 4/etc of any product never sells in China???? -tony

I don't know about China. But I've studied a little Japanese, and something very similar is true there. You'll sometimes hear the digit 4 as "yon" rather than "shi" because "shi" means something negative - death, I think, but I'm not at all sure of that (it's been too long). Apparently - I've never been to Japan, but this report came from someone who has - buildings in Japan don't have 4th floors, much the way buildings in North America don't have 13th floors. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

You still don't get it, do you? If there was a _standard_ icon used by every manufactuer to me 'parallel printer port' then yes, that would be clear and understandable. But there isn't. Maybe the symbol for 'printer' is pretty much recognisable, but there are plenty of other icons I've seen on connector panels that aren't. Without the manual (and how many of us here can honestly claim to have manuals for every bit of computer hardwre they own), you're prrtty much reduced to tracing out connections inside to work out what the darn connector is for. Also, please not that 'printer' does not necessarily imply a TTL-level parallel port. Suppose I make a machine that uses an RS232-interfaced serial printer. I, li,ing to stick to standards, use a DB25 connector for this, and I wire it as a DCE (since printing terminals are clearly DTEs). Which implies the printer connector on my machine is a socket. I label it with a 'printer' icon. What's the betting soembody plugs a PC-type parallel printer lead in there and blows up their printer (Centronics compatible prionters don't like -12V on the D1 line :-)). Who's to blame? And perhaps you could suggest icoss for : ADC input User Port System Bus (and if you dare suggest a picture of a Routemaster, I will LART you.) Autodialer interface And yo away from computers for the moment, how would you, using icons, label the 'RF gain', 'IF gain' and 'AF gain' controls of a radio? (and yes, at least one of my receivers has all 3 has serparate front panel user controls) I think there are many people here who prefer words to icons. There are no icons on any of the desktop computers that I use regularly (not even on the screen), apaart from the ones I mentioned in a previous message for the front of an IBM PC/AT. My cellular phone doesn't have any icons either. Plenty of English words, though I don't have a PDA. I have plenty of pocket calculators, all of them icon-free. None of my camears have icons on them either. On the other hand, I have several cameras with a 'Z' on the shutter speed dial for time exposures. Z = Zeit, of courst. THis doesn't confuse me, for all I never learn German. I disagree totally. I can think of many more situations where removing culterial bias has caused problems than situations where it's avoided them -tony

On 13/09/2007, Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote: Absolutely 100% concur. That was criminally stupid. USB is great for basic low-bandwidth I/O devices. Simple, robust and does the job. For more complex devices - scanners, printers, all-in-one devices and so on - I've had a few problems. For high-performance storage peripherals - disk drives, optical drives etc. - I don't much like it and prefer Firewire. USB2 and the wretched marketing fiasco of "USB full speed" versus "USB high speed" and so on has been a disaster. Because marketdroids (who should all, /pace/ Bill Hicks, be shot) complained that they didn't want their devices labelled "slow" or USB1 to equate to "slow"), instead of a nice clear distinction - USB2 = fast, USB1 = slow - we have a mess of confusing phrases instead. Horrible. And whereas it's convenient that USB1 and USB2 use the same cables, there should be mandatory labelling of which standards are supported, because not all USB1 cables, designed for 12Mb/s, can handle the 480Mb/s of USB2. All USB2 cables, hubs and devices should say, clearly and distinctly, that they are USB2. They don't. I've also, horrifyingly, seen at least 1 USB2 external disk case that used an A-connector (the computer end) for /both/ ends of its cable, which means that it included an A-to-A cable, which is prohibited. This would allow a naive user (i.e. most of them) to connect 2 PCs back to back over the cable, resulting in an expensive bang and release of magic smoke. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

IIRC, the PS/2 mouse interface and PS/2 keyboard interface are very similar. Both are TTL level interfaces with clock and data lines, both have 4 signals on the connector (+5V, ground, clock, data), and the data transfer protocol is much the same. IIRC, the pin assignemts of the 2 interfaces is the same too, and it's possible to make a device where you can plug the mouse and keyboard into either connector, and detect what sort of device is plugged into a given socket. The fact that most PCs didn't let you do that is not the fault of the interface. So why not use the same connector for the 2 interfaces? -tony

[Mini-DIN plugs] Those mini-DINs are the worst (common) connectors to solder, but the 6 pin ones are easier than the 9 pin. The Acorn Archimedes uses the latter for its mouse interface (it's a quatrature mouse with 3 buttons, the 9 pins being +5V, ground, the 4 quatradure signals and the 3 button signals). Anyway the first Arc I obtained came without a mouse. Obtaining a 3-button quadrature mouse was easy in those days (about 10 years ago), they were commonly sold as add-ons for the ST and Amiga. And getting a 9 pin mini-DIN plug wasn't hard either. But wiring it was,. Worse than that, as we all know, if you get the 2 quadrature signals for a given axis the wrong way round, the cursor moves the wrong way relative to the mouse motion. So while I could connect up the power lines and the buttons with some certainty, I had to 'edit' the quadrature signals to get things going the right way. And that was downright painful Acutally, I can see very little that's good about the mini-DIN connecotr. It's painful to wire, it doesn't have a good contact area, it's difficult to insuer (particularly 'blind', it's not that robust. I can see no reason qhy they should be used at all. -tpny

On 10/09/2007, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Indeed not... I've seen others, and I'm sure there are several more in the house too; those were just the few immediately visible on disconnected machines lying about. I have no idea if it's a standard, but where parts I've encountered have been coloured, it's been consistent.

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007, Liam Proven wrote: No, because a printer is called 'imprimante' in French :-)) Christian

Liam Proven wrote: I suspect it was more that the primary market was education, so it made sense to be as user-friendly as possible by stating exactly what each port was. If I bought a French computer I'd either rely on enough knowledge of French to get by, or I'd look up what I needed to know. Given that manuals and software have to be regionalised for the intended market, it hardly seems much effort on the part of the manufacturer to issue case decals that are also regionalised. There seems little excuse for a pictogram that might be ambiguous in *all* languages just because the manufacturer was lazy or was trying to save a few pennies. I suspect the number of times that a person is plonked in front of an alien machine with absolutely no knowledge of the written language of the country happen when the person is visiting a foreign country, and in that case you'd expect them to be making an effort to understand the language anyway. cheers Jules

On 10/09/2007, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Education /in Britain/. It was the *BBC* Micro. I think that is absolute reverse of the case, actually. Printing a new manual is cheap; redesigning case mouldings or even just what's printed onto the case means retooling production lines, producing different models for different markets, tracking which country each machine is destined for... Vast amounts of complexity. Any manager or designer who suggested this would deserve to be fired for incompetence. I think you believe that because you speak the world's most widespread international language. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On 11/09/2007, Rob <robert at irrelevant.com> wrote: Either you're pulling my leg - which looks not to be the case - or you're really being extraordinarily dense. Just in case it's option B: In short clear words: Printing on paper CHEAP. Printing on case DEAR. Changing case moulding HARD. If you're seriously proposing shipping cases with /no/ labelling and a sheet of DIY labels, you're either deranged or very stupid, and either way, it's not worth trying to reason with you. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On 11/09/2007, Gordon JC Pearce <gordon at gjcp.net> wrote: The thing is, how big was the profit margin on a MicroVAX compared to a modern ?300 PC? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

Is there any possible way that the Subject of this thread of messages could be changed? The current topic of discussion has absolutely nothing to do with Wang 300-Series calculators, yet I feel compelled to have to read through them, just in case there might be something interesting relating to the calculators in any of them (but, alas, this hasn't been the case since the original posting and a few responses). Thanks to all, Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com

Liam Proven wrote: I think you missed my point. It wasn't a typical general-purpose 'home' machine of the time, it was a machine designed primarily for a specific market - namely one where the majority of the users would be children who were actively encouraged to be plugging things into the machine. (unfortunately the only technical spec I have is 09/1981 and just states "colour scheme and markings to be agreed by BBC" - it doesn't detail the thinking about the labeling) Most cases - even modern PCs - seem to have at least something stuck to the front which isn't part of the basic underlying moulding. It hardly seems like rocket science to regoinalise what amounts to a printed label knocked up in a design package. OK; I wouldn't travel to France without knowing some French. I wouldn't go to Japan without learning Japanese. To not do so would just be an insult to the people of the country that I'm visiting, not to mention downright rude. Now, if I were in a situation where I was going abroad and going to be plugging bits of hardware together (rather than merely anticipating being a user of an assembled machine - in an office or Internet cafe, say) then it hardly seems difficult to extend my education to the few necessary words needed to figure out ports on a computer. In fact that's probably even easier for me than being in a foreign country where I'm not fluent in the language and am faced with a bunch of mysterious pictograms - not having the port functions spelled out actually makes it worse, because I not only have to ask what the ports are in the native tongue, but also interpret the response (so I still need to know what 'printer', 'serial' etc. is anyway) (sorry, pet peeve, but people who bumble into foreign countries and expect to communicate solely in their own tongue rather annoy me!)

On Monday 10 September 2007 19:14:37 Jules Richardson wrote: I have a French car (actually, I have several). The dashboard warning lights and switches are labelled with little symbols. The symbols are pretty much the same as on the dashboard and switches of my fiance?'s German car, and my Mum's Japanese van. Oddly enough, among the symbols on the dashboard of my car is one simply labelled "STOP", which is the same across all versions in the UK and Europe. It lights up when something really bad happens, along with a more descriptive warning light indicating loss of oil pressure, or hydraulic pressure or fluid level, or serious overheating. Why "STOP" and not another little symbol I don't know. Gordon

Liam Proven wrote: If memory serves, even France uses STOP. I have come across neighborhoods in Canada that use only ARRET, but it's not common. Peace... Sridhar

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007, Liam Proven wrote: THAT is a printer?? I thought that it was an external early modem. The Chinese character WOULD work as well for me. Sorry. Here in the colonies, we've buggered up a lot of what could have been simple, and use some hardly recognizable icons.

I thought it was actually 'Imprimante' but anyway... Yes it darn well is..... There exist these wonderful things called 'foreign language dictionaries' that I cna look up said words in (and for the record, I have managed to use a Russian dictionary to =figrue out the repair manual for a Russian camera). Or, if I can't use, say., a Chinese dictionary, there are plenty of people who speak both Chinese and English and who could help me by translating the 'words' on the back of my machine. The problem with the icons is that they're not universal. If I can't find the manual for whatever I am working on, there's no 'dictionary' I can look them up in. Finding a native speaker of the language of the country where the machine was made (or intended to be sold) won't help. I've had electornic devices with the connectors/controlls labelled in French, German, Russian, and problaby several other languages. None has caused me any problems -- unlike those darn icons. -tony

On 10 Sep 2007 at 23:13, Tony Duell wrote: I remember that and also that it didn't seem strange to me. Were there icons on the 5100 cable fittings or controls? Cheers, Chuck

Ensor wrote: How about the TIME to upgrade to Better sounding Err Higher priced stuff game. I have a idea for a nice 2 watt valve/tube amp but need a second view point on the design. I have general schematic roughed out, but not sure if it will work as it all depends on the Power Supply, something I need help with? Any takers on this list ... Contact me off list. Ben alias woodelf

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Andrew Burton wrote: . . . and Egyption hieroglyphics look like a subset of APL.

On Sep 11, 2007, at 9:28 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Funny you should mention that, Martin Ziskind recently pitched me a total salesjob on the merits of APL. It was quite surreal. ok bear

[Fred Cisin, quoting r.stricklin] But it'd be a *really* long line! [Chuck Guzis, replying to the same r.stricklin quote] Heh. I seem to be an exception. I like APL in many respects, and I'm glad I know it...and I almost never do anything for which it would be a right choice of language; I don't do much matrix juggling. Same for FORTH, actually, except that the "almost never" is less true. Yet I evangelize for neither. I wonder what's wrong with me. :) [In passing, to Chuck Guzis, whatever generated your References: header is a bit broken - it stuck commas in, and there should be no such punctuation, just the <message-IDs>.] /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 11 Sep 2007 at 21:34, r.stricklin wrote: It appears that there are no lukewarm opinions about APL. Either you *really* like it and evangelize constantly about it (sort of like Forth) or you ignore it and sometimes refer to it as "that Iverson thing"... Cheers, Chuck (put me in the "Iverson thing" camp)

On 12/09/2007, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Friend of mine was - is, probably - a Perl wizard. As soon as he got his doctorate in Physics - Computational Fluid Dynamics - he quit academia and went to work for a major US investment bank. Which runs a lot of its internal systems based on a language called A+, their own flavour of APL. He tells me he now finds Perl irritatingly verbose. I find this very frightening. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On Wednesday 12 September 2007 15:41, Chuck Guzis wrote: The strange character set was definitely off-putting, for sure. I remember running across some implementation of it a while back, whether it was early peecee or prior to that I don't recall. But it wasn't something I was gonna mess with unless I could get a keyboard with those characters on it. :-) Kind of the same way I feel about that Dvorak keyboard layout -- I'd love to work with that a while, but not without the right keycaps while I learned it. Keyboard layout-changing software just wasn't gonna cut it... Which brings to mind the "obfuscated C contest". I wonder if that's still ongoing? -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin