You hear that, Mr Andersen?

WYSIWYG

A friend at work bought a passel of t-shirts from ThinkGeek recently... and I saw him having to explain the shirt on the right. (You can click on the shirt to get their blurb about the phrase.) It reminded me of the whole "I'll always look this good" tagline - except in a much geekier way, obviously.

It got me thinking about our old BBC model B, and the word processor that came with it - I still remember having to type in Mode 7 (the teletext-like mode), and preview what your text would look like in Mode 3. (Not that you were going to get a proportional font when you printed things out; no, it was because Mode 3 let you show 80 characters across the screen, which is what your daisywheel printer was going to write.)

Anyway, I was trying to remember what the word processor was called. I remember that it came on a separate chip, but I couldn't remember the name until the mighty web provided the answer - View. And when I looked at this 'BBC Lives' site and saw the old rainbow-coloured "Welcome" book and graphics from Repton and Chuckie Egg... ah, sweet nostalgia. :) It was interesting poking around some of the hardware descriptions of the old BBC - weird sensations of "oh yeah, I remember that feature... so that's why it worked like that."

But even while I was at university, people were coming into computer science who had never seen a command-line in their lives. I think it's a much more difficult transition now than it used to be, and I suspect it means that mark-up languages are that much less accessible. After all, if you've endured the horrors of LaTeX (a mark-up language for writing papers with complicated mathematical formula in a text file), HTML is a doddle.

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A friend of mine pointed me at some lovely music: page 1 & page 2

Kids, don't play this at home.

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In answer to the questions about The Great Mite-Off - when I revisited to contestants, they were having great difficulty with tabulating the results, because they hadn't devised a suitable form for people to fill out before starting the mite-off. (Learn from their mistake!) Also, there were apparently insufficient samples for all the participants to assess all the possibilities, and they've discovered that there are Australian and NZ versions of vegemite. So they are preparing for: The Great Mite-Off 2: This Time, It's Organized!

Posted by svend at December 15, 2004 6:31 PM