denber.wbst@xerox.com (10/03/89)
Here at work I wrote a little program that lets me use my modem to dial the phone. I have a menu item called "Dial!". When I click it I get a prompt "Number please". I can then type in the number or use any of the system's line editing features. For example, I can shift-select the number out of another window instead of having to type it at all. If I click on Dial! with the middle button, I get a menu of the last 10 numbers I called, if I want to redial one. One nice feature is that the program automatically translates letters into numbers. I hate dialing numbers like "GO-AMIGO" on the phone, but it's real easy to type this on a computer keyboard. The program also knows how to add the leading "9" for local calls, and "8" for long distance. This all works well since my computer is running all day anyway - might as well let it do the phone too. While we're at it, I might as well throw in my teletype reminiscences, since everyone else has. In 1967 I belonged to the Weather Club in our high school. We had two teletypes with direct lines to the local Weather Bureau (this was before it was the National Weather Service). One line was called "Circuit A", which sent data from the northeast U.S., and the other was "Circuit C" which was national (I think circuit B was the south-east). I don't know the model numbers, but they were old even then. They were the kind that had the type in a rectangular box. The machine would move the box vertically and horizontally to position the proper slug under the print hammer. It was indeed, as someone else mentioned, fascinating to watch. Anyway, our machines were receive-only; they had just two buttons in front. One was labeled "LOC LF" (local line-feed) - I forget what the other was. My job was to get there at 7 AM to plot the national weather map coming in on circuit C. Each station sent its data in a single line of text (all numeric). There were several hundred stations reporting. After a few months of this I got good enough that I could plot faster than the tty could send. Being an impatient sort, I discovered that if you hit LOCLF *exactly* at the end of a line, you could eject enough paper while the carriage was returning so that you could tear off a little strip with just that one line before the next line started printing. People would get mad at me because by the end of the transmission, the report, which usually filled half a dozen pages, looked like it had been through a paper shredder. Sometimes the fuse that controlled the carriage would blow. This was apparently separate from the print hammer. If this happened at night, you'd come in the next day to find the entire report banged into a single character position. All that was left of it was a ragged hole in the paper. Sometimes people would forget to power up the motor on the take-up reel when they left in the afternoon. Then we'd come in the next morning to find mountains of yellow paper piled all over the room. Occasionally, the machine would drop a character. Since the reports were all numeric in fixed-length fields, a missing character would lead to some interesting weather reports. You could always tell a novice had been plotting the map when you found a station in Canada reporting 90 degrees in mid-January, or showers of ice needles in Miami. I suppose that's all gone today. Nowadays, the maps are plotted by computer and faxed to local Weather Service offices. But I'm sure this can't compare to the thrill of racing circuit C, man versus machine, in the pre-dawn darkness of another era. - Michel