Family "Characters"

My parents divorced when I was in the sixth grade and a year or two later my father married a woman who had an adopted son and was caring for an infant girl, also not born to her. My father adopted the boy, Ryan, and he and his new wife, Pru, adopted the girl, Kat.

Kat was the first (and only) girl for my father, and he set about making her an idiot. At meal times she would be in her high chair and he would clown around with her, hunching his shoulders, rolling his eyes, making faces and strange noises, etc. She, of course, responded, and the two of them had a grand old time amusing each other.

Pru expressed a little concern about this, saying "You know, she's going to do all this when she's older." Dad was otherwise convinced and continued the march.

As Kat's very first day at school ended, Pru got a call from the teacher.

Teacher: "What is wrong with this child?"

Pru: "What do you mean?"

Teacher: "She squirms at her desk, she rolls her eyes, she laughs at inappropriate places, she falls out of her chair . . . ."

Pru: "I don't know. You'll have to ask her father."

Even today, Kat loves to laugh more than anyone else in the family. She is also odd in various ways. For example, she can't stand the sight of her own blood. If she cuts a finger she holds it with the other hand and walks with a limp.

On the plus side, she does a very convincing imitation of an ostrich.

*****
Pru had her own quirks. When the kids were in high school she and my father stayed together for them, I think, in a marriage more of convenience and accommodation than anything else.

Pru was involved in local activities - 4-H, that kind of thing - and Dad worked during the day and moonlighted a couple of nights a week playing an electric organ in a restaurant lounge, so they mostly went their own separate ways.

They lived in the boondocks in New Hampshire, in an area where newspapers were not delivered and people picked up their mail at a local Post Office branch in a general store.

One Sunday morning Dad got up ahead of Pru, put the coffee on and left the house for a quick drive to the store for the Sunday newspaper. When Pru got up he asked her "What happened to your truck?"

Pru: "What do you mean?"

Dad: "There are parallel scratches all along the hood and the top of the cab, and the windshield has so many cracks you can't see through it. I'm surprised it hasn't fallen out."

Pru: "I don't know. Someone must have backed into me in the parking lot."

And there the matter rested, but *that* line is a family classic.

Pru didn't drink at all, so family speculation is that she nodded off driving home and drifted off the road into the woods, acquiring the scratches from tree branches. But she must have driven the rest of the way home with her head out the window, because the windshield was absolutely opaque.

One New Year's Eve

A couple of minor incidents from around 1977 or 1978 have popped into my mind because of the holidays.

I had just moved to Revere, Massachusetts and spent a small fortune completely furnishing an apartment. Dee Dee and I were on the outs and I had no plans for New Year's Eve, so I decided to host a small family gathering.

Brother Billy was in the Navy and had returned to duty after Christmas, so the party consisted of my father and Carla, sister Kat and husband Peter, brother Ryan and wife Denise, and yours truly with Liz, a WAVE from the Portsmouth (NH) Navy Yard.

Everyone there smoked grass occasionally, so along with a fully stocked bar we were in the midst of a ton of snacks and a bag of grass, with rolling papers, a pipe, and a bong.

We had several hours of sitting around chatting, listening to music, having drinks, and having the occasional toke.

As midnight approached, someone suggested that we watch the Times Square ball being dropped and that *everyone* had to be stoned for that.

I turned the TV on and found the program, turned out the lights and lit some candles, and we passed the grass around. I had turned my father on the year before. To his dying day he insisted that marijuana had no effect on him. He probably believed it, but no one who had seen him smoke believed it. This night he agreed to try again, "Just to be sociable. It really doesn't do anything for me." Soon, however, he got his tang all tongueled up and was backing talkwards.

As the countdown at Times Square began, I ostentatiously looked at my watch and said "Now let's see if they're right."

Post-midnight everyone had the munchies again. WAVE Liz had baked and brought some oatmeal butterscotch cookies, and at some point brother Ryan bit into one.

Ryan: "Who made these?"

Liz: "I did. They're oatmeal butterscotch. Aren't they good?"

Ryan: "Gosh. Things with butterscotch sure are hard, aren't they?"

And Liz threw one at him.

*****
The "let's see if they're right" line above is one of the approaches I sometimes use to tease people, and I am reminded now that it is possible to overdo that.

Somewhere around that time my Assistant at work, David, and I went to Jacksonville, Florida on business. We stayed at the Hilton and met for breakfast. There were sugar shakers on the table and when coffee arrived I poured some sugar into mine. Setting the shaker down I said "Exactly two teaspoons."

David went berserk. "You don't know that! "You can't possibly know that that was exactly two teaspoons!"

Donnie: "David, I know that I can't be that precise. And I know that you know it. Why are you so upset that I said that?"

David: "It's not that you said that. It's the cumulative effect of all the things you have said before."

A Voice from the Past

Well, not everyone I have known is busy dying. A friend and co-worker from the late nineties in Virginia - we'll call him Vic - has tracked me down some thirteen years after I left there.

We worked in a small company that provided data processing services for  junk mailers  direct marketers, nearly all of it on the fund raising side (charitable, political, etc.). Interesting stuff, although not as interesting as the catalog side of the industry.

We talked for some time, perhaps a half hour or so, I don't really know, on the phone and have exchanged a number of emails. Vic was in his late twenties when I knew him, single and hard partying, sometimes burning the candle at both ends, which is more easily done at that age.

Now he's a little north of forty, married, kids, dogs, the whole nine yards. I haven't said this to him (although he'll be reading this, I think), but he has matured greatly. I suppose we all do but it is not as noticeable with people one sees frequently as it is with someone out of touch for more than a decade, and the difference between someone in his twenties and that same person in his forties is dramatic.

We've been sharing memories and updating each other on what we know about friends and acquaintances. He's had to contribute more of that than I have, as over those thirteen years I've seen only two people we have in common.

We had another employee about Vic's age at the office, of Philippine extraction, whom Vic occasionally called "Secret Asian Man." For any youngsters reading this, that's a reference to the song Secret Agent Man, the theme song for a 1960's TV program, Secret Agent. Secret Asian Man is also married now.

Sharing memories is fun stuff.

Ineptitude at the Post Office

No, not at the *local* Post Office, but at the national level among those whose job it is to provide a "help" function.

One of the categories in which I do a lot of online selling is school yearbooks, generally high school yearbooks.

Now the United States Postal Service has a shipping category - you know, Parcel Post, Priority, etc. - called Media Mail. It is the slowest, but also the least expensive way to ship anything by mail. Eligible are various media items - "books, sound recordings, recorded video tapes, printed music, recorded computer-readable media (such as CDs and DVDs)."

There is some confusion at my local Post Office about whether school yearbooks fall in the "books" category.

I'm not exactly sure why such confusion should exist. Read my lips:

Year.

Book.

But exist it does.

I thought I might settle the matter and after doing all the research I could at usps.com, which is entirely silent on the matter, I exercised the USPS help function. One option is to email your questions to the USPS and await the promised answer, which I did.

I specifically mentioned the local Post Office's confusion on the matter and specifically asked whether yearbooks could be shipped via Media Mail.

I also asked a second question. Prohibited from Media Mail are books containing advertising (except incidental book advertising). I asked whether fifty year old or hundred year old advertising was OK, since at this point it really is memorabilia, not advertising.

Today I received my email response, in which "Donna" played back to me exactly the material at usps.com, informing me of the materials considered eligible for Media Mail: books, sound recordings, recorded video tapes, printed music, recorded computer-readable media (such as CDs and DVDs).

Not forgetting my second question, she also informed me that advertising material was prohibited (except incidental book advertising).

You will have noted the glaring absence of answers to my questions.

And then, and *then* she provided me with a telephone number for further information, the telephone number of my local Post Office, which I had informed her was the one confused on the issue of yearbooks.

Why waste the electrons?

The Early Days of Mainframe Computers

A couple of posts ago there was a discussion of IBM green cards. My memory is now directed to the mid-1960's and one of the more entertaining pastimes of those we referred to as "system programmers." They were the real bit pickers, the ones who got right down inside the bowels of the system code, including the code that managed the hardware.

In those days disk drives were great big clunky old things. Look at the picture of the 2311 here (the fourth picture on the right).

The console was perhaps waist high. If you needed a different disk you opened the hinged top of the console, lifted the disk out, stored it wherever it belonged, and replaced it with the drive that contained the data you needed. Then you had a little over 7MB of different data.

The drives' cables ran under the raised flooring, and were of course longer than necessary for the consoles' current positions in case physical reallocation of space for the various devices became desirable.

The bit pickers, those who wrote their own channel control words and channel control commands, realized right away the potential for fun.

Those disks were heavy and slow, with mechanically directed physical read/write heads. It was possible to read *backwards*. You could, with the right channel control, cause the drive to stop spinning and start spinning the other way.

Now normally there would be a built in (the software) pause to allow the drive to wind down and come to a stop before rotating in the opposite direction, but some fun loving programmers wrote their own software to manage the drives, and by dint of causing a sooner-than-intended reversal of spin they could make the entire console jerk, physically moving it along the floor.

When the cats were away the mice would play, and console races were born. Two programmers would each take a drive, write their own input/output software, and race their drives across the floor. Disks would stop and reverse direction much faster than they were intended to, jerking the consoles a little, perhaps an inch or less, causing the consoles to make forward progress.

Naturally, IBM experienced a much higher than anticipated failure rate with drives. I don't know when they figured it out - or found out - but it drove them crazy for a while.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun

A friend who is younger than I  but no spring chicken herself  has poked a stick at me with a comment on the preceding post. She has provided the following link, which you should check out before reading the rest of this post:

Getting into the spirit of it, I confess that with regard to most items listed, I am even older than *that*.

1. Rotary Dial Telephone: When I was in grammar school rotary dials had not yet made their appearance. You picked up the receiver and the operator came on the line. You told her what number you wanted and she took care of it for you.
   
   
2. Manual Typewriter: I had one, a Royal Portable given to me for my fifteenth birthday. I learned to type on it, picking up a bad habit along the way. When I was composing and typing I often had to stop and think of what to type next, and would lightly drum my fingers on the keys. When the IBM Selectric came out in the 1960's it had no sense of humor at all about that, and a half dozen characters would be typed before I managed to stop my fingers.
   
   
3. Coffee Percolator: It's electric. Ho hum. My mother had one that was *not* electric. You put the coffee in, added water, put the top back on, turned on the gas, and waited until it had perked a couple of minutes.
   
   
4. Flash Cube: I actually owned a box camera, a Brownie. No flash of any kind. If you wanted a picture you waited until the daytime.
   
   
5. TV Channel Selector: That was how it was with us. Get up, walk to the TV, manually set the selector to channel 4, 5, or 7.
   
   
6. Record Changer: The earliest couple of record players I remember us having did not have the capability. When a record ended the needle skipped back and forth in a silent area near the center hole. You had to lift the arm manually and put it back on the arm rest. Later, we had a console record player. It not only had a record changer but it had four speeds: 78, 45, 33 1/3, and 16 2/3 rpm.
   
   
7. Gas Station Driveway Bell: Yup, and a boy would come running. He'd pump your gas, clean your windshield, and offer to check your oil. Sometimes he'd just check it without asking.
   
   
8. TV Station Sign Off: I remember them. I didn't see them very often because I was young and they occurred after my bedtime. I think the stations went off the air at 10:00 PM and started up again around 10:00 AM.
   
   
9. Cash Register: To tell you the truth, I never paid much attention to them and have no clue regarding what they looked like when I was young.
   
   
10. Film Projector: Yes, I remember those, particularly from grammar school days when the entire school would be summoned to the auditorium to watch The Night Before Christmas or something similar.
    
    
11. Broken Record: Yup. Sometimes the needle would hop back and forth from one groove to another, over and over again. Another potential hazard was the "skip," when the needle would jump a groove and some small period of music or words would not be played.

Some Terminology Never Dies

I imagine that most occupations and pastimes of any age have not only unique descriptive terms, but terms that in fact misdescribe, because whatever they once described has evolved.

This is an IBM green card that I was using when I wrote programs for mainframes in the 1990's.

What?

Yes. Yes it is.

OK, then, here's what the original (1960's) green card looked like.

(If that link goes dead, someone please mention it in the comments and I'll replace it.)

The original was basically a two-sided piece of heavy stock with information useful to some programmers, particularly assembler programmers. It contained instruction names, the hexadecimal codes for the instructions, instruction mnemonics, that sort of thing. You carried it in your shirt pocket, you carried it in your back pocket, or you left it on your desk, in which case it went missing. Being carried around in pockets accounts for the disreputable appearance of the green card in the above picture.

Over the years the card was from time to time reprinted, having been expanded to provide more information and/or tailored to meet the requirements for use with more modern and different systems. The version shown above is also of heavy stock, but unfolds to eight pages with two sides.

These later versions made their appearance in different colors - blue, pink, yellow, whatever, but no veteran assembler programmer was going to ask to borrow someone's "pink card" or "blue card." Programmers who did so and were heard by veterans faced death by derision. Green card it was and green card it would remain.

When my programming career ended (2001) the green card was in fact neither green nor a card. It was a booklet of roughly (perhaps even exactly) the same width and height of the original green card, but containing dozens of pages of information.

For your amusement, I shall mention that I first got into electronic data processing a few years after its commercial inception, not at the very beginning. The mainframe was at a Boston newspaper and required its own room, climate control, raised flooring, etc.

It was an IBM 360-20, with 24K of memory. Of that 24K the first 1A40 (that's 6720 for fingers and toes people) bytes were reserved for the system. Thus, for application programmers the first byte available was 1A41 and the last byte available - "high core" - was 5FFF (24575).

That 24K is what my first home computer (as they were called at the time), an Apple II+, came with. You could buy an additional 24K, but that was it. That is laughable today, as your desktops and laptops have so much more.

Mainframe computers are known by old timers as "the big iron," and are in much wider use than many people imagine. Why? Power. If you need to process ten or fifteen thousand transactions per second, then you still need the big iron.