[Cialug] OT: grins and nostalgia (was Re: USB sensors)

[Morris Dovey]

Nathan Stien wrote:
| On Jan 18, 2008 10:17 AM, Morris Dovey <mrdovey at iedu.com> wrote:
|| I think you may be reading my mind. <vbg>
|
| It seems like the mass market internet kind of killed "<g>"
| notation. I picked it up from BBS culture in the 90's, but my
| computing experience only really began in the mid 90's.  Emoticons,
| LOL, and other such pleb constructs took over via America Online
| (as far as I can tell).  I held out for a while in those days, but
| eventually I had to explain "<g>" to too many people and I caved.
|
| It also took a while to stop trying to use ctrl-g to make someone's
| console beep.  <g>
|
| I also seem to remember saying that things were "k-rad" or "|<-rad".
|
| Wonderfully, the ICQ instant messenger software (smells like 1997 to
| me) used to support ^g as a throwback for old-timers, in those heady
| days of downloading poorly transcribed .mid files from animated
| GIF-laden geocities pages...  But maybe that was just me.  <g>
|
| Does anyone else here remember "<g>" fondly?  Is there perhaps some
| previous construct a relative whippersnapper like me wouldn't even
| know about?

It loses everything by needing an explanation :-( but APL's character
set allowed fabricating new characters by overtyping ( <char1> BS
<char2> { BS <charn> }... ). The overtyped '7' and '4' symbolized a
"smart move" ("two thumbs up") for chess-playing APL types. It
actually did resemble a knight.

I dimly remember that there was a symbol used for flipping someone
off - and before that we expressed serious displeasure with someone by
"lacing" their program deck - punching all 12 rows of all 80 columns
of each card.

Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/