Re: Distros specifically designed for children

On 2025-05-30 19:14, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-05-30, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
 

On 5/30/25 1:39 AM, rbowman wrote:
>

GE sent a friend and I to the fair, trying to groom potential engineers in
promising high school students. GE isn't what it was then, and one of the
few things that did happen was touch tone dialing. Kennedy opened the fair
with a TT phone and there was a booth where you could see how much faster
it was than a rotary dial. Of course Ma Bell owned the whole shebang.
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs4zjEwqdJQ

 I remember seeing an exhibit like that somewhere at about the same time.

Birmingham (UK) Science Museum, summer 1976.

    "Touch-tone" WAS do-able ...

 But you had to pay for it.  A friend and I hacked relays into our modems'
phone connection, activated by the DTR line.  A suitable driver enabled
us to pulse dial at whatever speed we wanted.  Maybe it was just the COs
updating their equipment for Touch-Tone, but we found that we could pulse
dial at 20 pps.  It was almost as fast as Touch-Tone.

Wow.

 

    But STILL want my flying car !!!

 I'm not so sure about that.  The way people are driving these days,
the last thing I want to see is for flying to gain mass appeal.

They are trying to do that with big drone like fly-taxis, automated :-)

    When I was a kiddie, a teacher took us to the proximate
    Bell/ATT facility. It was PACKED with row after row after
    row of relay-operated dialer machines. Physically connected
    one physical line with others. SO cool to watch ! Ca-chunk,
    ca-chunk, ca-chunk the discs would go around in order to
    connect A with B - layer after layer. Straight-up wired
    contacts back then, no software. Electro-mechanical magic !

 Early-stage techno-porn.  Loved it.
 

--
Cheers,
        Carlos E.R.