Too bad Meh didn't get to these!

@brainmist My very first computer!

@mehgrl Me too! The original actually eventually gave up, so I asked for another one in my late teams. And programmed Hammurabi in BASIC.

@brainmist I remember writing little BASIC programs and saving them to the tape recorder. I’ll never forget my gosub commands. I still have my TI, complete with game cartridges and programming books.

@mehgrl I should get it out. I’ve used a simulator when the Tunnels of Doom urge strikes.

@phendrick Ah, I haven’t thought about The Towers of Hanoi for a long time. Way back in my early SW engineer days, the sales guys had a multi-threaded animated Towers demo that output the display on an ASCII serial terminal. At that time, our OS only supported strict priority-based thread scheduling, which resulted in a choppy display of the demo. I was given the assignment to make it work more smoothly. I wound up adding a feature to time-slice threads within a priority level, which was a bit more challenging because much of the scheduler was implemented in assembly language.
The final result made the demo work nice and smoothly, which made the sales team happy. And it turned out to be a useful feature that was added to the next release of the OS product.

@f00l I hadn’t realized the cause, but now I understand why teens’ handwritings (even non-cursive) are so abominable. But at least they should have strong thumbs.

@f00l @phendrick You might be appalled by the number of people in their 20s (and older!) who literally have no signature because they never learned to either write or read cursive, and print letters clumsily and with little repeatability.

@phendrick @werehatrack

It’s debatable that i can “write” cursive at all. Once had copperplate style. but that was eons ago.

I can only go a brief try, a few words, before my hand cramps badly.

Can barely do block capital printing legibly. And only short phrases.

Maybe this means I would be bad at doing blackmail notes, unless I cut the letters from a book or newspaper.

But can read cursive, at least

/giphy cursive

@f00l @phendrick My hand tremor has wrecked my cursive, though that seems to be improving again. But when I have somebody under 30 hand me a handwritten note asking if I can read it, as though it’s in a foreign language, there’s a problem.

@f00l @phendrick @werehatrack I recently happened to see some documents that my middle daughter (now 30) had signed. Her signature is just a squiggle with no recognizable letters but apparently that is sufficient.

Many years ago, I read an account online of a fellow’s experiment to see how wild he could make his signature and still have it accepted. His approach was to go to stores and attempt to buy an expensive TV or similar, then sign the credit card slip with increasingly wild signatures. He tried random squiggles, printing “NOT A VALID SIGNATURE”, even strings of faux Egyptian hieroglyphs, but was never denied. It was quite a humorous tale.
Hmm, I wonder if the essay is still around somewhere…

@f00l [@macromeh] @werehatrack
I guess I’ve been (not) wasting my time. I NEVER sign my credit cards, thinking that would give a thief something to copy if using one of my CC’s (thought an accompanying driver’s license would make up for that). But I’ve never had one questioned on account of no signature, even when handed to a real person.
So another futile attempt from TPTB (the powers that be) to make us waste our time, in addition to those detestable EULAs, which I almost always do read, just to see what they are trying to pull over on us now.

@f00l @phendrick @werehatrack Ha! I found (at least an excerpt of) the story. (I apparently misremembered some of the details, but the original did include the episode of buying the expensive TV.)
https://www.cobaltss.net/forums/lounge-42/credit-card-prank-85055/

@f00l @macromeh @phendrick @werehatrack I don’t sign credit cards either; instead I’ve been putting “please ask to see photo ID.” A while back some cashiers asked, but now that every store just has you slide or tap, nobody even looks. The only place that refused to take my unsigned card was thePost Office. But that was several years ago too.

@f00l @Kyeh @macromeh @phendrick Unsigned cards have one major potential gotcha, even if they have been cancelled. They can be used as substitutes for a valid ID by an identity thief posing as the card holder. The thief simply signs the cardholder’s name on the back, and then begs for the indulgence of whatever place they’re trying to gain a next-step document from. It works entirely too well. And if you’re planning to travel to China, whatever is in the signature stripe will be considered “your signature”, so be prepared to duplicate “Demand Photo ID” (or whatever else you scribbled there) in places where they have yet to upgrade to using a PIN. But above all, understand that only one thief in a hundred (at most) is a competent forger, but 100% of them can scribble something that they can replicate in that blank space, and call it your signature.