Text 926, 76 rader
Skriven 2014-02-26 15:55:00 av Mike Luther (1:117/100.0)
    Kommentar till text 922 av Roger Nelson (1:3828/7.0)
Ärende: Texting with a PC
=========================
Spot on Roger .. and actually related to what became texting on PC's for me!

 RN> During my high school years, which go back a long way, there was a 
 RN> couple living next door who had a 1949 Packard and I 
 RN> often dreamt about driving it, but didn't get the 
 RN> chance.  It looked out of place among all the Chevys 
 RN> and Fords and Plymouths in town, but so did a lot of 
 RN> other cars.

 Another of my mentors here in College Station was Dr. P.J.A. Zeller who
 was originally hired by Texas A&M College in 1924 to design the entire
 sewage system for Texas A&M.  When Dad and Mom came to A&M in 1936, they
 could only find a place to stay as 'renters' at his then house on Dexter
 Street around what started here as Dexter Park.  A year plus later they
 moved a few houses away into a one of the few early rent houses.  And not
 long after, Dr. Zeller, who was never married, was coerced into moving
 out of the neighborhood into a second new home he had to build for cultural
 reasons in another area neighborhood, together with his neat beautiful
 Packard sedan.  I was about ten years old at that time in 1949.

 We lived very close to the two railroad lines that went right through the
 Aggie campus and I was fascinated with the Southern Pacific 'Sunbeam'
 passenger train that went fron Houston to Dallas through Aggieland and how
 fast it went!  'Zee' told me it went over a hundred miles an hour on the
 long straight-of-way between Houston and Hempstead, where the original
 Texas Highway 6 for cars was closely parallel to it for much of the way,
 where possible.  'Zee' told me he'd prove it to me.  Dad and Mom let me
 ride with him on an A&M trip to Houston and back in his Packard.  On that
 many mile stretch out of Houston, 'Zee' timed our return trip so we would
 be right in step with the 'Sunbeam'.

When he saw it come up behind us, he punched on the gas and pointed to the
speedometer.  My memory is that it roller peaked at 100MPH and when we got up
there it stayed there even though we were still going a bit faster!  We were
peaked out and the 'Sunbeam' was still roaring up from behind us and a LOT
faster than we were going!  Then comes text!  In Morse Code!  We were on the
right side of the rail line and, of course, the engineer is on the right side
and the fireman is on the left side of the loco.  As they lurched past us I saw
both the engineer and the fireman in the window roaring their arms 'faster and
faster', then the engineer yanked on the whistle with 'dit dit dit dit  dit
dit' over and over again as they whooshed past us!  The train was going a LOT
faster than we were which had to be a lot faster then 100MPH, I guarantee you! 
Then as passenger car by passenger car whooshed by us I looked and saw a whole
bunch of people in window after window waving their arms at us!  Especially
from the dining car.  And at the rear of the train, the conductor waved goodbye
to us as they zoomed away from us.

Plus I looked up at the front of the Packard and saw some kind of cloud coming
out of the front of the car.  I pointed to it and 'Zee' said, "Well Mike, it is
close to a hundred degrees out there!  The Packard is overheated!"  He slowed
it down to cool it off.  Really surprised, I asked him, since I knew the
whiistle codes, even back then for forward, backward,intersection and so on,
but couldn't recognize what the repeat 'dit dit dit dit  dit dit' was, what
that meant?  Zee told me, "Mike,that's Morse Code for the letters 'HI' and he
was joking and laughing at us with the whistle!  Morse Code, which you always
use for PLAIN TEXT when you really need to communicate in emergency with people
even when there is no way for them to ever know what you are saying in normal
conversation!"

I learned a lot that day about plain text.  And how important even the plain
text moved from the IBM first 64K memory Main Frame that Dad wrote the first
three programs for at A&M.  Plus how that morphed to my first Heathkit PC with
64K of memory I've talked about.  And was one of the exact vectors that carried
me all the way up to today when we are still safest in the world of IT only by
PLAIN TEXT, written and then encrypted so that there is no way anyone in the
middle can pop your tire out if you were even chasing a train like that today
at a couple hundred MPH or more and playing such a 'game'.  With even a PC and
not a snooped on tela phoney.


Mike Luther N117C at 1:117/100



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 * Origin: BV HUB CLL(979)696-3600 (1:117/100)