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Groke posted:Yah, this was the era that brought us Dr. Strangelove and all. That movie was a satire but you can bet your rear end there were at least done some serious feasibility studies of similar doomsday devices. There were way more than feasibility studies. Dead Hand was not only a real thing, it's possibly still in use. Now, unlike the one in the movie, it can be turned off, but yeah that poo poo is real.
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# ? May 8, 2013 19:40 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:05 |
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yaoi prophet posted:I remember having one of those! IIRC you sent files to your computer by plugging it in and hitting a 'send' button, and it would then essentially act as a keyboard 'typing' out the document very quickly. That is adorable (well, as as ancient computing can be, anyway) if true.
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# ? May 8, 2013 19:48 |
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yaoi prophet posted:I remember having one of those! IIRC you sent files to your computer by plugging it in and hitting a 'send' button, and it would then essentially act as a keyboard 'typing' out the document very quickly. I'd completely forgotten that! I think I actually opened a Notepad window before hitting send -- I don't remember an accompanying PC/Mac app that listened.
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# ? May 8, 2013 20:15 |
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Acting like a keyboard rather than spitting out a text file is so cool. How big was the character limit?
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# ? May 8, 2013 20:43 |
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When we used Alphasmarts in school, we physically unplugged the mini-din connector that went into the Apple computer keyboard, and plugged the alphasmart into the curly cable.
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# ? May 8, 2013 20:55 |
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On a similar note. I learned to type on one of these: A typewriter with enough in it to also do word processing through the attached monitor. You could type out whatever, then load the paper and it would print it using the typewriter's daisy wheel. I would always stay up late writing my homework then couldn't print it because the thing was loud as hell. Almost always remembered to print it before school.
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# ? May 8, 2013 21:00 |
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The Alphasmart 3K (in sizzling Bondi blue) had a mighty 200K. The Dana had 16M.
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# ? May 8, 2013 21:09 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:That is adorable (well, as as ancient computing can be, anyway) if true. Totally true, I remember this too! You would plug them in to the keyboard slot and open notepad. It would quickly type it out through the keyboard port. The AlphaSmart had 4 lines of text and was a horrible, horrible, device, but at the same time, they were impossible to break. I managed to break the screen on mine once by putting it in a binder and having the metal ring punch through the screen. That's it.
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# ? May 8, 2013 21:24 |
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Should've used a hole-punch first.
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# ? May 8, 2013 22:03 |
Athenry posted:On a similar note. I learned to type on one of these: My high school's keyboarding class still used these as of 1997, without the monitor. We also had to re-use bubble sheets for tests, erasing the previous users' answers and hoping it didn't read incorrectly. Horribly under-funded. I'm guessing bubble sheets are obsolete too now? As are keyboarding classes?
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# ? May 8, 2013 22:32 |
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leidend posted:My high school's keyboarding class still used these as of 1997, without the monitor. We also had to re-use bubble sheets for tests, erasing the previous users' answers and hoping it didn't read incorrectly. Horribly under-funded. As of 2005, high schools were still using Scantron and their ilk, as well as teaching a basic typing/office suite literacy course.
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# ? May 8, 2013 22:54 |
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I had to learn touch typing in middle school and hated it. I saw no point and almost immediately forgot all about it. Then I got on IRC in high school and a month later was typing at 100+ wpm
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# ? May 8, 2013 23:05 |
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kastein posted:I had to learn touch typing in middle school and hated it. I saw no point and almost immediately forgot all about it. I learned how to type in keyboarding class, but I learned how to type fast on ICQ ("UH OH!" A cash register at a local gas station uses that sound for something and it cracks me up).
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# ? May 9, 2013 00:45 |
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thedouche posted:I learned how to type in keyboarding class, but I learned how to type fast on ICQ ("UH OH!" A cash register at a local gas station uses that sound for something and it cracks me up). Hah! My local gas station uses that sound too (uh, do you live in NE Ohio?), and I use it for my text alert sound. e: I think that in 5 years of college I only took one test that involved a computer over a Scantron/bubble sheet. Hypnolobster has a new favorite as of 01:06 on May 9, 2013 |
# ? May 9, 2013 00:52 |
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cobalt impurity posted:As of 2005, high schools were still using Scantron and their ilk, as well as teaching a basic typing/office suite literacy course. I just finished a master's at an under-funded but not bankrupt major state school and Scantron is 100% still a thing, and I'm sure it will stay a thing for a long time. I'm 26 and have been using it since grade school.
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# ? May 9, 2013 00:56 |
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leidend posted:I'm guessing bubble sheets are obsolete too now? As are keyboarding classes? Keyboarding classes maybe, but bubble sheets and standardized tests that use them are very much alive and well, even at more well-off schools. Just took one today, in fact!
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# ? May 9, 2013 01:00 |
What would "bubble sheets" like Scantrons even have been replaced with? It's shocking that, for as ubiquitous a technology as it is, anybody would think it's gone/replaced.
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# ? May 9, 2013 01:22 |
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WebDog posted:I was messing around the other day with putting Blood Dragon through an old mac Monitor. Windows 8 is surprisingly scalable. And no picture of playing Blood Dragon? WHYYYY?
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# ? May 9, 2013 01:34 |
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Hypnolobster posted:Hah! My local gas station uses that sound too (uh, do you live in NE Ohio?), and I use it for my text alert sound. I'm in central AR. The chain that had the ICQ cash register was called Doublebee's. I haven't been in awhile since they stopped being open at really early hours. When I was in college in the early 2000's, we used scantrons like they were going out of style. They made us buy them at the campus bookstore or convenience stores rather than providing them.
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# ? May 9, 2013 01:43 |
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You Are A Elf posted:That is ubiquitous with 1970s and earlier TV sets and the then recent 1980s technology, and man, that TV had an awesome picture when playing NES on it. So what I was seeing on my old rear end TV with my NES looked like this: Those old projection TVs were horrible. My uncle had one back in the early 90s and it was basically unwatchable unless you sat dead center, and even then it kind of looked like the picture above. The early HD CRT RPTVs actually had the potential to look good, but they often looked like blurry poo poo out of the box. I used to read AVSForum and a couple of other home theater boards around that time and there were people there who actually made their living traveling around and calibrating these TVs. I've seen a couple of properly setup CRT projection TVs that looked absolutely fantastic, but they still needed maintenance to keep looking good. The later LCOS/DLP/LCD sets were much better out of the box, but they still had issues with viewing angles, bulb life and internal dust.
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# ? May 9, 2013 02:41 |
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Someone cleaned out an old desk at work. This was the highlight: Considering our current technology, this was probably used in the past 10 years.
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# ? May 9, 2013 02:52 |
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charliemaul posted:And no picture of playing Blood Dragon? WHYYYY? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zzy8vi__m0
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# ? May 9, 2013 03:04 |
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Lightning fast ZMODEM! I shouldn't laugh. When I finally got Telix and a modem that could use Zmodem I thought it was pretty cool.
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# ? May 9, 2013 03:44 |
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Hypnolobster posted:Hah! My local gas station uses that sound too (uh, do you live in NE Ohio?), and I use it for my text alert sound. Have heard it around Texas too, mostly in Shell stations it seems. I wonder if ICQ just got it from some stock sound file place and now gas stations think it's the best thing ever.
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# ? May 9, 2013 04:32 |
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Agar Agar posted:Have heard it around Texas too, mostly in Shell stations it seems. I wonder if ICQ just got it from some stock sound file place and now gas stations think it's the best thing ever. I heard it at a gas station in mid-Michigan the other day, and I thought I was going crazy. Doesn't seem like there's a geographic pattern here!
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# ? May 9, 2013 05:00 |
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Ha! I've heard the ICQ Uh Oh! in NW Washington and NW Oregon too. I couldn't remember where I'd heard it, but I remember thinking "holy poo poo, that sound!" Also I've been to a few stations that play the Sonic "pick up a ring" sound when the register processes an order. It's awesome. And I was in college in early 2000s [graduated 2006] and I remember buying piles of scantron packets at the bookstore.
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# ? May 9, 2013 05:50 |
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Just to throw the geographical thing off totally, several IGA stores in Perth, Western Australia use the noise on their cash registers.
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# ? May 9, 2013 08:19 |
Cream-of-Plenty posted:What would "bubble sheets" like Scantrons even have been replaced with? It's shocking that, for as ubiquitous a technology as it is, anybody would think it's gone/replaced. Shocking, really? I haven't had a multiple choice test in school since 1997, I assumed something had taken its place.
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# ? May 9, 2013 09:34 |
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:What would "bubble sheets" like Scantrons even have been replaced with? Once electronic handwriting or voice recognition becomes good enough, likely that. It might allow full-automation without the multiple choice acting as a hint where the correct answer possibility can be whittled down by guesses, word-recognition and known-falses.
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# ? May 9, 2013 10:32 |
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I'm in Adelaide, South Australia and my work uses the Windows 98 Chime when we need to start a fuel pump.
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# ? May 9, 2013 11:52 |
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The "uh-oh" sound was also used in WS-FTP to tell you your download was complete.
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# ? May 9, 2013 12:37 |
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Getting in on scantron-chat, all the big standardized tests use them. Our neighboring school district got in big trouble for erasing incorrect marks and replacing them with correct answers. Like get fired and go to jail kind of trouble.
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# ? May 9, 2013 13:44 |
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This thing right here was my first "mp3" player. Seemed logical, had a minizipdisk drive on my laptop so I could use those suckers to play music and trade games between friends! Thing was a pain in the rear end, only 80mb of storage between disks, clunky, slow. Made for a good portable minizip disk drive...which since it fit into the card slot of my laptop was already about as portable as you can get.
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# ? May 9, 2013 15:34 |
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Krispy Kareem posted:Getting in on scantron-chat, all the big standardized tests use them. Our neighboring school district got in big trouble for erasing incorrect marks and replacing them with correct answers. Like get fired and go to jail kind of trouble. Slight derail but is this part of the massive investigation going on with this in Atlanta? I heard on NPR the other day that a bunch of schools got nailed for changing test scores, erasing bad ones and entering good ones. If I recall, erasing a scantron answer bubble still left quite a mark on it, dark enough that I used to worry that it'd still get picked up as my answer instead of the one I changed it to. I also always wondered about those mystery bubbles that weren't part of the main answer grid. Never did fill any in, but I always wondered what they controlled.
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# ? May 9, 2013 17:10 |
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I wonder if anyone has made the correct answers to a test come out as a design. Young me would have been freaked out if a perfectly answered two column scantron looked like a Christmas tree or a person with a big butt or something.
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# ? May 9, 2013 17:37 |
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Code Jockey posted:Slight derail but is this part of the massive investigation going on with this in Atlanta? I heard on NPR the other day that a bunch of schools got nailed for changing test scores, erasing bad ones and entering good ones. Yep, it's the Atlanta mess. You expect a certain number of erasers, but several Atlanta schools were off the chart, which started the investigation. The superintendent and a bunch of principals, teachers, and proctors were arrested. Not so much for cheating but because they received cash bonuses for those good grades (hello racketeering). So yeah, you can't totally erase a Scan-Tron answer, but the grading computer is smart enough to tell the difference.
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# ? May 9, 2013 17:44 |
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This is cool. I wonder if they just get all of the erased answer data for the district and do a Grubb's outlier test or something?
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# ? May 9, 2013 17:46 |
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thedouche posted:I wonder if anyone has made the correct answers to a test come out as a design. Young me would have been freaked out if a perfectly answered two column scantron looked like a Christmas tree or a person with a big butt or something. When I was in high school, we were required to take some state exam, but it didn't matter because we were in the AP program. My friend filled in the bubble sheet to be a smiley face. Also while I was in high school, the town over got hit pretty hard for faculty "reviewing" SAT answer sheets; but they went even further and actually helped the students during the exam, I believe. JediTalentAgent posted:Once electronic handwriting or voice recognition becomes good enough, likely that. It might allow full-automation without the multiple choice acting as a hint where the correct answer possibility can be whittled down by guesses, word-recognition and known-falses. That seems pretty unlikely. For one thing, certain exams which use scantrons and have an essay section, like the ACT or the new SAT still have someone actually read the written part. And the point of standardized tests is that they have multiple choice in the first place, so electronic handwriting won't help there. And voice recognition would be an absolute disaster for that kind of test, unless you can somehow sequester every test taker in a soundproof room/booth. Besides, when basically every major examination uses them, you aren't going to see a change anytime soon. It's a convenient and easy way to handle the SATs, LSATs, GRE, MCAT, &c.
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# ? May 9, 2013 17:47 |
leidend posted:Shocking, really? I haven't had a multiple choice test in school since 1997, I assumed something had taken its place. Yeah, I still think it's really surprising. I mean, if anything, schools have consumed more Scantron-style materials since 1997, what with all the emphasis on standardized testing (at least in the United States). Even outside of a school environment, that whole "bubble in" technology is used on a lot of government forms and for various applications, to help eliminate errors. Beyond JediTalentAgent's post, I'm not sure why anybody would think they'd been replaced with anything. They require paper and #2 lead. They are the cheapest, fastest thing available to public schools and government departments. Maybe everybody just remembers them from highschool and college and figures they disappeared with [expensive new technology here] after they graduated?
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# ? May 9, 2013 20:49 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:05 |
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Krispy Kareem posted:Yep, it's the Atlanta mess. You expect a certain number of erasers, but several Atlanta schools were off the chart, which started the investigation. The superintendent and a bunch of principals, teachers, and proctors were arrested. Not so much for cheating but because they received cash bonuses for those good grades (hello racketeering). Gah my husband is a teacher in Fayette County and the security crap he had to deal with just to give the EOCT this year because of Atlanta...
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# ? May 9, 2013 21:26 |