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Admin
And also read the article on the NeXT Computer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
To quote the article: "At the time, a 640 MB drive cost approximately US$5,000." (Time referenced in the article was 1986).
Also, if you did a full install of the NeXT Computer OS, it was 200 MB!
Admin
Admin
Ah yes, but where do think the designers of Word got the idea for how to set the fonts, margins, indents, formatting and superscript "th"? Probably from the gold-standard IBM Selectric.
Admin
Some people learn from their mistakes. The whole "fire due to a snafu" without-thinking-it-through corporate mentality costs corporations, it doesn't save money. New person will always need to get on top of things, learn the job, even if the job description matches experience.
It's not necessarily a valid assumption that the IT manager in question kept screwing things.
Cheers!
Admin
WTF?! The font face doesn't match what was usually put on Selectric, and the formatting was done definitely by Word (or OO.org). Whoever had typed it on a Selectric, would have done it differently, and it would look different.
The designers of Word didn't design any fonts, either.
AFAIK, IBM didn't design fonts for the Selectric either, they got their fonts from well-known foundries.
That memo was done on Word. I'm not saying that there wasn't some original memo matching the contents of DR's, just that the particular exhibit is contemporary, plain and simple.
Cheers!
Admin
Yeah, because when you install OO.org on Windows, it won't use any M$-provided fonts. Also, OO.org doesn't strive to match Word's output, like, at all.
Have you ever tried, on a Windows machine, to type up a simple document in Word, print it out, then open it in OOo and print it again? Chances are, they'll look exactly the same. That's my experience.
Cheers!
Admin
This story reminds me of a set of systems we used to manage at a former job that were a sort of primitive cluster for searching documents. There was one master box and 3-4 slave boxes. The slaves were behind a reverse proxy connected to a database. Code was pushed by the master via rsync, and the data was collected via the slaves, which were supposed to be clones. Due to various hardware issues, one was usually down for some kind of maintenance or non-pushable upgrade.
One day, one of these boxes was being re-engineered for a new structure. This meant re-coding a lot of stuff by hand, and the master server was used as a template of sorts. Well, sadly, one of the scripts had the rsync set up like the master (that is, went upstream instead of downstream). He then forgot about the cron job and left it running. As root. With DSA keys and no password required.
The test slave then did an rsync --delete --update move which copied over an empty data directory into the master, wiping out all the data, including the initial codebase. The altered master server then pushed out this empty data to all the slaves. Suddenly, all the slaves were empty and crashed because they had static linked libraries that had been erased. As root.
When we got the pages, we thought since all the slaves were reporting empty, that there was a database connection problem. It took us 6 hours to find out none of the code was working. Then we found out the master server was also missing what we needed (but somehow did not crash like the others until a reboot was accidentally done).
LUCKILY, one of the slaves was turned off due to scheduled maintenance because the SCSI hard drives were tossing out errors. We gingerly booted it back up, and copied all the data and codebase we could before the SCSI drives died or corrupted the data we needed (they stayed up). The source code for the master was also saved due to a recent tape backup.
It took a week to deconstruct what had happened.
Admin
It might be cruel in the short term, but in the long term it's the only way to go. Works both ways, too: decent companies end up with high-quality employees, and crap companies end up getting rid of the only people who know what they're doing ...
Admin
It absolutely does not match "pixel for pixel". If your version of MS Word produces text that looks like this, I would send it back to Microsoft and demand a refund.
possibly Times (New) Roman - which dates back to 1931, but it has also been suggested that the type face is actually “Bembo”. In general, the differences between Roman typefaces (including the spacing) are quite subtle.
All of which may have been standard typesetting practice at the time and incorporated into Microsoft Word as defaults (and left unchanged since then). Typesetters are known to be a conservative bunch (not necessarily in a political sense of the word) and Microsoft likely knew that.
This actually looks completely different in the version I produced using Word 2003 (see below) compared to the CBS memo. In Word, the top of the h extends only slightly above the top of the preceding 7. In the CBS memo, however, both the t and the h extend way above the top of the digit. I tested both manually setting the superscript font option on the th as well as using the corresponding "AutoCorrect" feature with the same results.
Anyway, when I typed the memo using 12pt Times New Roman in OpenOffice.org then it looked quite different from the one I typed in MS Word 2003. However, once I changed the page format to US Letter with 1.25” margins left and right (Word's default setting), then the only striking difference between the OO.org and Word versions is the line spacing which is greater in OO.org.
In both the OO.org and Word versions, the “not” before “happy” ended up at the end of line no. 4 of the first paragraph, whereas in the CBS memo, it's at the start of line 5. In the Word version, the ends of lines 2 and 3 seem to line up exactly whereas in the OO.org version, the g in “regarding” is slightly more to the right. While this isn't visible in the downscaled version that you posted, the g in regarding is also slightly more to the right in the CBS memo.
The type face in the CBS memo, while absolutely a member of the Roman font family, is definitely not the Times New Roman used by MS Word 2003. For one, the digits look quite different, e.g. as has been mentioned, the upper and lower loop in “8” are almost the same size in Microsoft's Times New Roman while the upper loop is markedly narrower in the CBS type face. In general, the CBS type face is also quite irregular (just look at the “a”s and “m”s) and blotty or incomplete (notice the 1 in “18 August”?) and look much more typewriter-like than anything I could come up with using Word.
Of course the resulting image could have been post-processed using special imaging software to make it look more typewriter-like. However I would have to believe that the forger was surprisingly skilled in using such image processing tools yet on the other hand foolish enough to use MS Word with default settings. There is also the interesting question why one would use MS Word to try and fake a typewritten document when refurbished vintage typewriters of the 1960s and 1970s such as the IBM Selectric and IBM Executive can be bought from ebay with warranty included (I am not kidding!). Some of these not only could be used to produce proportional Roman type face but also super-scripts.
If I were to produce such a forgery, however, I would probably use a monospace font with no superscripts anyway.
The documents may still have been forged, but the idea that MS Word was the tool of choice seems anything but compelling to me.
Admin
Admin
My first computer was a Packard Bell in 1995 with a 850 MB hdd for about $2000 withot monitor.
Admin
Fantastic.
Admin
too right - 10Mb would have been massive back then!
Admin
Funny, after the umpteenth post someone found out it was Unix, even with the giveaways.
1 - It mentioned workstations. Not PC's. Anyone working in corporate or university environments knows the difference, and knows that real workstations run UNIX.
2 - Because of being workstations, it also means they usually have more resources than household PC's. Overspecced HD's for workstations were not uncommon.
3 - Geeze, didn't "softlinks" give the obvious hint? I don't know any other OS that uses that concept. (No, "shortcuts" in Windows aren't the same.)
Admin
Ah ... the Children of the 90's have arisen. Sheesh, I didn't use BITNET or FidoNet back then, though I did use some BBS's in the mid-90's and still I know that email spans a hell of a lot earlier than the Internet boom!!!
I also remember that part of the Iran-Contra scandal (remember that?) was uncovered by deleted e-mails on the government network. That's 1987.
Its kind of like people bragging about IM not existing before 1999 because MS hadn't built MSN Messenger yet. (Hint: ICQ @ 1996, eXpress Messages in BBS systems in the 80's.) Or chat systems, forgetting about IRC. Or multiplayer games (MUD's since the late 70's) ... oh well...
I'm going now. Gonna play Ms. Pacman on my C-64 ... ;)
PD: I'm a children of the 80's. ;)
Admin
Admin
Word existed before Office and indeed before Windoze.
Admin
I can only imagine how much the licensing would have cost.. in the mid 80's Xenix would have been the 'cheap' option, but it would have cost a fortune....
Forget the disks!
It wouldn't surprise me if their setup included something like a VAX or an honeywell with a LOT of serial ports, then each of these fine 'workstations' connected up with UUCP for document management & of course email.
But the mid 80's was before Xenix TCP/IP iirc, they could have been Apollo or even SUN workstations...
I remember BSD 4.2 installing nice in 40MB, so I don't see why an old version of SunOS wouldn't fit in 70MB.
Funny if they could afford all of this hardware/software, but balked at a proper sysadmin.
Go check out TME (The machine emulator) ( http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/ ), Someone could just build it, get the SunOS, and settle if it'd fit in 70MB. My memory wants to say yes.
Admin
I bought WD 200 MB for $250 in 1993, Quantum 350 MB in 1994 for $350, and this was in Russia. Bought WD 1GB in 1995 for $400, at Fry's.
Admin
reminds me of an old story: an employee misunderstood the message on the floppy disk that said "this disk must be formatted before use"...so EVERY SINGLE TIME he put a disk a floppy drive, the VERY FIRST thing he ALWAYS did was Format it...and his job was to do the company-wide backups! and nobody noticed till they tried to use a backup.