SciFi history?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nyrath

Close, but not quite.
It was not Isaac Asimov. It was actually Hal Draper in his insightful story MS Fnd in a Lbry . But your point remains good.

Ebook: http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html

My memory failed me. Yours didn't. Thanks for the correction.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

My friends and I discuss this issue a lot... it seems most television and movie dramas these days depend on nothing but lack of communication. Nobody's really a good or bad guy... they're just all afraid to share, and as a result, all Hell breaks loose. Lack of communication creates conflict. (Maybe we should add that to the Rules of SF thread... or maybe not.)

An awful lot of stories revolve around lack off communication, and the lack can result from an assortment of causes.

One old friend was writing an SF novel where the plot revolved around financial skulduggery. The first suggestion I made revolved around the time required for communications. We're used to instant communication in the financial markets. We can know about changes in values to securities listed on the Hong Kong Bourse as they happen. When you have interplanetary or interstellar distances involved, you can't, and the better model might be the age of sail, where the banking house back home wouldn't know for 6 months what had taken place somewhere they had an investment, and had to rely on local factors with broad discretion to handle their affairs given general guidelines about what the banking house wanted to do.

In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, most of it takes place in the context of a war with the neighboring Republic of Haven, where the folks working in Manticore's War Room are basing decisions on information that is weeks old by the time it reaches them, and the ships (or even entire fleets) affected by the information may not even exist by the time the planners hear of it. They are all uncomfortably aware of it, and it's yet another stress factor.

In another instance in the same series, peace talks collapse because someone was deliberately altering diplomatic communications, so what one side saw wasn't what the other side sent, and decisions to resume hostilities were made on the basis of false data.

But "Nobody's really a good or bad guy" can be a strength. A lot of the books I like have folks on both sides who are fine, admirable people, who simply happen to be on opposite sides. I may root for them to lose, because I'm against their side, but I'll want them to come out of it alive.

Look at the TV show Lost... simple honest communication between all parties would have ended that show in about nine episodes. I think it's a telling statement about our society today, unfortunately.

A friend got the entire run of Lost on DVDs, and sat down recently to watch it all straight through. I never watched the show, and had no desire to, so I didn't care about spoilers. What I got from his comments was that seeing it all back to back like that made it more comprehensible, but what was there to comprehend screamed Second Order Idiot Plot.
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Dennis

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by nyrath

Yes, when Gene Roddenberry was creating the writer's bible for the original Star Trek TV show, he noted that in a cop show, when a policeman fires his gun, he does NOT stop and explain that the hammer strikes the firing cap, igniting a charge of gunpowder, which expands and pushes the lead bullet out the barrel.

So neither should a starship captain explain how his ray-gun works. Just let your readers know it is a futuristic kind of hand-gun and leave it at that.

True... but Star Trek (TOS and Next Generation particularly) also went out of its way to describe minute details of everything they did, disguised as military convention--specific orders and detailing actions to command structure, and of course, the conference room discussions that often included the ship's doctor, who only seemed to be needed there in order to say "I'm a doctor... not an engineer! Just what does that mean?" and providing room for any necessary exposition.

SF shows often use a "foil" to provide excuses for exposition, like annoying children (looking at you, Wesley!) or alien companions that are "not well-versed in Human ways," etc.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

A friend got the entire run of Lost on DVDs, and sat down recently to watch it all straight through. I never watched the show, and had no desire to, so I didn't care about spoilers. What I got from his comments was that seeing it all back to back like that made it more comprehensible, but what was there to comprehend screamed Second Order Idiot Plot.

I'd agree that's a fairly good assessment.

[Penforhire]

Joe, many of us are old enough to have also used punch cards (52 card pickup, grrr). That's my word association for Fortran ("Fortran? Punch card!"). And don't forget tape drives (load failure in my Commodore PET because the tape stretched?!). The 8" floppy fad didn't seem to last all that long. Must be because they were terribly fragile (hey, but 2-sided 8" got you all the way up to 200 KB of storage, IIRC). Seems like 5.25" use lasted a very long time but maybe that's just my personal exposure to it.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Joe, many of us are old enough to have also used punch cards (52 card pickup, grrr). That's my word association for Fortran ("Fortran? Punch card!"). And don't forget tape drives (load failure in my Commodore PET because the tape stretched?!). The 8" floppy fad didn't seem to last all that long. Must be because they were terribly fragile (hey, but 2-sided 8" got you all the way up to 200 KB of storage, IIRC). Seems like 5.25" use lasted a very long time but maybe that's just my personal exposure to it.

I had a client once who got confused, because he wasn't aware that on the new system my employer sold him, there was slot on the 5.25" floppy drive you had to uncover to make it readable. On the 8" CP/M diskettes he was used to, it was the other way around...

I never had to deal with 8" diskettes, but still have a fair number of 5.25s, as well as 3.5s, and a half height combo drive that can read either.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

True... but Star Trek (TOS and Next Generation particularly) also went out of its way to describe minute details of everything they did, disguised as military convention--specific orders and detailing actions to command structure, and of course, the conference room discussions that often included the ship's doctor, who only seemed to be needed there in order to say "I'm a doctor... not an engineer! Just what does that mean?" and providing room for any necessary exposition.

Forget the presence of the doctor. Start with the Captain and most of his senior command structure beaming down to unknown conditions on a planetary surface to investigate something. I'd expect that behavior to get at least the Captain relieved of duty really fast in a sensible navy.
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Dennis

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I had a client once who got confused, because he wasn't aware that on the new system my employer sold him, there was slot on the 5.25" floppy drive you had to uncover to make it readable. On the 8" CP/M diskettes he was used to, it was the other way around...

I never had to deal with 8" diskettes, but still have a fair number of 5.25s, as well as 3.5s, and a half height combo drive that can read either.
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Dennis

This brings back memories and things have certainly changed. In the 1980s I used to use 8 inch diskettes on my CPT system (a dedicated word processor). It had two 8 inch drives, one for the program disk and the other for the data disk.

One nice thing about the screen was that it was a 50-line paper-white screen, giving it the look of a sheet of typing paper. The typewriter analogy was enhanced by the way the cursor worked, you typed on a one line and the rest of the text moved up (much like with paper in a typewriter).

Due to the limitations of the system I had to choose between available features. For example, I could have cut-and-paste, or justified printing (but not at the same time). To change from one feature to another I had to reload the system's program disk.

I had to save each page of a document as a separate file, and could save about 100 pages on a disk. Moving text from one page from another involved merging to pages together and saving them.

As I said, things have certainly changed.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

This brings back memories and things have certainly changed. In the 1980s I used to use 8 inch diskettes on my CPT system (a dedicated word processor). It had two 8 inch drives, one for the program disk and the other for the data disk.

I never dealt with CPT gear, but I remember the existence of things like it, Lanier, Wang, Vydek, and IBM Displaywriters.

A bank I once worked for was grimly amusing. At one point, they decided to upgrade the secretaries, who had been using IBM Selectric typewriters. They realized they needed Vydek gear, but bought Qyx intelligent typewriters instead because those were within the signing authority of the VP of the area doing it. Buying the Vydek kit would have required kicking things up to the next level of management, and they didn't want to do that.

The small systems manager put up word processing on one of his PDP systems, and users discovered the systems also had games, so I'd get "official" support questions, like "How do I get the bucket to rise to the top of the well in Dungeon?"

And at one point, an officer deliberately bought his secretary a WP system incompatible with anything else in use, so she couldn't be asked to work on other people's projects.

Shortly thereafter, the IBM PC began taking over, producubng an entirely different set of issues.

One nice thing about the screen was that it was a 50-line paper-white screen, giving it the look of a sheet of typing paper. The typewriter analogy was enhanced by the way the cursor worked, you typed on a one line and the rest of the text moved up (much like with paper in a typewriter).

I've seen monitors like that. I've also seen WP systems that were not full screen editors. Only the selected line could be edited, though they could display more than one line.

Due to the limitations of the system I had to choose between available features. For example, I could have cut-and-paste, or justified printing (but not at the same time). To change from one feature to another I had to reload the system's program disk.

Things were on overlays, and you had to load the overlay from the program disk? Sounds like the old CP/M word processing systems. With a whole 64K (if that - some had 48K) of memory to hold OS, program, and data being worked on, you pretty much had to adopt that approach.

I logged some time on a Commodore 64, and one of the better word processors for it had an odd quirk: it did not auto format as you typed. The text would wrap whenever it hit the right edge of the screen, even if it was in the middle of a word. To see things properly, you had to switch to a preview mode, but you couldn't edit while in preview.

I had to save each page of a document as a separate file, and could save about 100 pages on a disk. Moving text from one page from another involved merging to pages together and saving them.

As I said, things have certainly changed.

Much to our collective relief.
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Dennis

[Joebill]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Joe, many of us are old enough to have also used punch cards (52 card pickup, grrr). That's my word association for Fortran ("Fortran? Punch card!"). And don't forget tape drives (load failure in my Commodore PET because the tape stretched?!). The 8" floppy fad didn't seem to last all that long. Must be because they were terribly fragile (hey, but 2-sided 8" got you all the way up to 200 KB of storage, IIRC). Seems like 5.25" use lasted a very long time but maybe that's just my personal exposure to it.

I'm old enough to ahve used punch cards, but I didn't start using computers until after the Apple ][+ ( 2+) came out. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1 kilobyte of memory. Cost me 100 dollars. Later bought the 16 k expansion for 50 dollars. 1984.

Had a DEC VAX 11/780 at university. 6 VT(don't remember the number) vacuum tube, valve, terminals on one campus. 4 terminals at another campus. One modem port. 1986

From home I used my Amiga A1000, a 1200 baud modem, and a VT100 terminal emulator to read Bitnet email. That was in 1989.

At an earlier university, in 1976, I saw a paper tape reader hooked up to a computer being used to operate light and sound cues for theatrical productions.

The Master Lighting person made the tape during dress rehersal. During production, one of the other lighting techs would play the paper tape, speeding it up or slowing it down, if the action or actors speed up their speechs or slowed them down.

[WillAdams]

williemeikle wrote:

>Star Trek had their "tricorders" and such in the late '60s...

which were _not_ usable as general purpose computers and had little beyond sensor input, minimal processing power and storage capacity --- remember Spock having to make a computer of ``stone knives and bear skins'' in _City on the Edge of Forever_?

William

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

The most entertaining thing about Star Trek was its tendency to create new compounds and elements by adding "dou/di" "tri" and "quad" to existing elements:

di-lithium
tri-tanium
tri-ox
quadro-triticale
duo-tronium
duo-tronics
tri-corder

Can anyone think of others I missed?

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

di-lithium
tri-tanium
tri-ox
quadro-triticale
duo-tronium
duo-tronics
tri-corder

Can anyone think of others I missed?

not sure it was mentioned on Star Trek, but look up Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Extremely controversial stuff.

[BenG]

Originally Posted by kacir

Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Two atoms of hydrogen, one atom of oxygen. Yes, keep away from that stuff.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BenG

Two atoms of hydrogen, one atom of oxygen. Yes, keep away from that stuff.

It's the universal solvent. It can dissolve whatever it touches!

If you must use it for some reason, best to dilute it with C2H5OH.
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Dennis