Old Tandy laptops

Aaaaaaaargghhhhh!!!!! :'(

 

Had a friend covering a game in a back-water Florida burg using one of those old-timey laptops. Put the couplers on in a payphone to send when a nosy local cop shows up, asks him what he thinks he's doing, tells him to step away from the payphone. Dipshit thought the laptop was a bomb and my friend was going to blow up the payphone.

 

That old TI pictured above, that was my first remote. They handed it to me an hour before I went on a two-week road trip and said to use it. The photo doesn't show that there was a roll of thermal paper that your story printed out on as you typed. If you made a mistake, you retrieved the line the mistake was in as the paper kept advancing. Sometimes by the end of the story, the paper was 8-10 feet long. The paper roll lasted 3-4 days so you had to pack extra. The rubber modem cups were round just at the time the phone companies started making handsets square. And any extreme noise, like the blowers they used to clean the stadium after the game, would disrupt your transmission. Olympic Stadium in Montreal was a troublesome sending place. Sometimes, Betty Lou or Madge, the phone operators, broke into your line, also disrupting your transmission. But I could really wail on that keyboard.

 

Phone company probably would've been happy if they nuked the payphone, since those things are expensive to maintain given how few people use them anymore.

 

That probably beats having to file on one of these tho.

 

How many other people remember working at a newspaper where you did type stories with a typewriter and typed headlines and cutlines on sheets to send to the typesetter? I did that at my college paper quite a long time ago. Not knowing what was to come later, I loved it.

And we didn't have to worry about getting the stories on the Web site.

 

Never had to use typewriters, but I remember having to save stories on 5 1/4-inch discs. Had to put the disc on the editors desk.

I forget the system we used right now, but IIRC, we had to disc to the processor in the composing room. And it would come out in about four segments, then you had overlap the pieces together.

And yes, we had to figure heds the old fashioned way.

Then we had to run the boards to the local paper to print it.

 

Just remembered the system we used. Compugraphic.

 

That system is ahead of the systems they had at the first my first two newspapers AFTER college and then the first couple of years at my third paper. The stories came out in one long column, they were cut out, waxed and pasted onto a flat. From there, negatives were made.

 

Nice sideburns, Hank.

Incidentally, why the avatar change? I loved Flamethrower Scorpio.

 

It stopped showing up, so had to get a new site to get the image from. Found the leering Hank kinda cool. Flamethrower Hank will come back at some point.

 

First job: type the story into the computer, save it, send it to a contraption with sheets of thick "film" with holes like an old stock ticker machine that had different fonts, output the story on a long strip, wax it, cut it and stick it to the flat to make a negative.

To change the font, you changed the ticker "film" on a drum.

Aaaarrrgggghhhh.

The editor there was a two-fingered hunt 'n peck typer who was the fastest I've ever seen. He was a good editor, solid writer and a great person to work with.

Good place to break in, though: Community news, chasing fire trucks, parades, prep sports.