Reminds me quite a bit of Asimov’s “The Last Question”, which mines the same “computer-as-God” vein, is also very short, and has a suspiciously related title. Asimov’s story appeared in 1956, just two years later.
My exact thought process on seeing the title here: "Ah, 'insufficient data for meaningful answer'. No, wait, that one's called 'The Last Question'. So perhaps it's 'There is now'." :-)
(Asimov's is better. Also, the version of this one in my memory is better than the actual story, in that "There is now" is better than the rather clunky equivalent in the story. I suppose it's possible that I'm remembering a different, slightly better written, story with the exact same idea.)
As an old fart who actually used a typewriter, I must point out that the bell does not ring when you press the carriage return. The bell rings when you are nearing the end of the line to warn you that you are bout to run out of paper.
On carriage return, the sound should be a slow swing of the heavy carriage physically returning.
This is odd, I could have sworn mine rang the bell when the carriage return returned to the start of the line, so it was more of a "swoooosh ding!", but I watched a video and you're right. Very odd.
The bell was rang (rung?) when you were around ten columns away from the right side of the paper, as a notification to the user to manually use the carriage return bar, or use the return key on the fancy electric typewriters.
> as a notification to the user to manually use the carriage return bar
It also, probably more so, was a signal to the user to start thinking about how to break the current line. You couldn’t type and, upon realizing the word you were typing didn’t fit the line, backspace and type a hyphen.
‘About ten columns’ then is a reasonable number. Of course, longer words exist and aren’t extremely rare, but those would have a reasonable hyphenation point that you could and would want to use.
Our office still has a manual typewriter, and an IBM Selectric.
The bell rings when the Page Stops are reached. These can be manually set on the page. The bell rings, the typist plans for end of line, then they whack the bar and zzzzz-thunk the carriage returns.
I am not a lawyer, but my full-time work involves reviewing codebases for GDPR and CCPA compliance.
I do not believe this strategy will achieve what OP is hoping.
In response to a deletion request, Reddit instead seeks to anonymize the data. Anonymous data is not personal data, so anonymous data is not covered by GDPR.
If you submit a GDPR deletion request, they will in this way wriggle into a position where they claim GDPR does not apply.
When Reddit (or most any other website) soft-deletes an account, they simply obfuscate the user's identifiers such as username and IP address. They argue that this is sufficient to make the mass of remaining data anonymous, and therefore not covered by any privacy law.
This is an extremely common position for websites. However, it requires that the remaining data truly be anonymous. For Reddit, this is absurd, as the free-form content of the website allows any amount of identifying information to be uploaded. Reddit simply cannot guarantee that identities cannot be deduced from what remains.
I believe this is fundamentally in violation of GDPR, but I am not a GDPR regulator with the power of enforcement.
This requires a legal appeal to the regulatory bodies.
Usually companies would rather delete uploaded content / text to avoid the chance of the user having disclosed private information through that content which will remain if simply "anonymized" because the account holder's PII is disconnected from the content. The liability is high enough to warrant deleting the content.
There are many correct answers here, but I recommend the Pentax K1000. It is possibly the world's #1 most-manufactured camera, and was the standard camera for beginner photography classes throughout the 80s and 90s.
There are vendors on eBay that specialize in this camera and have literally 100s of cameras in stock.
Early models are all-metal, while later ones incorporate some plastic, but are consequently lighter. At this age, I wouldn't worry about the reliability difference of the two, and simply plan to replace the body if it fails.
The Pentax K-mount has a lot of cheap, good glass. The 50/1.8 is standard and fabulous, the 28/2.8 and 135/4 are also amazing and can be had for under $50.
The camera is entirely manual, with no autofocus or autoexposure available. Optionally, you can put a button cell battery in it to power a simple exposure meter, visible as a needle indicator in the viewfinder.
I've been shooting these for 40 years, so I'm a bit biased, but I do recommend them just for their ubiquity and cheap replaceability.
The K1000 and the Canon AE-1 are some of the only model names that people still recognize. They were both basic cameras when new. Ironically, they are now frequently more expensive than better cameras from the same makers. The name recognition has driven search.
I now recommend a Pentax MX, the same operation of a K1000 but better in every way. It was a more upscale all mechanical camera from Pentax. If you want a Canon, go for an Fb to Ftb for mechanical cameras or an A1 if you want more automated exposure options.
The best deals are probably the autofocus cameras from the 90s. With a little looking around you can probably find a Minolta XtSI with a 50mm lens for $50 or less. It is small and the lens, like all 50mm, is great. It also has a built in flash and a variety of of auto modes to simplify picture taking. Yes, they are cheap, plastic cameras that will not last a very long time. But you can get then for so cheap it doesn't really matter. The lenses tend to last longer. You can get similar deals on other brands too. Pentax autofocus cameras are super cheap but you can find Canon Rebels by the truckload as well as many Nikon (the N/F80 is my favorite plastic fantastic from them).
Under CCPA, businesses do not "demand" data because there is no restriction on its collection. Businesses simply need to provide notice of what they collect.
Consumers cannot opt out of this collection.
Consumers do have the option to opt out of having their personal information resold to third parties. The CCPA then specifically restricts businesses from withholding services or providing you with reduced services as penalty for this opt-out.
CCPA may not be perfect or even well-explained, but it's a first step in a positive direction within the United States. I think it's unfair to call it "useless".
I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history."
Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.
The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.
CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.
It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....
Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time.
In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.
Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. The whole thing got exported as RTF and fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-ROM access and that also built a full-text search index. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.
Around this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no one knew what format would "win" for hypertext. In any case, there were no tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything -- including our own search engine for the CD-ROM.
This kind of comment is the exact reason why I keep coming back to HN. It's great to read stories of real people who have worked in all kinds of amazing and inspiring projects, thanks for sharing your experience with us, it's always nice to read about technical details of legendary software.
It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).
If you like that you might love this trip back in time from the one and only Douglas Adams;
"Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest."
Not to stray too far from the subject, and you clearly have some valuable ability to improvise in tough engineering requirements. Where did you end up?
Haha, I was thinking the same thing, but hopefully he is retired after 30 years in tech (with a nice retirement portfolio assuming he worked at MSFT in the early 90s).
i certainly found myself thinking a similar thought, if only because said username seems highly applicable to my own life. mostly the jobless part as i have done a lot of work to leave the junkie aspect behind but i would be lying if I said vestiges of it don't still remain
Authoring WinHelp files is a pain (and indeed better done by hand or via a convertor from a saner format), but from a user perspective WinHelp is IMO the best format - the only thing i'd like (assuming WinHelp was still distributed with Windows 10 - though you can copy it from a machine that has it and it'll work) is the contents sidebar from HTMLHelp (which is also nice, but a full blown browser engine is IMO overkill and it gets often abused with fancy CSS and javascript effects in some CHM files - WinHelp is too limited for that, though some programs did try to push things further than should be pushed).
Hey, thanks for your work! I got a CD-ROM holding Encarta '95 for Christmas when I was in grade school and I loved it - spent a lot of time on that program over the years, and it really helped develop my love of learning.
One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time.
It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.
A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300.
To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today.
Interesting, I do remember 2000+ dollar computers in that time period, but $3700!?
Although '91 is earlier than I got back into PCs, strongest memories are probably more around '93, '94. The 486SX might have been the ~$2000 computer at that time. I remember later having the AMD 386/40 and 486/100 made better performance affordable.
At that time you could get a moderate 386 system at Walmart or Radio Shack for around $800. These were pretty common consumer systems for kids just on their way to college.
Internet history fairy here to make sure people know that the internet has been in continuous operation since 1969 [1]. (And DARPA started funding research for the express purpose of creating a global computer network in 1960.)
What was still a few years away in '91 is awareness or interest in the internet by a significant fraction of consumers (or by Bill Gates for that matter).
[1]: Some people would deny the name "internet" to any network prior to the introduction of the internet protocol suite in 1982, but it was the same user-visible services (email, ftp, telnet, netnews, etc) running on both the earlier network that began operation in 1969 and the later network that some want to reserve the name "internet" for. In other words, the switch in 1983 from NCP to TCP/IP was mostly transparent to users.
No, we had HTTP in '91, but the web was small and consisted almost entirely of information about physics and computing.
And we didn't yet have a graphical web browser that ran on Windows or Mac. And MSDOS was AFAIK never adapted to allow the computer to interact with the user while something was downloading or uploading. (I.e., it lacked the necessary kind of multitasking.)
I just want to thank you for your work on Encarta. It was the first _real software_ I interacted with in my teen years; it fascinated me a lot back then and I believe it’s part of the reason I’m in software industry. Thank you.
I definitely poured hours into Encarta as well. I was already a big fan of computers but I do wonder how much of an impact Encarta had on me. It definitely built up that early browsing habit that translated so seamlessly into the web.
My reading is that levels were once randomly generated, but the updates ends this.
The update provides a fixed series of 10k hand-checked levels for everyone to play, regardless of their existing game state, so your game will end after hole 38,890.
