Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for January 31, 2016

Did Pig buy that whale oil online?

I can remember when a chat room was an actual room in which people chatted; it was officially called a living room.:Nowadays, there’s not so much living going on.

hey! I been lookin for whale oil!

Surely Pig must know it’s illegal to hunt whale (for their oil, for their blubber, etc.) nowadays.

Good “old guy” dig from Pig.

When I was a junior in HS, the school got a single computer, and it was a BIG DEAL. I and my classmates in AP math were the only students permitted to use it. Programs were created on punch cards, and recorded on paper tape. One of my classmates became an IBM Distinguished Engineer, the highest award IBM gives to its best programmers. Others also became highly accomplished programmers. They really caught the early wave and rode it all the way to shore.

I used to run a Computer BBS. Bulletin Board System. Very few people know that that even is anymore.

So:

1) Where did Pig get that whale oil so readily and2) How is it that he even knows about whale oil lamps?….oh, yeah…..he Googled it.

Technology goes way too slow. Planes are still as slow as in the 1970s. There are still trains that are not high-speed. Mobile phones existed in the 1980s. Cars are still not fully autonomous. There’s still no holograms or teleporting.In fact the only interesting thing created in my lifetime was the internet, and that is now ruined by censorship, advertising and social media.

I’m slightly younger than Stephen, but we had the Internet in college. There was no Skype but there was IRC. And there was p0rn that you could download using FTP to either Washington university or some university in Finland. I guess law students really didn’t have the Internet.

Oh,my! I look upon Cartoon-Boy as a mere youth from my perspective. No, Pig, I did not hunt dinosaurs (although I sometimes feel as though I did)….

It’s true. It was virtually impossible to binge-watch a full season of anything on a slide rule.

I’m guessing, Pig, and Rat, are between the ages of 20-25

hey, internet didn’t exist for the first five years of my life!

Do you shave a whale before you oil it or after…it’s all so confusing…

What? No coal-fired black-and-white internet with aluminum foil on the rabbit ears by candlelight? Uphill, both ways?

Kids these days…

Computers have given us many great and wondrous things, but social media is not one of them.And yes, I get the irony of posting that comment on this forum.

The times they are a changing…………But when the crash comes as it must………….it will be just that much harder :-(

Three channel black and white TV,rotary phone attached to the wall on a party line, and a seven transistor GE portable AM radio……that’s me back in the day. Ain’t technology wonderful!!!

The Internet (domain names) was invented by DARPA in the 1960’s The World Wid Web was invented by CERN in 1993.

I started hearing John Lennon 6 panels in.Imagine there’s no Skype…No internet to run on…

As a tech-supporter, when I first got on the ’net, most of my colleagues were still in diapers, if born at all.

♫♪He’s an old hippie and he don’t know what to doShould he hold on to the oldOr grab on to the new.He’s an old hippieThis new life is just a bust.He ain’t trying to change nobodyHe’s just trying real hard to adjust.

In my high school physics class, we got a special deal on circular slide rules to use in school. I still have mine somewhere. I brought it to work once to show to some of the younger guys who had never seen one. They reacted about like those other people in the diner.

My cell phone is so old it has a rotary dial!

@Joken-

Please define “rotary” and “dial.”

All they are is a tool and all that they do is what you want them to do. I’ve been using them since 1974. I have a tool box of good hand tools i started buying about the same time. I finally have a computer that I put in the same class. It’s durable, very useful at times and may last a few years. A lot of younger people bring this thought to my mind: Is that device your servant or your master?

This is the same way I used to talk to my parents about television. How did you exist without television?? What on earth did you do??!!

“And you kids who complain that the World Wide WebIs too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin’,’Cuz when I was a boy every packetWas delivered by carrier pigeon”

http://www.stevemacdonald.org/lyrics/wiwab.html

I still have a Pickett circular rule, completely forgot how to use it.

It’s one “downmanship” here today huh? OK, I still USE my sliderule.

When at R.I.S.D. in 1955, we lived in our own apartments, only freshman women lived in a dorm. I didn’t bother my room mate practicing tenor & 5-string banjo. He was a banjo player as well. As a professional in graphic arts, photography,& printing my world changed when computers took over the process of preparing original artwork for reproduction. Worse, everything was expected in moments, not weeks to do it by hand. Analog is better for mind body & spirit.

jeeesh, don’t mention that VCR’s were still the rage. We had the first Nintendo.

Hey! But we did invent dirt. Actually, “we” invented a lot of those things the millennials have now.

I better type this quick before my last supply of whale oil runs o

You young whipper-snappers have it easy today.What with all your graphing calculators, smart phones, and googley-oogley internet.Why in my day the only things on demand where the bills you had to pay. And if we wanted to calculate something we’d stick our fingers through holes in a piece of cardboard, and for really hard problems we’d take off our shoes and socks.

We had internet and email on DARPANET in the 70’s|80’s, but the company|school outgoing email went out and the incoming replies from yesterday came in overnight. Email conversations were SLOW.

We called people calculators. Many of us carried slide-rules, just like our elders who built atom bombs, SR-71s, moon rockets and landers, the transistor, polio vaccine….

It is just progress. The Pony Express lasted only nineteen months before it was put out of business by newer technology..After spending the last 5 days trying to get the post office to locate and deliver a package they were supposed to have, transporter technology would certainly be appreciated.

I agree with Stephen, I’ve lived for 21 years and I’ve seen basic mobile phones turn into flip phones. Flip phones turn into slider phones.I could be all day with this so I’ll stop. You all get the point.xxx

Look, my first computer was a TRS-80 (aka TRaSh-80). It used a tape drive. You know that you activated the program in the morning before you left for work/school, and when you came back that evening, you know it … would finish loading any minute now…

386 k, too… :-)

I brought my slide rule to engineering college in 1973. A few months later I bought a calculator that could perform 4 functions and fit in a holster on my belt. The slide rule still works; you can’t get batteries for the calculator any more.

cat-in-the hat, you should have waited until 1974 to buy the Texas Instuments SR-50. The first engineering calculator I could afford. And yes, I still have my slide rules, though I forget what the specific scales are for.

Or as some kid said, “When he was a child, Abraham Lincoln was so poor he had to watch tv by firelight.”

Laptops didn’t exist when he got his BA in Political Science in ’89? Not likely. The first flip top style laptops came out in the early ’80s. Would have been better to say “uncommon to own a lap top when I was in college unless you were rich.”

TV is even crappier today than it was back then.

Stop looking down your noses at all of us who grew up before laptops, the Internet and Skype. Some of us were the ones who built the Internet, created the laptops and wrote Skype.

You’re welcome.

I’m older than dirt. And I’ve been in IT since line printers chipped the letters out on little slates.

A kid I worked with not too long ago was busting my chops about how in my time we had no internet, no cell phones, no tablets or real laptops.

I just squinted at the little SOB and said “Yeah, we didn’t have any of that – that’s why we invented them – not your generation – MINE!”

Damn kids think they invented computers…

Landline phones hardwired, not cordless make easy two way talk a pleasure when conversing with an equal phone set-up; not so much when the other party is on a cellular system.

Not fast enough, my area top internet speed is around 1mps

and we sometimes had to walk over to the tv through thick shag carpet which created both enormous drag and electrical current equal to as police taser so we could change the tv channel~!

In another generation those that had computers big enough to put in their pockets will be fossils that burned LED oil.

oooooh pig roasted him with stephs on oil

It really is unbelievable how quickly technology has advanced in the past 30 years.

Wow, that’s a lot of pins!

Hey! I was in the same boat! Back then, windows were clear things you looked through and you opened them when you got too hot.