Not sure where all this revisionism is coming from. The Loudness Wars and the move to very hot mixes was driven purely by the demands of the record companies wanting their tracks to stand out on commercial radio stations, who were already doing the same thing themselves anyway. Anything that can make your song stand out (and loudness works) was deemed a Good Thing.

My old Technics SL-B2 (http://www.vinylengine.com/library/technics/sl-b2.shtml) was belt drive and has the strobe and adjustment. Quite a few manufacturers had the same on belt drive. Not seen it on an idler driver deck though.

What could possibly go wrong...

That's a good point. There's a few 80 column word processing solutions but I don't recall seeing anything for spreadsheets.

You could also get Visicalc on the Atari 400/800.

You could also get 123 for various Unix flavours. I used it on DEC Ultrix.

Accountants and clerks did amazing programming using Lotus 1-2-3.

I wrote a custom billing system for a bank. It had a master shell spreadsheet which then read in 300 odd data files from a mainframe listing transactions, one by one. Each customer file was parsed, the data processed into billing records which were written to another area of the sheet. Once all that was done, the bill templates were read in, again one by one, the addresses looked up, billing records turned into a charge schedule and the statements printed out. Took 30 hours to run the master macro on an IBM AT. We were the only people allowed to buy an AT, XTs were too slow. 286 - raw power.

Been programming since the late 70's in one form or another. Probably 98% of the stuff I have worked on is C, C#, VB or Java. The only reason it's not 100% is because to begin with it was all stuff like Dbase III, FoxPro, Access, DataEase and some assembler. I've not been asked to tackle anything other than the C/Java/VB variants since about 1990. Where exactly are all these other (non web related) languages used?

In other news, sales of Minox spy cameras rise ten fold.

In the 80's a UK bank experimented with signature recognition by listening to the pen on the paper. The dynamics and pressure etc were much harder to fake than the actual signature so it made sense but ultimately didn't go anywhere.

Note, as mentioned in the link you provided, some people do partially or even fully recover. It's too soon to assume this is the way it will always be. Meanwhile, hopefully others can come up with good ideas for a way forward communication wise.

Same here. I wash everywhere else but I don't think I've used anything other than water on my face in 30+ years.

We think the "social drinking at pubs, not at home" thing is odd.

In the UK, drinking at home might be considered tantamount to alcoholism. Binge drinking in pubs is far more socially acceptable. Work that one out!

Yeah, thanks for the snark. I've been over a few times and traveled there a lot, either driving around the east coat or staying in cities. Either way, I found magazines pretty scarce compared to what I was used to.

add thing/odd thing.