Oy vay! Glad I didn’t go there….

Could NOT resist from posting this: from Joanne Jacobs – Worst School Name Ever?

Bad enough to be a middle schooler; worse when you have to tell your peers from other places where you go. Imaging how hard the cheer leading squad has to work at their lyrics…

And while I’m on a roll of strange but slightly humorous items, a headline that our very own Grok ‘N Roller would love:

Residents of northern Los Angeles County are not grooving to this music.

Lancaster (CA) city officials said this week that they’re paving over a quarter-mile strip of asphalt grooved to play the William Tell Overture when auto tires speed over it.

The road was completed this month as part of an ad campaign for Honda. It’s engineered to play the overture — also known as the theme to "The Lone Ranger" — at perfect pitch for motorists driving Honda Civics at 55 mph.

But neighbors aren’t amused. One says the road music sounds like a high-pitched drone. Another says it keeps him and his wife up at night.

Lancaster officials plan to pave over the grooves Tuesday.

No sense of humor or appreciation of how much work went into figuring that out! I remember doing similar things with a Digital Equipment PDP-8E mini-computer in high school. Hold a radio close to the console and listen to the RF "music" coming from the lights on the console…..

After the jump is the front plate of one of those bad boys….along with the "state of the art" terminals I learned to program in BASIC, FOCAL and assembler.

See those rocker switches? You set those up in certain positions and that loaded in the BOOT program which then read the paper tape (slow or fast) which then allowed the system to run its magnetic DRUM (not disk) based programs from magnetic CORE (not ICs)

The TeleType? The thing ont he left side is the slow paper tape punch and reader. Hard to touchtype on that thing, too – push one key down and the one that was down would rocket upwards….and yes, it typed on rolls of paper (our’s were yellow) – not screens.