Australian cities went through three digit changes :
1978 from 6 digits, to 7 digits…
e.g. my mate Macka’s number went from 69 5114, to 690 5114
1990’s from 7 digits to 8…
e.g. my parent’s number went from 534 1124 to 9534 1124
And - not until we moved to Perth in 1979, did my dad agree to have the phone put on (328 7710) - i.e. before that we never had a phone at home, which made things pretty stressful for my mum when I’d go AWOL for 2-3 days (e.g. "staying at my mate’s place tonight, would turn into 2 further nights)… it was EXTREMELY selfish of my dad to refuse this - only because HE didn’t want to get called at home! And it’s not like his job was 24x7 - he was a set and costume designer for a theatre company!
It was great having the phone on in 1979, I could ring my girlfriend at any time on 279 3677! That was her parent’s number (they became my in-laws), they moved house in 1986 and kept similar number 379 3677, which then became 9379 3677 and stayed that way till they both passed away, mother in law in 2002, father in law 2013…
We don’t have a land line phone anymore, VOIP devices are such a major PITA to configure, I gave up!
About the only two numbers I know, are my military service number and my social security number. I have to ask the Wife, at times, my cell phone number, being 75 years young does not help!!!
Yes , but we are more than that too, because we are creative.
Things are more than the sum of their parts, because there are such things as emergent properties… for example , put together a heap of fibres, and you get a woolen jumper. The jumper has properties that are not apparent in any single fibre.
You cant say that life is just chemistry. We are indeed a bunch of molecules, but we are more than that. The way the molecules are organised has a lot to do with what we are.
The same applies to mental things. Our memory bank is part of what we are, but not all of it. Every person has unique abilities. Making things (being creative) is special… it defines who I am more so than my memories or my dna.
We are also the sum of our interactions with others… what other people experience of or from us. Some would call that our spirit. It can certainly live on after us.
I’m “only” 61 and that happens to me daily - but I do have to train myself to remember numbers (7 or 8 digits) in my short term FIFO buffer - mostly ticket numbers - working across 3 or 4 computers… So I can force myself to short-term remember numbers, but not when it comes to vague concepts like “grab your wallet before you head off to the shops” - or “where did I put my glasses when I came inside?”
Most of the time I can use use X select buffer - and this mostly works across MacOS (MacOS terminal app automatically puts selected text into clipboard - but sometimes I forget and select text in some other app and get miffed when it’s not in the clipboard!) and Linux desktops with Synergy (shared clipboard is one of its greatest strengths) - but sometimes clipboard can be unreliable - especially buried 3 layers deep in RDP sessions - so I repeat one of those 7 or 8 digit ticket numbers out aloud (internally doesn’t work for me) several times and it’s there ready, in my brain’s short term FIFO buffer to type out in another application…
So summary - the UNIX x-select buffer is a massive time-saver, but it makes me lazy and complacent, and assume this behaviour will work everywhere else!
But laziness? It’s one of the reasons I love UNIX and Linux - the shell and CLI - where I can automate stuff, 'cause I’m lazy and easily bored, so I’ll write a shell script - try that with clickety-click-click-click system administation on Windows servers…
I’m not saying it’s impossible on Windows - but you have to know it inside and out before using PowerShell to do something. I use a couple of powershell scripts in my job, one to grab group members from an AD group, and another one to keep my remote Windows sessions alive :
Ironically, I forgot I have one Stupid Human Trick I learned in college. In a fit of boredom, I memorized pi from a book I got for graduation: CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae. It was listed in blocks of 5 digits and I memorized the first row. Sort of a party trick for geeks.
You have probably heard the Seymour Cray story.
At the opening event for the first Cray supercomputer, he did his presentation, walked over to its console, and calmly toggled in all 256 bits of the bootloader out of his head.
It started first try.
Note: OS/X wasn’t Apple’s first flrtation with UNIX - there was Apple UNIX which was based on AIX on PowerPC, and had a System 7/8/9 GUI ontop…
and I think they even had another earlier UNIX offering on Motorola CISC 68000 systems (with System 6 GUI on top)…
And OS/X is a near direct descendant of NeXT - which Steve Jobs ran after he got fired from Apple, NeXT ran on 68000s and 80486’s… Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT cube running a UNIX to develop http and the www…
Microsoft’s first flirtation with UNIX was the hideous XENIX (I think some people liked it though), but the did flirt abit with it when they bought some company and made “Windows Services for UNIX” - then later on they had WSL, and now their own Linux distro for Azure…
! RIP Mike D)
