Company wants you to answer e-mails or you to receive calls on your mobile in your time...

We are lucky, my employer says, unless we are on call (2 people on the team in rota), you should turn off your company phone when you leave the office.

I have mine set to switch to do not disturb mode at 16:30 and goes back to normal at 08:00 the next day.

“The officer had had a letter typed out for his golf club and didn't want "UNCLASSIFIED" on the bottom of the page.”

When reading the piece, I was determined to comment sarcastically something like “haha, they complained about UNCLASSIFIED being printed on birthday party invitations” until I reached the line above. I was being a bit naive - reality always wins!

I remember being called to the big boss's office by his secretary who was having trouble re-formatting a document. Turned out it was the boss's Amateur Opera Society newsletter and as I was helping her the boss walks in and asks what I was doing etc. At least he had the decency to look sheepish after.

“At least he had the decency to look sheepish after.”

Must have been many years ago. Nowadays you’d get asked that why isn’t it done yet.

Yep at least 20 years ago. The same era we used to get a memo (not an email!) about not using the computing facilities for personal use.

Were they using aria(l)?

Just leaving, don't mind me.

Or were they using aria2 to download opera videos?

When DOS and UNIX ruled, we wanted to upgrade our CAD system (among other things) but that also meant an upgrade to the computers which would require the use of a new fangled "windows" operating system.

One of the managers at the time couldn't quite get his head around this. "Windows!" he shouted, "what the f***k is windows?". He pointed to the glazed hole in the wall "that's a f*****g window!".

It was a simpler time.

In GUIs were the windows always called windows? Did any early GUIs call them 'frames' or 'areas' etc. or maybe some long complex term - scalable-application-frame-working-space-region?

Anon - because maybe everyone else knows

My recollection was that they were always called windows. I worked with windows based interfaces on Apollo (remember them?), Mac and DOS plus TopView. They always called them windows.

Also, the XEROX Alto User Manual from September 1979 calls them windows.

I remember when MS came out with MS Windows 1.0 everyone thinking they had a real cheek calling it that.

Be careful - XEROX never produced anything original...

I'll get my coat...

I think Framework from Ashton-Tate was the only one to use the term frames, and that was a DOS application.

Framework.

Now that's a name that I haven't heard in a long time.

I seem to recall the term was always 'window' because:

the visible area within the frame was a 'window' onto a larger display area hence the scroll bars to move the window around in the display area.

Essential when you're using a VGA monitor at 640x480.....

Which reminds me of Oak graphics cards; set the DIP switches right and get VGA displayed on a CGA monitor, a bit psychedelic but usable....

Isn't that why we call them "window managers"?

...an ex-high ranking military officer on a particular site.

His office was inside a much higher security rated section of the site so you had to go through extra rounds of searches etc to be allowed in even if you had the right clearance.

I think it was about 5 or 6 months after the smoking ban had come in and during our entire meeting he sat puffing away on a pipe.

At the end, I said something like "Errr... you do know that is illegal now, right?" and pointing at the pipe.

He took a good three or four puffs on it and said "Yep!"

Good to be above the law...

I was a Civil Servant (briefly) in the mid 80s when we were just getting word processing facilities and had just bought a DEC LN-03 Laser printer. Great, we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them on (IIRC) IBM Selectric typewriters and returned them to us for signing.

One of my colleagues had spent some time on secondment at the MoD, one job he did was photocopier guard. He had to check the security rating on everything being copied and check the person had the necessary clearance. There was plenty of scope for arguments with high ranking officers and their secretaries* but if they didn't comply he didn't unlock the copier.

*As in, "I'm sorry Ma'am but if the Rear Admiral wants that Top Secret document copying the Rear Admiral will have to bring it himself!"

Must have been an "interesting" copier if you could run TS through it...

"we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them on (IIRC) IBM Selectric typewriters and returned them to us for signing."

????

The middle part of that process seems entirely redundant!

"we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them on (IIRC) IBM Selectric typewriters and returned them to us for signing."

> ????

> The middle part of that process seems entirely redundant!

Yes, but ... unions. At least that was the explanation at the AAEC in the 80s. The secretaries couldn't allow us to give them a draft paper in electronic form. We had to give them our hard-copy so that they could type it into the system themselves.

Before we had access to text editors or word processors letter production went

Hand write first draft this would be so covered in scribble and changes nobody but the author could understand it

hand write second draft much better, but then you'd realize the paragraph order didn't work

hand write 3rd draft with reordered paragraphs

Proof read 3rd draft and make amendments

If you were lucky that went to the typists

If you weren't you hand wrote the 4th draft

being able to produce electronic drafts that were reworked rather than started fro scratch every time, and were readable was a godsend and saved me hours every week. A soon as the typists got word processor software we worked out how to copy and paste between a text editor and a word processing document and were soon agitating to get the full product (and a PC). Typing pools remained for about another decade in most organisations as the standards of presentation required even for internal documents was incredibly high. Since then t report writers have got more skilled with the tools and there has been acceptance that their output is 'good enough'

"Great, we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them"

We had the same experience with witness statements which couldn't be on plain stationery (II|RC there were 4 different pre-printed variants to cope with single and multi-page statements). This was referred to as "sending them to have typing errors inserted".

Luxembourg.

In a high-level meeting to define the specs of an application that was supposed to revolutionize the internal document management system of the company, I was busy explaining how the access rights worked to the database and its documents when one of the bigwigs interrupted me, asking about the access to the documents.

I re-explained how the user creating the document was responsible for the document (at application level) and could delegate reponsibility to other people. After ten minutes of additional explanations my colleague took over and, being Luxembourghish, gave an explanation in that language. I still didn't understand what the problem was.

After the meeting, it struck me : the bigwigs didn't want to have to touch the computer, but they wanted all their documents to be under their name whilst the secretaries did all the work.

I never did get to know what happened to that project, but I didn't have anything to do with it after that meeting. I still believe I got lucky on that.

We had a brand new printer to replace an old, basic one. The new one had all the mod cons, icons, and flashing lights.

Someone had a paper jam in the new one, and was not brave enough fix it.

Fools rush in ... etc. I opening it up and fixed it. It was clearly "personal printing" for school kids. The paper was about 1 inch deep in the output tray - so not the acceptable one or two sheets.

I stood by as he then took the printed output, and put it back >into< the paper drawer of the printer ("the other way up") to print another page on the back.

I asked what he was doing - and he said "saving paper - I am printing on both sides".

"Have you tried using the 'duplex' facility that comes with this printer?" I asked, pointing to one of the icons.

Shortly after that each printer had a one page, large print guide explaining what the "intuitive icons" meant. For example "To print duplex .. press this one...", "to shrink two A4 pages per one page of A4 .. press this one".

"intuitive icons"

Multilingual: equally incomprehensible in all languages.

"Shortly after that each printer had a one page, large print guide explaining what the "intuitive icons" meant."

The only intuitive interface is the tit. Everything else is learned.