the python name

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 6:48 AM DL Neil <PythonList at danceswithmice.info> wrote:
> Working with a bunch of younger folk (who may technically be of the age
> of 'grand-children' - pardon me, I almost fell over my (long, grey)
> beard), I am frequently the butt of their gentle, if ageist, jokes.
> However, my sardonic amusement is to watch them wrestling with concepts
> 'we' readily recognise, perhaps from as long ago as mainframe-days.

My Dad was in computing back in the mainframe days, and used to regale
me with stories of holding a kilobyte of memory. But now I've started
doing the same sorts of things - I can expound upon the wonders of
engineering floppy disk boot sectors and finding that one spare byte
that I could use for something unrelated, or writing MS-DOS TSRs, or
*avoiding* writing a TSR by having it invoke another program and then
clean up after itself when that program finished... I distinctly
remember hooking the Print Screen interrupt to switch from one screen
to another so that I could play Colossal Caves (aka "ADVENTUR") and
keep track of which treasures I'd collected. Young folks these days
would say "why couldn't you just alt-tab"...

ChrisA