[geeks] bahahahaha.

Doctor Obnox Son of a Bitch geeks at sunhelp.org
Wed Dec 12 16:09:55 CST 2001


Ken Hansen, reeling from the shock, managed on Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 07:32:02AM -0500 to scrawl:
> Naw, never touched the Basic4, but I did watch Dave S. (www.homeport.org)
> use it...
> 


Hmmm... checked out this homeport site, followed a few links, and found
out that old Dave S (Now Dave BS) is the author of the trouble-ticket
system I worked with at my last job at $ISP.

> For those curious, Dr. Obnox's father was my Computer Science and one of my
> Math teachers at The Pennington School. His father ("Mr. G") had open book
> tests ("you'll have books at work, why not during the test?"), and after our
> main classroom building burned down, held Programming classes in his living
> room.
> 
> My favorite test was when he asked me to write a program that drew an
> american flag. I then spent the first hour of the test period hunting down
> and documenting the design of the american flag (how the stars alternate,
> now in vertical rows, how many red and white stripes in total, and how many
> of those stripes are to the side of the field of stars, etc.
> 
> My favorite test taker was Bruce Peterson, who wrote his final project/exam
> exercise as a series of print statements like so:
> 


Wasn't Bruce Peterson the guy who had the pathological fear of baloons?


> 10 print "10 rem this program will compute the farenheit temperature"
> 20 print "20 rem from an input celcius temperature."
> 30 print "30 rem Bruce Peterson, December,  1981"
> 40 print "40 cls"
> 50 print "50 input "Please enter the temerature, in celcius";c"
> etc.
> 
> It was hysterical, watching Mr. G try and keep a straight face as he asked
> the student why he had all those print statements.
> 
> The answer?
> 
> So Mr. G could see his program to grade it.
> 
> He didn't get the fact that the program *needed to run* - Mr. G was quite
> capable of figuring out the intracacies of the "list" command in TRS-BASIC.
> 
> He also took Dave S. and I to a computer show in Boston - when the Sinclair
> ZX81 (?) was introduced. Ithink he bought one...
> 


Oh gawd, I remember that monstrosity. Dad and I wasted many hours trying
to write a Form 1040 app in basic for that thing. Way more hours spent
saving to tape than actaully coding, of course.


> Ken
<SNIPPPED FOR BREVITY>

-- 
"So I am not the only one that runs around naked with my Bobba Fett helment on?
Cool"
		-David Smith

Gustafson
                                                    drobnox at visi.com



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