“Mark me up, Scotty.”<\/b><\/p>\n
You never know what might come in handy.<\/p>\n
When I was in college, we all did stuff on the college mainframe. PCs didn’t come in until after I graduated, scarily enough.<\/p>\n
Most people who wanted to “word process” used a text editor. We used one called EDGAR (since it was a VM\/CMS system). This was sort of like word processing with Notepad, except without line wrap. <\/p>\n
Those who were Privileged<\/i> could make use of Waterloo Script. This was a markup language written and made available through the U. of Waterloo in Canada. WScript was cool. You could type “.pp” in front of a bunch of text and, voila, when you processed it out through the virtual spooler to the virtual printer, it came out as a formatted, justified paragraph. Yowzers!<\/p>\n
There were, of course, far more commands than just that. And it had a macro language, so that you could create a set of elaborate markup tags to do tables of contents, standard MLA formatting, all sorts of keen things.<\/p>\n
By Privileged <\/i>above, I meant faculty. And, of course, the computer center staff. Using the mainframe for word processing by students was exceedingly frowned upon as a frivolous use of a valuable resource, which resource, if we absolutely must extend it beyond the faculty, really should be used only by Science and Math undergrads anyway.<\/p>\n
Consider the butterfly-in-the-Amazon impacts of the above apparently irrelevant bits of info above.<\/p>\n
Because I wanted to learn more how to use the text editor to word process, I wrote a series of online help files for EDGAR. That brought me to the attention of the Computer Center Powers That Were.<\/p>\n
Because I was a History major, and someone had the brilliant idea that maybe they were emphasizing use of the computer for just Math and Science majors a bit too <\/i>much, I was offered a post-grad internship at the Computer Center.<\/p>\n
Because someone else was already going to be heading up the student consultant staff, I was offered the Systems Programmer internship.<\/p>\n
Because of that, I ended up working in the computer biz as a career, rather than going on into academa or becoming a personnel manager somewhere.<\/p>\n
Also because of that, I landed a job at my employer of the last 17 years.<\/p>\n
And also because of my internship, I got to learn Waterloo Script. Which meant I got introduced to markup languages.<\/p>\n
Which made my learning how to do HTML a whole heck of a lot easier, conceptually. Since HTML is, too, a markup language (that’s the “ML” part of it).<\/p>\n
Which is how it is I’m able to do this blog.<\/p>\n
You never know what might come in handy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Mark me up, Scotty.” You never know what might come in handy. When I was in college, we all did stuff on the college mainframe. 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