Shoutbox

lol
I honestly didn't expect to learn anything new, but I never saw it as *bold* and _underlined_. I guess they all do the same job anyway. It's funny how much we take for granted without thinking about it.

Do we live in a clueless world?

The Computer Museum in Boston is a very cool place and should not be judged by this anecdote. In 1995, I was there with my father. In a place with the first virtual reality machine ever built, Danny Hillis' Tinkertoy computer, and other lovely objects, their star attraction is a giant plywood model of a computer that you can walk around in. In fact, you can go on a tour of it, led by a young gentleman who explains how computers work as you went.

The tour guide failed to make a stellar impression early in the tour (Did YOU know they're called microchips because they're really, really small?), but we hung on bravely. That is, until he got to explaining what a floppy is. He pulled a 3 1/2" disk out of his pocket and said:


Tour Guide: "A lot of people don't know why they call it a floppy because, you see here--" (shakes disk) "--it's not floppy. But you see that's just the outside." (pries case apart, removes interior, shakes it) "Inside, you see, it's floppy. That's why they call it that. You need floppies because sometimes the computer can have what's called a fall-down. I dunno why they call it a fall-down, but that's why you need the floppies or else you lose the stuff in the computer."