Tek 4010, info and prices 4018

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:12:43 -0400, KR Williams

When you are the only person on a photoshoot who knows how to generate pictures and get them onto the screen, the endless arguing about the angle of the window blinds in the background by the "creative" people 1 means you need a way of letting off steam. Magnetic bubble memory had been the Next Big Thing a couple of years before, and I reckoned that soap bubbles would be lighter than magnets....

On another shoot I started off as the "model" operating the workstation, but the lights reflected off the top of my head ;-( So I was relegated to the back of the room where there were a couple of full-size drawing-boards. The drawings on them were actually plots from the CAD system, and all the drawing instruments in view were my own 2. A few years later,afterdesigning the graphical interface to ComputerVision's first CAD package to run on the Sun, I attended a training course on HCI. One of the photos shown by the instructor as an example of "poor ergonomics" was from that shoot. So I stood up and said "If you look carefully you will see me in the background. That picture is to show all the bits of hardware you get for your money, not to show how it is actually used!" The course itself was so bad that I advised my boss to ask for our money back. It was however the only time I'd been offered caviar at lunch on a training course Cafe Royal, London.

1 Photographers are OK in my book though, they are just as peeed off with the marketeers.

2 And I still keep a slide-rule on my desk next to the computer today.

Mike