![]() ![]() We got a Xerox 860, with 8 1/2 in floppy drives, for composing messages. Finally, in the mid 1980s I was battle group comm officer on an aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation. We wangled a drug deal with the Base COs office that our YN3 (secretary) would learn how to use it, train his YNs, and we got priority on it for our training project. The advantage was you could edit the text without retyping it. a memory card about the size of an IBM paper card but containing probably 100K of text. ![]() Guam had just gotten one (ONE) IBM Selectric Typewriter with magnetic card memory. My next tour I was Training Officer at a squadron on Guam, and we undertook to establish a new training curriculum for ten flight crew positions in the EC-130. The disadvantage was that if you dropped the box containing your several thousand IBM cards containing your thesis, at about one card per line of text, you just scrambled your memory!ΔΆ. The advantage was if you needed to change a typo, or rewrite a sentence, you only had to change one card. You typed out the text (and equations with a non-WYSIWIG set of arcane codes) on IBM punch cards, and submitted them for overnight batch processing. ![]() When I got my MS degree at the Naval PG School in Monterey in the 1970s, the added a "word processing" program to their mainframe IBM 360 to support thesis writing. I had three early and amusing experiences with computers vs.
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