OT: This ought to make you chuckle

[hex]

Most metal drop shears are scarier. A shear that chops 12' (yes feet) x 1/4" sheet steel wouldn't even notice flesh and bone. Heck even a

12ga capacity machine is in the same boat. And since those are mechanical with fly wheels it's not a gentle hydraulic motion -- push the pedal and wham it's over -- total cycle time less than 1 second. Line steel up, count fingers, push pedal, count fingers. Call 911 if count changes. Repeat as necessary. As far as paper things go I was alway freaked out by the over-sew machines used in book binderies. Stitches right through that 3" text book no problem.

hex

-30-

[Han]

"mttt" wrote in news:078am1-81g.ln1 @armada.sprintco.bbn.net:

Anyone have an old Epson printer with a current loop interface? We have a scintillation counter that would do just fine, but there is no way to look at the data since our printer went belly up ...

[Roy Smith]

Wow, what a blast from the past. One of those big Beckmann monsters with a teletype sitting on the top? I havn't seen one of those in years, but I've still got the PM tube from one of them as a desk ornament.

Anyway, you want something like

to convert from the CL interface to RS-232. I guess I'm showing my age, though, because I used to think of RS-232 as "modern". These days, it's almost as pre-historic as current loop. Most printers you can buy today will be USB or ethernet or firewire or bluetooth or some such. The last couple of computers I've bought haven't even had RS-232 ports on them.

Oh, yeah, there actually is a tie-in to woodworking. Those old Beckmann scintillation counters had a nice walnut veneer front to them. Well, maybe it was really formica, but it looked like walnut veneer :-)

[Dave Hinz]

I've got a few Epsons in the basement - have been buying them for (yikes)

24 years, and can't bear to throw them away because, well, none of them are broken, it's just that I buy a newer, aster, better Epson printer to replace them.

What does the "current loop interface" plug look like? I'd be happy to have a look.

Dave Hinz

[Han]

Roy Smith wrote in news: [e-mail]:

No this one is very modern, with an orange formica divided, sidehinged top to access the sample compartment.

Thanks a zillion. I printed that page, because we're having trouble with the replacement table top Beckman LS 7600 (??).

The one (Packard?) I remember from the old times (when I was trying to get a Dutch Master's degree, '66-'69) had bunches of Nixie (??sp) tubes with flickering numbers. Believe it or not, back then they had a hairdryer mounted in a hood to evaporate the toluene-based scintillation fluid, so as to reduce the volume of radioactive waste.

[Han]

Dave Hinz wrote in news:c6v0gt$gmdnv$ [e-mail]:

I can't quite describe it. If your email address is working, I'd like to email you a picture early next week. May I? My address is j dot broekman about verizon dot net.

[Mark & Juanita]

I really miss the "view codes" command available in WordPerfect. Your text was indented and you didn't know way, simply set the "reveal codes" option, find the offending "indent" command and delete it. Unlike Microsloth Word that embeds all codes in the paragraph end -- and you can't get at most of the codes. I do not like software that takes judgement on what I write and decides that I really meant to format it *this* way.

The WP commands would let you left and right justify on the same line, too. That was really handy for setting up headers and footers.

[Norman D. Crow]

Ayup.

In one of my former "lives", maintenance in a sheet metal products factory, helped prepare for installation of a 500ton press brake. If'n my memory doesn't fail me, this was the approx. size of it, plus the "bed", which was about 6" thick, went about 2-2 1/2 ft. below baseline. Had to drill out old

1' thick concrete & 100yr. old packed dirt under it, form up for a new concrete slab 18" thick with a 12' long, 12" wide, 3' deep hole in it to accept that bed, a'la

_________________________________ | | | | \ / ground level \______________________________/

Dern thing could bend a 90deg. corner in a piece of 1/4" x 8' steel plate without even raising a sweat

[J. Clarke]

FWIW, I've seen industrial machines that will go through aluminum and plywood. I suspect that one of those with the right needle would have gone right through your thumb, bone and all.

[B a r r y]

You can shut all kinds of auto formatting off in Word

Word does this as well, in the header / footer dialog box. I often right justify one piece of information and left justify another in the same header or footer, sometimes with a third centered.

Barry

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Not to mention True Type fonts. I sure don't miss the good old days.

I think I may still have a set of Word Star for DOS disks around and I'll sell them for less than the original $400 price. Ed

[Dave Hinz]

You bet; my address works, & I have a fast connection, so images are just fine. Thanks for asking, though...nothing worse than being on dialup and getting a several megabyte email from someone. No guarantees, but I've got lots of stuff down there...

Dave

[Joe Wells]

If you've never used WP reveal codes, then you just don't understand. Using reveal codes is much like formatting a document with html, only reveal codes is more powerful. I really, really hope that OpenOffice implements this someday. (Are we far enough off-topic yet?)

[bridger]

reveal codes was definitely a nice feature of word perfect.

[B a r r y]

I know what they are, and how they work.

WYSISYG is still preferable to me.

Barry

[Tim Douglass]

All still there in WordPerfect - which is why I still use it despite all the conversion hassles with people who think that the world begins and ends with MS.

Tim Douglass

[Tim Douglass]

WP is fully WYSIWYG, but with the press of a button you can see *why* your formatting is going haywire. Word aggravates me because they assume it will always work out fine and in complex stuff it only takes a moment to mess it up then you end up having to cut everything out, convert to plain text to lose the imbedded codes (which are there in Word, just hidden), paste back in and re-do your formatting. WordPerfect is a tagged formatting language with a nice WYSIWYG editor on it, Word is an I don't know what, but from a power user POV it is pathetic.

Tim Douglass

[Charlie Self]

I also liked the "insert and close" command for symbols. Put your dollar sign in with that and go back to typing. Word takes 2 commands, with a blink or 2 between them. A real PITA when you're using a lot of symbols.

Charlie Self "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte

[Charlie Self]

Tim Douglass responds:

I've forgotten most of the WP commands now...or shuffled them way back. I don't know of a single editor these days who will accept a WP document, so there's not much chance of my making a return.

Charlie Self "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte

[Robert Bonomi]

Modern versions of WordPerfect will output in many file formats. Including MS-Word. WP will even _read_ files generated by MS-Word.

WP's advantages over MS-Word become more apparent, the larger the document is, the more complex the document is, and the more structured the document formatting is.

Oddly enough, WP _still_ practically owns the market for word-processing in lawyers offices. And among people doing grant proposals.