Lost Bear Jct., Alaska 99731
Wednesday; Fog, No Snow
Mr. William T. Whittaker
626 Campus Drive
Blickweiler U.
Sandrigham, Illinois 60054
Dear Bill:
As you know, I have trouble writing letters. Why, I don't know—after all, I write stories for a living. But anyway, Margin Books just paid for that spy opus, and the bank tells me the check cleared all right, so you can count on my answering letters a little sooner.
The reason? You may not be aware, in your ivory tower, that your old roommate is up to the latest technological marvels and prepared to take full advantage of them at the first chance that offers. It takes effort, but it is worth it. What I have done is to take advantage of the current little downblip in the computer industry—sales off forty per cent, 16,000 laid off, four major manufacturers bankrupt—that sort of thing—to buy myself, at fire-sale prices, a completely new Vectrosupermax Business System, with all its bundled software (16 different programs: total value, if bought individually, $6,472.89).
As you may know, before the market took its downturn, Vectrosupermax was probably the leading manufacturer of hardware using the KBCDOS operating system and the 99Q processor. Two years ago, Vectrosupermax was a comet lighting the sky both day and night with new sales records. Today, they're selling them out of the back of a truck down in Mosquito Forks, and very grateful for a sale. Well, that's high tech, for you.
But to get back to what this means from my viewpoint, the fact is that the Vectrosupermax may be a drag on the market, but it works as well today as it did two years ago. This calamity in the marketplace means it is possible for me to make this initial comment on the old manual typewriter, connect the Vectrosupermax plug to the outlet (I mentioned we got electricity in my last letter), hit 10 on the keyboard (a special command so it will just print what I tell it to, and not reproduce the commands themselves), and then I simply reel this length of paper into the Vectrosuperprinter's maw, and you have a vivid record of technological progress as applied to the art of letter writing:
Sdfl;ksdkasdgf;saasdfiuas8u 234]?
SYNTAX ERROR 66
Memory munged
1234567890-=°!@#$%2[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]
1234567890-=°!@#$%2[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]
1234567890-=°!@#$%2[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]
WARNING! DIVISION BY ZERO!
EITHER YOU OR I HAS MADE A MISTAKE. I CAN'T FILE THIS FILE.
PLEASE GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING AND TRY AGAIN.
(Buffer Overflow)
SYNTAX ERROR 96
Well, I have to admit, that was
n't much fun. I suppose I should
have read the manual, but tha
t wasn't very attractive either.
There are sixteen different man
uals, and Now, what the—
00001Well, I have to admit, that was
00002have reread the manual, but tha
00003There are sixteen different man
*##?a. . .22%!...2..C###!
. . .$.opy..E..@@#..cC..?
.X..18.p..6ro,,1982.tt.
. . ...righj..4.##..7.##.
Vectrosuperwriter is protected by a sophisticated lockup program keyed to your individual computer and its included hardware and software. If you attempt to use our proprietary DEBUGG utility to crack the copy-protection, our built-in safeguards will lock up your computer every time you use the software, and we will be automatically notified at once when you try to use the modem. Just take this as a friendly warning and GET YOUR GUMMY LITTLE FINGERS OUT OF OUR CODE BEFORE WE CHOP THEM OFF!!
(Use VDUMP for non-ASCII.)
WARNING! SQRT OF NEG NUMBER!
gods and little fishes!
this is "user friendly"?
re's the stuff I typed?
ll with all this! What
o now? This son-of-a-
ch squeezes everthing
o a narrow column and
nts it out with letters
sing on the left. The
trosupermax Quikcard
mand summary is around
e somewhere. Ah, yes,
e we are. "Escape-LM"
t could be simpler?
x Error 111!
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—
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.
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.
Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock
This session: 02H29M14.7S
Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock
This session: 14H46M11.96S
Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock
This session: 42H21M38.6S
Bill—As you may notice from a close inspection of the typeface and the unevenness of the print, we are back to the old manual again. It is Friday now, and there really was a pretty good length of letter there on Thursday, but it sort of disappeared when I hit the X on the keyboard instead of the S. It seems that X is the easy mnemonic for "eXpunge," and I was reaching for the S but got the X by mistake. Oh, well. My error, of course.
There's a kind of long scratch across the top of the machine, where I only just managed to catch myself in time—I all of a sudden had the axe in my hand, and must have let out a yell because it was the middle of the night and out back the rooster started to crow. I see the dog just crawling out from under the bed now, and there were two cats in the room when I started, but I haven't seen them since I read the Vectrosupermax "Easy-Does-It" manual. It has a lot of cute pictures in it. Heh-heh. And a sheet of last-minute corrections and changes that aren't noted anywhere else. Heh-heh-heh.
Well, Bill, I guess progress has its price, so it will take me maybe just a little longer than I expected. But if I have this thing really mastered before I go in for next month's groceries, count on me to add a few good long pages after this paragraph.
All the best,
Jim