I used those. Circa '87. They were a little surreal. Printing really is nearly a lost art.
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I still have a Royal portable typewriter from the 1940s. I learned to type on an IBM Selectric, and had to make adjustments when I used the portable, as it had fewer keys. There were no zero (0) or one (1) number keys. You used the uppercase letter O and lowercase L instead. If you wanted a British pound sign (Ā£), you typed an uppercase L, hit the backspace key, and typed a lowercase f over it. For a cent sign (Ā¢), you typed a lowercase c, backspaced, and typed a / over it.
Actually, native speakers are bothered by it. They just get used to it sooner or later.
In primary schools, learning how to read seems to take twice as long for English-speaking kids than it does for speakers of various continental European languages (not counting French).
And @shaddack: abolishing diacritics is just a big cultural no-no. Be ready to be accused of cultural imperialism of the worst sort if you propose that somewhere where people are neither native English speakers nor tech geeks.
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Well the lack of a consistent orthography does make learning to spell an issue in English which it isnāt in other languages.
I had a Polish physics professor, and during office hours he told me he was born in āWooj.ā
āWooj?ā
āYes. Wooj.ā
āHow do you spell that?ā
He smiled, āWith an L.ā
Realization dawned on me and based on his expression I could tell he was enjoying the face I was making, āOHHHHH!ā I picked up some chalk and wrote on the blackboard, āLodz?ā
āYes! Only with a slash through the L. Thatās the Polish letter āwā.ā
Iāve read a fair bit on World War II and Cold War history, and I was familiar with the name of the city through that, but Iād never heard it pronounced before.
Mind. Blown.
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I read a piece recently about @ characters being worth their weight in gold in the artisanal letterpress world, with # not far behind.
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We had one in an art department I used to run back in the early nineties. It hadnāt been using in a decade at that point, but probably still worked. I regret not attempting to learn it.
We had a selectric for a little while which we also used for typesetting. Years later my wife found the metal type ball in a drawer with all the letters on it and wondered what it was. It was amazing to see it working especially if you had it typing from its memoryā¦ The ball spinning around so fast.
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Plenty of Central European slavic names appear unpronouncable to English speakers, and yet, (as a Czech, not sure about Polish but I think itās the same) we consider the language purely phonetic - ie. you donāt need to know some special rule for pronouncing it, you simply read at it is written.
The diacritic symbols really are intended to make the writing more compact (though I can relate to Shaddackās frustration with keyboards) so a slash above the letter i Ć, Ć just gives it the long ee sound which in english would usually be 2 letters (ee).
And if you were surprised by your profs pronunciation, when I arrived in Canada as a kid and slowly picked up English in school - I remember someone reading the word āenoughā and being surprised at that pronunciation.
On the other side, Irish Gaelic writing and pronunciation strikes me as far more complicated so
Galway is actually written Gaillimh.
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Iām always afraid Iām saying Ljubljana wrongā¦
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What? Oh, I just pronounce it ālube ganja,ā and assume I look smart.
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If you trust Rick Steves
loob lee ana
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In college, the school had a $20,000 Wang 2100C, that ran BASIC. It stored programs and data on cassette tapes, and used an IBM Selectric as the printer. It had about as much processing power as a Commodore 64, which was still a few years away.
No, actually what it does is dumb down our character set (or in a similar way, any other computational feature) to what corporate coders think is important. Apart from being annoying at practically every moment of an intelligent computer userās work life, what coders donāt know about the work everyone else has caused a huge gap in human capability.
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Chinese typewriters were hideous. But while the hanyu pinyin romanisation system uses diacriticals, predictive text makes modern Chinese text entry on a computer pretty easy.Type the sounds of the words and the contextual best guesses pop up. Select the correct word or phrase from the menu and there you go.
If you change the input method on your computer to āPinyin Simplified Chineseā and type dajiaqingshuoputonghua you should get ā大家čÆ·čÆ“ę®éčÆćā ā¦as the best guess. Which is āEveryone, please speak Chineseā. Pretty quick.
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This is so true. The amount of time we waste in healthcare because someone coded this āeasy to codeā way of doing it but the safe and ergonomic workflow by the patient requires something different ā¦ 
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Thatās usually not the fault of those overly vilified ācorporate codersā. Those hapless folks just code according to the specs they get. Blame where the blame belongs - those who are writing the specifications, describing what the code should do.
The best way is that there is a single person or a small team, and the coders themselves understand the problem they are addressing (so double as the analysts). But such happy setting is rather rare.
a) See above. The biggest āgap in human capabilityā is caused by inept specs.
b) There is no need to use diacritics in file names. That crap itself caused me a lot of pain when doing data recovery.
c) Intelligent computer user - I saw a few, but they are rather uncommon. And they are more willing to follow the simple suggestions that later save a lot of effort when trouble happen and are able to understand a simple sentence like āif you put such a pseudo-character in a file name, I cannot guarantee I will be able to recover it from a crashed diskā.
Granted, I can be biased because such disks usually end up in my hands, but anyway. (It is also usually possible to recover, but it is always an added hassle, if only the checking if the software did not choke on the characters, as it sometimes does.)
If the cultural sensitivity has too high cost attached, itās time to dump it. Letās them accuse me of whatever they please, I am used to that. Wonāt change that I am right here.
And I am well aware about the non-native English speakers, as I am one of them. Also explains why I had it with these pseudo-characters and why I hate them so viscerally. Not Worth The Trouble.
And that does not even go into the area of wasting limited keyboard space on thoseā¦ things; the tradeoffs against (in local case) the numbers/symbols line which they occupy like an invaderās army are a bit too uncomfortable. One of the reasons why even my personal notes are taken in English. Dump the cultural sensitivity and your wrists will thank you.
Oh good, thatās how I say. So far none of my students who came from that region have corrected meā¦
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Fair enough. In a health environment we tend to have new systems dropped on us fully formed, then have to work around them. The idea that someone would even ask the frontline staff how they work, what they need and what their interface should allow at different stages of a workflow is a totally alien concept to the powers that be.
And edited to add: The asking of the frontline staff tends to happen at the stage after an off the shelf solution has already been purchased, which is frequently done on the basis of its price. Rollout thus consists of teaching how to avoid the deficiencies of the software. And then the clipboard bearers involved in the rollout get most upset because no-one wants the job of helping inflict it ā¦
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With the systems I wrote for logistics, I started with watching the old way the people were doing it; asked what every form means, why it is used, what relation it has in the great scheme of things. Spent some time with the people who did the job the software was for, getting taught the ropes. And that was just lousy pushing of boxes from somewhere to elsewhere. I have a rule that I wonāt start writing code until I understand what it has to do and why, and it paid off (also, I am too lazy to be eager to do needless work, and am not paid by line of code. Never pay the coders by line, the result will be huge ugly mess.)
That this is NOT done in something as important and error-prone as healthcare is something that does not sound good to me.
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