>>Hilmar,
>>
>>>I remember reading about the filming of a movie, which had some phrases in an African language - Swahili, I think it was. Well, directors at that time didn't much care about the content of foreign-language texts, and somebody was hired to come running (acting as a messenger) and deliver some message - any message, as long as it sounded urgent or something. Which he did.
>>>
>>>When the movie was shown in Africa, it got some good laughs - because the actor had said, in Swahili: "It is a disgrace, how little money I get for this role."
>>

I was just remembering when I did a home stay and Spanish language study course in Costa Rica and saw Apollo 13 and Batman, I think it was, w/Spanish sub-title...some of the translations were pretty hilarious.


>Another topic; I am a little curious: What kind of software development did you do 33 years ago? Or is that a typo? (Information from your account setup.)

gosh i hate to do the arithmetic to compute my age when I see that "33" ;-(

no, not a typo. I started working in 1968, at a timesharing company, Tymshare (actually I started working for a smaller company, in Buffalo, NY that was purchased by Tymshare). Timesharing was the big new thing in computing, and our world-wide network, Tymnet, ran on Varian mini-computers. I started on PDP-10's and did operational type applications...in Fortran, assembler, etc.

The system that I'm the proudest of, I completed in the mid 80's before I left Silicon Valley to retire for a bit (and cruise around the Pacific on a 40' sailboat). It was written in Concurrent Pascal and controlled access to all the computers on the Tymnet network (password control, host access and origination, synchornization of the data on 4 computers, etc.); at the time it was installed, it decreased response time from about 30 seconds to about 5 - over 100,000 people used it to change their passwords. I think it's still in use. I heard the other day that the end is now in sight for Tymnet, as of 9/1/02.

How long have you been playing w/computers?

J