Career milestone of sorts

That car deserves these pants.

 

Don't know where that pic came from but I do know exactly where it was taken ...

 

Mine was more turquoise, but yes. First new car I ever bought.

 

Tahoe?

 

That kind of looks like the Empire State Building in the background...

(never been to N.Y., forgive me)

 

So S.F., what's the craziest locker-room story you've ever heard. Come on, 30 years in the buiz, I bet you could bullshit for 15-16 hours nonstop.

 

Hey, I remember hearing my dad talk about "Datsuns."

 

I've only been around 28 years but I remember pulling stories and agate (in the form of perforated yellow tape) from a row of the clanking old AP machines and marveling at the conveyor belts zipping across the news room. I placed code on the stories I typed on an IBM Selectric (sp?) and pulled press releases off the cylinder of the telecopier. A couple years later, we pioneered the use of CRTs in the newsroom, first with full-size Hendricks models and, soon after, newfangled desktops. I remember filing NBA draft stories from Madison Square Garden (Felt Forum?) in '82 using a Teleram PortaBubble (the earliest form of portable computer, about the size of a big suitcase and weighing about 40 pounds). TRS-80s and 100s were the next wave. They put portables in the hands of thousands of journalists. They had your 300bps acoustic couplers that fit over a standard telephone receiver. By the late '80s I recall having one cell phone, the size of a WWII walkie-talkie, for my AP bureau.

The amazing thing to me, looking back, is that not many of us had a clue about personal computers or this coming wave of technology when we were in high school or even college, yet we all adjusted to these changes with very little training.

Great back-in-the-day thread, SF. Thanks and congratulations.

 

I have used both Windows 98 and XP. Also, I remember when we used to have Pentium 2s on our desks with only 512 MB. That's no way to put out a paper.

Seriously, what were the green eye-shades for? That's been bugging me for a long time.

 

PortaBubbles, Cran!
That's what I was referring to a few pages back when I simply said "Teleram"

And I doubt they weighed an ounce more than 35 pounds ... but at least the screen was like a 4-inch square!

 

Sorry, Sweetness. I wrote for the first five or six years of my career -- proud to say I was a Florida contemporary of Shelby Strother -- but most of my time was in editing.

I do have one story I've saved, though. It will pretty much fully out me to many, but what the hell; most who know me figured it out long ago. I'll just generic it up a bit.

We were at an NFL game in the Midwest and, as usual, we had been out far too late on Saturday night.

A bunch of the beat guys -- the guys covering this team got along just great, and took me under their wing even though I was still in my early 20s -- were sitting at a table eating the pregame spread. And the funniest guy in the group looks over at my hunched, bloodshot form and says:

"So, SF, I heard you were doing OK last night until you called room service and ordered three circus midgets and a donkey."

And standing right behind this guy, well within earshot, was a man about 3 feet tall.

So one of us looks at the writer and says, "Joe, you'll never guess who's standing right behind you."

He pauses a second, but only a second, and then without missing a beat, he says, "I don't (sigh) suppose it's a donkey."

Wasn't a dry eye in the place, including the 3-footer.

 

I've been in 17 years, and I remember at my first daily job they had just gotten an AP Laser Photo machine when I got there, and how impressed everyone was with the picture quality. I remember someone telling me that all the layout was going to be done on computers one day and thinking, "How in the hell are they going to do that, and what are they going to do with these dudes in the galley room?"

Indeed, how times have changed.