This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2015 at 18:22 and is filed under Dystopia Watch.
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2 Responses to “The Average College Freshman Reads at 7th Grade Level”
When word processing was first introduced (and, yes, I’m that f*ing old that I remember it), IBM worked hard to get companies to ignore those upstart PCs (despite most of them being IBMs at the time) and use their mainframes. The software (Displaywrite) had a grade-level setting for grammar checking. The “standard” setting for business was 7th or 8th grade.
The joke among their sales staff was that as you wrote letters for higher management, you should drop a grade level for each step up the management ladder. By the time you got to CEO, the only important parts of your memo might read, “See project make money. Money, money, money.”
As a side note to that, the tricky part of IBM’s software was that it could save and transfer documents in EBCDIC which IMB mainframes used instead of ASCII which is used by, well, everybody else. The Intel 8080 CPU chip in the original IBM PCs had a translate function so that it could translate to/from EBCDIC/ASCII. EBCDIC made sense in the days of punch cards, and no one mourned the passing of those dreadful things. They were used in some interesting art projects (wreaths were popular) and if you could get your hands on the little “chads” punched out of the cards, they could be used to fill the sock or underwear drawer as a means of nerd revenge. And it is now evident that my mind is wandering in what a friend refers to as “congnitive disassociation.”
The reason for the translate functionality was because IBM saw PCs as being intended by God to act as terminals for their mainframes, which is why modern PC keyboards have the 3270 layout to this day.
In 2006 I worked for a company that used IBM big-iron to do a lot of its processing, and one of the knottiest challenges was translating the EBCDIC data to ASCII so we could put it in our data warehouse — and that’s a non-trivial exercise. Fortunately we had an old greybeard consultant who knew how to do it. (The packed decimal numbers were the hardest part.)
January 9th, 2015 at 11:26
When word processing was first introduced (and, yes, I’m that f*ing old that I remember it), IBM worked hard to get companies to ignore those upstart PCs (despite most of them being IBMs at the time) and use their mainframes. The software (Displaywrite) had a grade-level setting for grammar checking. The “standard” setting for business was 7th or 8th grade.
The joke among their sales staff was that as you wrote letters for higher management, you should drop a grade level for each step up the management ladder. By the time you got to CEO, the only important parts of your memo might read, “See project make money. Money, money, money.”
As a side note to that, the tricky part of IBM’s software was that it could save and transfer documents in EBCDIC which IMB mainframes used instead of ASCII which is used by, well, everybody else. The Intel 8080 CPU chip in the original IBM PCs had a translate function so that it could translate to/from EBCDIC/ASCII. EBCDIC made sense in the days of punch cards, and no one mourned the passing of those dreadful things. They were used in some interesting art projects (wreaths were popular) and if you could get your hands on the little “chads” punched out of the cards, they could be used to fill the sock or underwear drawer as a means of nerd revenge. And it is now evident that my mind is wandering in what a friend refers to as “congnitive disassociation.”
January 9th, 2015 at 20:20
The reason for the translate functionality was because IBM saw PCs as being intended by God to act as terminals for their mainframes, which is why modern PC keyboards have the 3270 layout to this day.
In 2006 I worked for a company that used IBM big-iron to do a lot of its processing, and one of the knottiest challenges was translating the EBCDIC data to ASCII so we could put it in our data warehouse — and that’s a non-trivial exercise. Fortunately we had an old greybeard consultant who knew how to do it. (The packed decimal numbers were the hardest part.)