Hickeys

Certainly in the 4-pair cables (Cat-5 and better) used for

10Base-T/100Base-T/1000BaseT ethernet jumpers. :-)

One thing which is rather weird -- as they are crimped into RJ-45 connectors, at least -- is that for some reason or other, the primary and secondary wire colors are interchanged for the first pair only (pins 4 & 5 -- in the center of the connector). I can't even figure out how it could make a difference -- as long as both ends are done the same. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Right. I had forgotten those. That's probably how it ended up on the QWERTY keyboard in the first place. I use it now to approximate.

Oh, I didn't know that. So, did the Brits start with an MGZ?

My sister had a 1973 BLMC MGB GT. (say that 3 times real fast)

I had one year of Organic Chemistry in high school, and I think over

1/3 of the class dropped out. I was happy with a B+.

What was the answer, a gazillion puff?

No comment.

Yeah, campuses were evil cauldrons of socialism even back then, weren't they?

Rugged. Kudos on all that, BTW.

The wee beastie has a long history, doon it?

I had the job of designing the fonts for an ink jet printer so I've researched the names and meanings of the symbols.

Maybe -- but it also belongs above certain letters in Spanish

(pronounced "ennye". I'm not quite sure what the effect of it being orve an 'a' is in Portugese. :-)

[ ... ]

The sports cars were not all of their line. I think the sedans at the time of the MGA were the "PB", but I'm not sure.

The T series cars were all rather boxy, with the MG-TF the least so (the headlights were faired in the the fenders (wings) in the TF, while they were in bullets above the fenders in the earlier ones.

The MGA was the first of the swoopy body designs for the sports cars, and I always thought looked nicer than the MGB line.

It was certainly fun to drive, anyway. :-)

O.K. IIRC, the GT models were ones with a hardtop, but I may be wrong.

Enjoy, DoN.

Thankless job, wot? (more recently, anyway) I used to make web advertising banners and sorted through the hundreds of different fonts available through Corel Draw 3 (my first graphical purchase) to match the font to the product and company it represented.

I toyed with a font editor a couple times but didn't have the mindset for it. You probably did it more from an electronics perspective, so I can't really compare. Were you gifted with naming the font you inspired, or did the company graciously call it "default inkjet font

1"?

Wow, they had aliens way back then? Cool! "The ampersand is the logogram "&", representing the conjunction word "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et, Latin for "and".[1]"

I sure prefer the more easily handwritten modern ampersand.

I had to learn those (Alt-0139 originally, it changed with different fonts) early on since I tossed French, Spanish, and German words in my BBS posts very early on.

Maybe it's pronounced with a Suthuhn accent "ayund" The-yus a-yund tha-yat. :-/

They were all evil, sporting that Prince of Darkness symbol on their electrical systems, so I didn't follow them. (Yes, "Lucas")

(googling to refresh memory) My dad ran an Austin Healey 100/4 in gymkhanas and autocrosses in me yout. I grew up/teethed on tuning his spoked wheels. They were quite similar to the MGA, wot?

I think I prefer the look of the MGB, and the performance of a Sunbeam Tiger, a Shelby Cobra, or the lines and performance of a McLaren P1 GTR, TYVM.

Yes, as was my first car, a '57 Chebby BelAir 4-dr Hardtop.

The dot pitch was 240 per inch, with the option of horizontally shifting by 1/2 the pitch after a blank space, which helped to fake Bezier curves and draw italics. The lawyers said we could copy laserjet output as long as we renamed the font, since the alphabet can't be copyrighted, so each was prefixed with the company name.

However laserjet printing is at 300DPI and is fuzzy with toner dust around the edges, so the engineer had custom-built a digitizing and editing system based on an HP1000 minicomputer that only he and I could operate. I had to completely redraw each letter to resemble the blobby size and outline of each digitized character image in the full IBM sets of Courier, Bodoni, Times Roman etc, in several point sizes of normal, bold and italic, plus fine-tune the character widths for the proportional pitch fonts, then make test printouts and re-edit to account for the unique quirks of this ink-jet printer. I spent nearly a full year on that task before they were happy with the results.

--jsw

They still have a lot of that fuzz today, but it's better.

Widely embraced, I see. ;)

I would have gone absolutely bonkers after even a week of that... Congrats on surviving it.

Actually I fell back on the hand lettering guideline rules I learned in Drafting and created my own grids, since I couldn't imitate the

300DPI dot placement and they used a different set of tricks like a tiny dot outside the curve to change its appearance. I had to account for the molten ink dots wicking larger or running together before they solidified.

And any idea what they looked like on other systems reading from your BBS? I tended to avoid anything outside the 7-bit ASCII character set just so everyone would see the same thing. (I also stick with fixed-pitch fonts for the same reason -- very helpful when posting ASCII graphics. You can never bet what the proportional pitch fonts will do to graphcs -- even if you post in a proportional pitch font. The character width play games between systems and fonts. :-)

I would probably have been reading BBS postings with either an ASR-33 Teletype, or a Lear Seigler ADM-3A CRT -- both very fixed pitch fonts, and no choices to change fonts. :-)

like "saaao" (sort of a stretched "sow") but I am probably way off. I'll have to ask my neighbor -- she is from Brazil.

[ ... ]

Actually -- things were pretty good for the MGA -- other than the electric fuel pump, which was *not* Lucas, but rather "SU" -- same people who made the carbs. :-)

The Healy (at least the one which I knew) was a six-cylinder one otherwise similar to the MGA. More HP, but also a much heavier engine, and the weight of the engine was a big part of the overall weight of the car. On the MGA, the floorboards were plywood.

I started with a 1500 CC MGA (my father's car left when he moved with a job up to New York City, where car ownership was prohibitive anyway). From that (after an accident) to a Hudson Hornet, and from that to a MGA 1600 Mk II (1622 CC). Later in its life, I swapped in an

1800 CC engine from a MGB, and I think that was peppier than the Austin Healy.

O.K. I really liked the convertible nature of the MGA, though there was a model which was hardtop -- I never had that. I also once saw at an autocross a MGA Twin Cam (original 1500 CC engine, but with a different head -- dual overhead cams, and higher compression. That was impressive -- except that it was hard to keep con rods in it. :-(

Enjoy, DoN.

And then you had to tell the driver whether or not it was a glossy (clay-coated) paper, regular copy paper, or newsprint, etc.

That must have been a bear. Those things are close to 40' long.

Yeah, pass.

You couldn't pay me to own a Lucas-infected vehicle.

That machine would print its molten plastic ink sharply on a textured paper towel; we tried a lot of strange things to impress the investors. We also hand-fed it clear acetate and sheet metal, in fact it could color-separate aluminum offset printing plates. Braille was possible though not very satisfactory. That led directly to 3D printing with a more suitable mechanism and less brittle ink.

That's really good for an ink spitter. I was doing polyester plates on an HP5P for the old Multilith 1250 of Terry's.

Smart! I hope you went old-school. Less trouble from EMPs.

Though rumor is, we'll be seeing our Brothers from Space here RSN, so any EMP event may never happen after all.

I don't recall in detail, but I know some people had to reset their character sets to get the Euro fonts and higher ascii to show up. Most happily did at the behest of the BBS owner, The Electric Shock Therapy BBS in Fallbrook, CA. That name took a while to drag out of the archive dungeons of my mind.

Yes, fixed pitch was the only usable font back then. I started on a very fast modem, a 1200bps! A couple friends had 300s. You could literally type a character and have to wait 2 seconds to see it on your screen as being sent to the BBS. We've come a long way, baby.

Yes, in theory, it is, but they tend to talk so fast, that little nuance is totally missed by anyone but a natural Brazilian speaker. Ditto the differences between Spanish and Mexican, though folks from Spain ended their words with a "th" sound rather than an "s". Wind one up and you can't understand a word. It sounds like a 33 album played at 78 (reference to a very old-school machine called a "phonograph" which preceded MP3 players, to our younger crowd).

It was hell keeping twin or triple SUs synced. I had a guy in a Jag v-12 come into the shop in Fallbrook once, asking if I could give it a tune-up. I told him that if he bought me an airflow-meter, I'd give it a shot. I'm glad he didn't take me up on it. He ended up taking it down to Sandy Eggo for everything but oil changes and special ordered wiper blades.

Dad's Healey was the 100/4, a little 4-cylinder. Then there were the

100/6 and 3000 models, both sixes.

A true British Leyland buff, eh? Condo^H^Hgratulations.

Yeah, the 3-second 1-hand top drop was outstanding tech! Chicks dug it. I had an old '72 2WD International Scout with a roll bar in the back. I could pop the top and drive it as a convertible in SoCal. After looking into the price of bikini tops, I designed my own out of waterproofed denim (powder blue body paint on the truck) and Mom sewed it up for me. Chicks dug that, too. The second time I took some girls "flying", I heard a really loud metallic rattle in the left front suspension. Scared the crap out of me, but it was only the tab for the shock mount. It took an hour to R&R from the leaf spring and one of the body shop guys welded it up for me. (I couldn't weld worth a hoot back then, except with oxy, and the shop tips were all sheetmetal sized.) I was back flying the next week. My old Corvair convertibles were fun to fly, too. I'd follow my friends' Combat Wombats (2-stroke 100cc Hodaka bikes) over the little motocross course in it. Ahhh, the good old days.