Originally Posted by
welch
Looks like an Insignia ballpoint. Richard Binder might be interested, or might, at least, get misty-eyed.
Richard worked at DEC when the PDP-11 was a main product. How do I know? Chatting as he fixed a nib on a Parker-61...tricky job. My first programming job was to write 8080 assembly language in 1981, when our target machine was too small to have a an assembler and our 5 1/4 inch floppies could not hold enough source code. We cross-compiled on a PDP8A using an editor called TECO. Richard had used TECO. Said he stayed with DEC through all the sell-offs, mergers, and sell-outs until the last. By then, he was making "a competence" fixing old fountain pens.
As I was about to move from my unintentionally non-profit first company (13 consecutive years as a start-up) to GE, we got a PDP-11. I remember the documentation -- red three-ring binders -- that took up an entire wall in our back room...which had once been the biggest dance hall in Bergen County, NJ. Documented everything except how to find whatever simple thing you needed to know.
I never got anything as classy as that pen. At GE, we got Cross pen and pencil sets for doing a good job or just for giving a senior manager's presentation to an outfit like NASDAQ. I have thrown out the advertising ballpoints that used to draw me to trade shows. Used to get flimsy pens and pencils for an expensive project, a programmer-killer project, called Global Straight-though Trade Association (GSTPA: 1999 - 2002). Cost nearly $200 million USD, not counting the staff that my company, SWIFT (see swift.com) gave to the project. Whenever our majority partners pulled something shady, such as tell the customers that their development had been delayed because of a network problem one of the 16 redundant servers we had given them and I had installed, then I would walk to the center of the work floor, flourish as GSTPA ballpoint (worth about 10 cents) and break it.
Baseball caps were useful, although I once nearly got into a talk-fight because I was wearing a Redhat Linux red hat and a couple of stupidly drunk "city boys" and a "city girl" walked right behind me shouting insults at Manchester United. I gather that ManU had lost a game. They had just come out of a pub near the spot where several streets cross near the Bank of England. I snarled some [expletives deleted] about people dogging Linux. They had to translate my New York-ese and they had no idea what Redhat or Linux might be. Drunks are all the same.
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