Did you ever…

[Cheesehead DaveParticipant]

…put away a piece of clothing for a season, then when you took it out a year later, you found something interesting (or $$$) in the pockets?

I pulled out a jacket I hadn’t worn since last spring, and felt something in the inside pocket. Pulled it out, and it was a cache printout for The Entwives Tumor, the first cache I ever found!

Unfortunately, it archived now, but I think I’ll save this sheet in my personal “cache container” as a nice memento.

[jthorsonParticipant]

A little early to get out your spring stuff. Spring doesn’t come until July.

But when I find forgotten things in unused clothing, I prefer cash, not cache.

[GrouseTalesParticipant]

I once found a snuff container full of ice fishing bait (maggots) that I left in my coat over the summer. I opened it up and discovered many had morphed into flies. They were all dead,

[RayParticipant]

Did you ever…
Notice that your computer’s numeric keypad is numbered wrong? The phone and all of my remotes are numbered from the top left as one might read a printed page. My computer’s keys are numbered from the bottom-up. And, the zero is on the bottom on all of them.

Wyzat?
tb

[arfferParticipant]

Actually, its your phone (and remote?) thats backwards. The numeric keypad on your PC is based on the numeric keypad on adding machines, and their offspring, calculators, going back to 1914 (David Sundstrand, Rockford, IL). As the zero was the most used key, it was placed large and at the bottom where the thumb could quickly operat it. The rest of the number counted upwards from there. Adding machine users quickly memorized the layout, much like typists memorize the QWERTY typewritter keyboard.

Back in 1960, The Bell System Technical Journal published the results of a ‘Pushbutton Telephone’ human factors study by R.L. Deininger. Part of this study were 16 different key placement arrangements. The very first arrangement (Group I, set I-A) was identical to the adding machine data entry layout. It was the tenth arrangement (group IV, set IV-A) that we have today (less the ‘*’ and ‘#’ which came much later). The adding machine layout had a much higher dialing error rate and lower dialing speed in the tests, possibly because the participants in the study (employees chosen at random at Murray Hill Bell Labs) did not have experiance as accountants or data entry clerks, and were not used to the upside down layout that adding machine users had already memorized.

So, the change for telephones (and remotes) was a simple decision based on the fact that the majority of telephone (and remote) users were not accounts.

[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 02-07-2003).]

[Team CachebarrMember]

Wow! Way too much time on your hands, Alan! Thanks for the great info!

[adminKeymaster]

I hate when I try to use the phone like a 10 key? It just doesn’t work…

[Author]

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