Do I really need to be #(number sign) Lazarian?

In the dim – getting dimmer every day – and distant past when I joined the Airline I was introduced to a “Computer” .

IBM told us “This Computer sent the men to the Moon!” Its introduced to Ireland as an IBM platform for European marketing, was to run the International Programmed Airline Reservation System – IPARS. In other words it would enable computerised bookings for passenger details for flights.

By the way - when used as a chat up line - the answer to “What do you do?” being “I work on the computer that sent the men to the moon” was a killer.

We worked on small 12 inch screens with a green glow – we wondered if it was radioactive – and an attached keyboard.

This is where the symbols come in. To enter a name you prefixed it with The Name Item -: a dash.

Explaining it this way is going to get tedious and uninteresting – when all I want to talk about is the @ and # keys -so I will just simulate a booking!

-Lazarian/Wordsmith/Mr <Return Key> which we called the enter key.

Then a slashed zero was used to enter the flight details, a 9 preceded the phone number and a 6 the identity of who made the booking – 6PAX.

But when you wanted to change any of these details as the booking proceeded and you made a “Small Mistake” or as we began calling it a “Deliberate Error” like messing up the phone number we used the CHNG to rectify the error 91234567@2345678. Not an AT key then a CHNG key.

And the # key in communications to denote a number only.

Happy days – when a phone sat on a desk and you left it behind you at COB – Close Of Business – and a Mobile hung over babies' cot.

Oh! Look...#IBM #EarlyComputers #GettingTooOldforThis and my Spell Checker suggested #GoodForNothing.....