I had a few movies downloaded on my Chromebook, for trips or other situations. Last night was another situation: m router was down as there was no power in the neighborhood. However, every time I tired to play one of my offline movies, the player would run for 9 seconds and stop. I'd see a little spinny circle, but no progress. Try to jump ahead: spinny circle. I tired rebooting. I tried removing all extensions. I tried stopping things with task manager. I tried using my phone as a hot spot, to get past the 9 seconds. None of those fixed the offline movies. I could play one of the titles by using a browser instead of the google play movies app, using my hot spot. It was interesting that the movie would stall for almost a second at the 9 second mark. This suggests to me that 9 seconds must be the point were some extra authorization check is happening. The last step: reload the google play movie extension. Would I lose the offline movies? Maybe, but they weren't doing anything f...
Late 1970s - fascinated by the teletype and accounting computer at my father's office. The computer was a big special formed metal desk, with an electric typewriter and a printing calculator built in. Below the calculator was a magnetic card reader/writer. Where the drawers on the side would have been was a big metal box. It ran simple accounting programs and simple mail-merge processing, and had a coil of wire for the main memory storage. My favorite thing was to do powers of 2 on the calculator - having no idea that those were natural binary values. My Uncle worked for IBM, and one time when he was visiting NYC, we visited him at one of the offices. This was my first time seeing green-screen terminals connected to bigger systems. 1975 - my father buys an SR-52 programmable calculator - which had a tiny magnetic card reader for storing programs. I learned an early version of machine code programming using the calculator. My favorite game was the lunar lander simulator...