Feb 12th 2008 06:57 am Adults say the darndest things

Gene Gives Arlo Back His Own Advice

The comic strips I drew in 1992 were slightly larger than the strips I draw today. About the time this strip was drawn, I purchased a computer and scanner. I downsized the original art so it could be scanned with one pass on a legal-document-size bed. The entire process back then, from the scanning to the transmission over a dial-up modem was very, very sloooooooow.

Posted by jimmyjohnson / Vintage A&J

22 Responses to “Adults say the darndest things”

  1. Greg in Robertsdale on 12 Feb 2008 at 8:02 am #

    I can’t imagine having the testicular mass to do that to my dad, but I can sure sympathize with Gene and say that I sure wanted to do likewise sometimes when he told me something that went against my sense of self preservation. Good one. Loving these oldies, JJ.

  2. Cousin Keith Johnson on 12 Feb 2008 at 8:03 am #

    Having been on both sides of the ball in that scene, I can really appreciate Gene’s logic.

  3. Phil in Sugar Land, TX on 12 Feb 2008 at 8:17 am #

    In regard to today’s cartoon, would that be like The Redneck’s Last Words of “Hey, y’all, watch this!”

  4. Leslie on 12 Feb 2008 at 8:22 am #

    I always wanted to do this to my coaches when I played little league! I got hit in the mouth my first time on the field, so after that, I guess the trust was broken. I love when Jimmy shows this side of Arlo. As guys go, he’s fun-loving and philosophical, but we don’t often get to see him try to toughen up Gene. The only other I can think of is when he runs into a tree, and Arlo just yells “walk it off” then gets a smack from Janis.

  5. Kathleen on 12 Feb 2008 at 8:36 am #

    Kids do have a way of making their point, don’t they?

    Glad the process is faster for you these days. I had to chuckle at your post about having to FedEx the strips in, then on to the slow modem, and now faster transmission. It’s amazing how much technology has changed in the last 10 years or so. Now if someone could just figure out how to get high speed internet to MY house so I could get off the modem it would be great!

    BTW, my brother had a job with FedEx back when it was first getting started in Memphis as Federal Express. The idea was considered crazy and the owner couldn’t even promise my brother guaranteed paychecks at times, but was willing to train him to work on the engines of the planes used. He would have been in on the ground floor of something really big. But he was newly married and decided he couldn’t go with a job that he couldn’t be assured of pay and future with, so he chose something else. I can only imagine where he would be now if he had stayed with them. But he’s happy, and that’s what matters.

  6. billinbossier on 12 Feb 2008 at 8:37 am #

    That must have been one of the first scanners to come on the market. I know I didn’t get a scanner until about 1995 or so, and you were right it was slow. However, we didn’t think so then, because we had nothing to compare it to. I bought my first digital camera shortly after that, and was just amazed how you could take a picture and transfer it to your computer, no film or anything. Now my phone has a camera in it. We have come a long way in the past 10-15 years.

    Maybe it was, Bill. I was not the first cartoonist with United Media to go digital, but I was among the first. It was an HP scanner, and it was much heavier (read, “better constructed”) than the scanners today. — JJ

  7. Lillian on 12 Feb 2008 at 9:43 am #

    I know you gave me fair warning with the heading about what adults say and all, but really, I almost had coffee all over my keyboard. Thanks for a great opener to my morning!

  8. sarah in oregon on 12 Feb 2008 at 12:20 pm #

    ya know, I think most kids feel the way Gene did when their “trust” in a parent is questioned. The most famous is that first booster shot … “This won’t hurt”. An early albeit painful lesson that I learned back when they started giving us polio shots (yes, I remember those first shots and my mom lied….ultimately for the best but you wouldn’t have known it by my reaction at the time).

    for lillian — I’ve made it a point not to be drinking or eating anything I don’t want on my keyboard first thing in the morning when I read A&J. I learned the hard way. I needed a new keyboard anyway.

  9. Ron on 12 Feb 2008 at 12:58 pm #

    I do believe that Gene has more than a little of Janis’ spunkiness!

  10. Rick in Lancaster, Ohio on 12 Feb 2008 at 2:48 pm #

    2J said, “The entire process back then, from the scanning to the transmission over a dial-up modem was very, very sloooooooow.”

    I did not have my first Internet-capable computer until 1994, and being able to connect via a dial-up modem was an absolute marvel. At that time, DSL and cable for the Internet didn’t exist in my area.

    I liken dial-up to the first horseless carriage. By today’s standards, it is hopelessly antiquated. For its day, it was state of the art.

    How quickly I have become spoiled. 1994, I am awed by dial-up. Now, I grumble if a download of anything requires two minutes.

    You’re right, of course. Dial-up seemed miraculous back then. Before that, as you recall, I actually drove the strips to the nearest Federal Express office. I still had to do that with the Sunday strips for several years after I went online. The color strips simply were too big to send via modems of the day. — JJ

  11. Tobias Gibson on 12 Feb 2008 at 4:19 pm #

    I remember the old days of having to use a program called UUencode/uncode in order to FTP large files. It allowed you to turn an image into a text file with a bunch of binary code which was small enough to FTP. Even then larger files had to be split up into smaller text files after encoding and then manually reassembled in order to before decoding.

    There was a time when you actually needed to know something about UNIX in order to do something on the internet. vi get a grep!

    That was back in the days when Turbo-Gopher was cutting edge technology; Pre-Mosaic days.
    Remember Mosaic?

  12. Mary in Ohio on 12 Feb 2008 at 4:44 pm #

    Hopefully , after this, Arlo was not one of those guys in the stands at a Little League game screaming “RELAX!” as Gene steps into the batter’s box.

  13. Kim in California on 12 Feb 2008 at 5:00 pm #

    Sarah, I never wanted to tell the shot lies to my kids. I told them that it would sting just a little, but if they moved while the doctor gave them the shot, it would hurt much more. That usually worked, and they were really pretty good. There were tears of course, but they stayed still. What helped, was not telling them they had doctor’s appointments until we were driving into the parking lot. That way, they didn’t have too much time to freak out over the situation. Eventually, the kids began to recognize where we were going, and they’d yell, “Are we going to the Doctor??!!” All in all, they handled it pretty well.

  14. Linda on 12 Feb 2008 at 5:19 pm #

    Tobias,
    I do remember seeing/test driving Mosaic for the first time in a computer lab in the library where I worked. In perhaps the one and only time I was ever right about technology, I turned to my colleague and said something like ‘this is going to change everything’. That was 1994. Yikes.
    –Linda

    [and I always detested Gopher, turbo or not]

  15. Steve from Royal Oak MI on 12 Feb 2008 at 5:33 pm #

    As a baby boomer, watching Wapakenta, OH native (my dad farmed there before I was born) and Purdue Graduate Neil Armstrong land on the moon was the greatest marvel that one could imagine. To think that the computer that they counted on had the power of a Commodore 64 (It was an 8-bit computer which ran the BASIC operating system). Basically the computers at Nasa ran all of the programs and fed the infor up to the LM’s computer. Those computers were the size of several conference rooms. That same memory would only be a portion of Jimmy’s laptop.

    My Dad never played ball with us but he was our 4-H leader and all 7 of us ended up going to and paying for college on our own. One time he ran out of gas a half mile from home in the dead of winter. We had a big gas tank at home and Dad asked me to fill up a can so that we could get home. I said “Why, I’m not the dumb*** that ran out of gas.” The only time in his life, my dad took a swing at me. He slipped and fell on the ice and ran like blue blazes and got him his gas. We never spoke about it afterward.

  16. Bill Briggs on 12 Feb 2008 at 11:28 pm #

    Yes, dial-up modems were slow. Still are. There are a few of us out in the boon-docks for which it is still the only way to access the internet.

    Thank you for running a “clean” web site without time-hogging little “movies” in the margins.

    Bill Briggs
    Charlevoix, Mich.

  17. Tom on 13 Feb 2008 at 12:14 am #

    Now I’m really going to date myself. I remember punch cards. One of my jobs was to sort
    a whole tray of cards by social security number. You could only sort on one column at
    a time, so sorting by SSN took 9 passes! Took all afternoon. Luckily I only had to do that
    once a month.

  18. BubbaWorldComix.net on 13 Feb 2008 at 5:46 am #

    I think I would bash my head against a brick wall before going back to dial-up now. I have a wireless connection and a laptop. A laptop that fits under my arm with more storage space than that big clunky freezing up piece of technology that takes up a whole desk and a stand beside it. I just need to get a new scanner and printer to go with the laptop. Every time I go crank up obsolete I just dread the experience.

  19. Jim in southwest Illannoy on 13 Feb 2008 at 8:49 am #

    Punch cards, paper tape, teletype. I’ve used all of those Tom. My first 2 modems were only 300 bps. With the first one you had to have a phone plugged into it to do the dialing, then once you got a carrier you would flip a rocker switch to connect. That was way pre-internet connecting to computer bbs’s. Broadband is a major improvement.

  20. Peter B. Steiger on 13 Feb 2008 at 10:07 am #

    Steve, I used to *dream* of upgrading to a Commodore 64. I blew my entire summer’s McPay on a brand-new Commodore PET in 1979 – all of 8 THOUSAND bytes of memory, a built-in monitor that could only display 40 characters per line, a half-sized keyboard, and only cassette tapes for storage.

    In high school we learned BASIC on teletypes connected to some college mainframe in downtown Houston, and we used paper tape rolls for storage. My freshman class in college was the last one to use punch cards.

    Dang, listen to the bunch of us. It’s like we’re getting old or something, and I’m pretty sure I made a vow never to let that happen.

  21. Tom on 13 Feb 2008 at 11:25 pm #

    Jim – remember those phone couplers? It was a cradle you put the phone handset into.
    I think they were 150 BPS.

    Sometimes the ‘good ole days’ weren’t!

  22. DOuG pRATt on 15 Feb 2008 at 12:32 am #

    There were strict regulations for attaching telecommunications gear directly to a phone line, before Judge Green broke up Ma Bell in 1982, so acoustic couplers were used for 110 baud and 300 baud modems. For those technologies the bits per second and baud rates were the same number, but that changed with 1200 bps modems, where the baud rate was 600. Almost everybody got this wrong and said 1200 baud, which is incorrect. Phase modulation allowed two bits per signal change, and that’s what a “baud” is — a signal change.

    Back in those days, a typical “green screen” text display was 80×25, or 2000 characters. With 10 bits per character (start bit, 7 ASCII data bits, parity bit, and a stop bit) that meant to fill a screen required 200 bits per second. A 1200 bps modem could transfer only 120 characters per second. Slow! Things got much better when 9600 bps modems came around, because that meant a screen could be transmitted in two seconds.

    Yes, this is a comment for ArloAndJanis.com! By the way, I met Ken from Framingham today. Great guy! He was surprised, as was I, to learn that I knew his boss when I was in college.