“Pieces of string too short to save”

I thought I was being original in naming this section of my pages “Pieces of string too short to save,” but a Google search turns up several others who have used the idea before me. The reference is to the story of New Englanders who were notorious for saving everything in the expectation that “it might come in handy some day.” When one of them died, the executors of his estate found his house crammed with boxes and folders, all neatly labeled with their contents. One of the boxes was labeled “Pieces of String Too Short to Save.” Sure enough, it was full of pieces of string that could never possibly be used for anything, yet their owner could not bear to throw them away.

In a similar fashion, over the years there have been some documents on these pages that were very useful in their day but are hardly useful now. They probably never will “come in handy some day.” Still, I hate to throw them away. I keep them here primarily to show what the state of computing was in the “early days,” which weren’t all that long ago, actually.

A Guide to VMS Computing Systems for History Students at The University of Memphis was intended, as the title indicates, to acquaint students in History with the VMS computers which were the mainstay of academic computing from the late 1980s until not many years ago but which are completely passé now. One of them was named mocha, another latte, and I always expected cappuccino to come along one day but it never did. Read the document to see all the hurdles you would have had to overcome back then, and be thankful for the much more user-friendly systems we have today.
An even more useless “piece of string” is A Guide to Univac for Non-Programmers. It was the forerunner of the guide to VMS systems and was designed to furnish guidance in the use of the older Sperry Rand Univac system. The Univac system was much harder to use than the VMS systems, so if you want to see what a real challenge computing was in the “olden days,” read this guide. Ironically, the very first edition of the manual written in 1982 by A. Survivor apparently did not survive. What you will see is either the second or third edition, which was converted from the very cumbersome Document Processing System (DPS) to the classic WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS format.
Searching The On-Line Catalog (Information Gateway) of The University of Memphis Libraries was — believe it or not — useful until late July 2008 for certain purposes. Before the Libraries of The University of Memphis created a Web interface for the online catalog, this was the only way to work with the catalog. Until 22 July 2008 it could still be used instead of that Web interface for all the entries in the catalog and had to be used to get full information about periodical holdings. The new Web interface (http://bibliotech.memphis.edu/) is supposed to include periodical holdings (some library users have reported problems, however). The telnet interface is no longer supported. Once more, thank your lucky stars that something better came along.

There may be some more pieces of string tucked away somewhere, but right now I don’t even know where to find them myself.

This page is maintained by Maurice Crouse
Last modified 21 March 2009