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 Telephone history series
- Mobile telephone history
- Telephone manual
- Digital wireless basics
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- Cellular telephone basics
- Jade Clayton's pages
- Dave Mock's pages
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- Seattle Telephone Museum
- Telecom clip art collection
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- Britney & telephones
- Bits and bytes
- Packets and switching
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- A telephone joke book
exists? Apparently. Search for this title with the Try http://www.abe.com
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- 101 Telephone jokes
by Katy Hall Age Level: Juvenile Condition: Standard ISBN: 059048575X
Publisher: Scholastic Inc. Subject: Subject: Jokes Publication
Date: c1994 Binding: 96 p.
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This
excellent site is a wonderful resource, the best telephone quotes
on the web:
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- http://russell.whitworth.com/quotes.htm
(external link)
TelecomWriting.com's Jokes
and Quotes Page
- We Don't Need Telephones
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- When news of the telephone reached England, presumably a
hundred years ago tomorrow through Cyrus Field's cable, the chief
engineer of the post office was asked whether this new Yankee
invention would be of any practical value. He gave the forthright
reply: "No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone
-- but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
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- Attributed to Sir William Preece
by Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, former H.M. Postmaster General. Quote
given to Arthur C. Clarke who published it in his essay 'Communications
in the Second Century of The Telephone' which is contained in
The Telephone's First Century -- And Beyond : Essays on the
Occasion of the 100th anniversary of Telephone Communication,
by Arthur C. Clarke ... [et al.]; preface by John D. deButts,
introduction by Thomas E. Bolger. New York: Published in cooperation
with the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. by Thomas Y.
Crowell (1977) p.87
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- In a Kingdom Far Away
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- In a kingdom far far away, and a long long time ago, a party
was being given. To this party the king had invited everyone
in the kingdom to his castle. And everyone was having a grand
time. The wine was flowing, the tables were overflowing with
food, and the dancing was beautiful. Suddenly, a gnarled old
man appeared out of thin air. His hands clutched in tight fists
by his body, smoke streaming from his shoulders, he walked up
to the king and said, "How dare you have a party and not
invite your own court wizard! For this insult I curse this castle
with the dreaded Curse of the Fingers. Anyone who attempts to
leave here will be rendered limb from limb by huge disembodied
fingers!" The wizard waved his bony arms about and shouted
in a guttural foreign language. "There!" he said and
vanished.
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- All at once, the people of the kingdom looked to their king.
What would he do? How could he save them? The king pursed his
lips and looked about him. Finally, he turned to his knights
and asked for a volunteer to ride to the next kingdom and plead
with their wizard to remove the curse. Of course all of the knights
wished to go. The king selected the knight with the greatest
seniority and sent him on his way. The knight gathered up all
his weapons, put on his best suit of armor and headed out. As
soon as his foot stepped off of the drawbridge, gigantic yellow
fingers appeared from nowhere and ripped him limb from limb.
One after another, each knight attempted to ride out of the castle,
each one in turn was ripped to shreds. Finally, no knights were
left. The king looked about him. "Is there anyone else who
would brave this curse and rescue us from this horrible curse?"
he said.
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- "I will, sir!" said a small boy who had been serving
one of the knights before he died. The small boy packed up his
belongings and provisions for the journey. Since he was a poor
serving boy, and had no horse, he knew he would have to walk.
But he was determined to succeed. As soon as he crossed the drawbridge,
the yellow fingers appeared and tried to rip him apart. They
couldn't! Each time the tried to grab him, the boy wriggled free
and continued on his journey. Several days later, the boy was
back at the castle with the neighboring kingdom's wizard. The
king was overjoyed to have the curse lifted and he called the
boy to him. "How did you escape from those monstrous fingers?
All my knights couldn't get past them and they were killed. How
could you do it?" The boy looked up at the king and replied,
"Your majesty, it occurred to me as the last knight was
being killed that the only way to escape this curse was to...
Let your pages do the walking through the yellow fingers."
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- Twain on Telephones
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- It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope
and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the
poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized,
the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole
earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting
rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
Mark Twain's Christmas greetings, 1890
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- Consider that a conversation by telephone - when you are
simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation
- is one of the solemnests curiosities of this modern life.
A Telephonic Conversation, 1880
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- Confound a telephone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying
similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity
of sense.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889
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- It is a time-saving, profanity-breeding, useful invention,
and in America to be found in all homes except parsonages.
"Letters to Satan", Europe and Elsewhere
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- The Twain quotes above are from http://www.twainquotes.com/Telephone.html
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- Miscellaneous
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- Great science nobly labored to increase the people's joys,
- But every new invention seemed to add another noise;
- One was always on the telephone or answering the bell,
- And everyone wondered why the population fell.
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- Sir Alan Patrick Herbert [1890 -- 1971] Former House of Commons
Member, one of two representing Oxford University. (Read as
part of a longer poem in the House of Commons, November 1938)
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- Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science
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- Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king
summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both
a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob,
and a lever. "What do you think this is?" One advisor,
an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he
said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded
computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit
microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the
darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades
of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would
use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of
initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements
and start the timer with the initial value selected from the
table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat
and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you
a working prototype."
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- The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized
the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters
don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm
frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast
food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated,
they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast
food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled
eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete.
If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign
the toaster in just a few years. With this in mind, we can formulate
a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class
of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains,
pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated
with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles;
pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided
into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs,
and various omelet classes. The ham and cheese omelet class is
worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics
from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that
the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance.
At run time, the program must create the proper object and send
a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics
of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so
they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled
eggs."
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- "Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis
phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any
kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered
some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented
language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want
the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent
processing is required, too." "We must not forget the
user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility,
and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product
unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the
breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot
on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX
v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the
time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu
and click on the foods they want to cook." "Having
made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the
design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware
platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB
of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient.
If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports
multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program
will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if
we had foolishly allowed hardware-first design strategy to lock
us into a four-bit microcontroller!)." The king wisely had
the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever
after.
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- This excellent site is a wonderful resource,
the best telephone quotes on the web:
-
- http://russell.whitworth.com/quotes.htm
(external link)
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