{"id":15101,"date":"2018-08-09T23:12:20","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T03:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=15101"},"modified":"2018-08-09T23:12:20","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T03:12:20","slug":"comprehensive-uncle-techtip-simulator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/09\/comprehensive-uncle-techtip-simulator\/","title":{"rendered":"Comprehensive Uncle TechTip Simulator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Around 1988\u00e2\u20ac\u201c1991 there was a weekly computer magazine in the UK called <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/newcomputerexpress\">New Computer Express<\/a>. This period coincided roughly with the time I was a freelance writer in the same field.<\/p>\n<p>For childish reasons now lost to time, a group of us freelancers had a major hate-on for\u00c2\u00a0 NCE&#8217;s advice columnist. Writing under the name <em>Uncle TechTip<\/em>, this columnist seemed to answer most questions with something like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153<em>Hmm, I don&#8217;t know anything about _____. Maybe a reader can help?<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Almost without fail, he&#8217;d have readers write in answers for next week&#8217;s issue.<\/p>\n<p>Not realizing that Uncle TT&#8217;s economy of response was a sly precursor to crowdsourcing websites, the neophyte journo brigade were incensed by his lack of knowledge. One of us wrote an Uncle TechTip Simulator in BASIC, which I recreate from memory for your enjoyment:<\/p>\n<pre>10 CLS\r\n15 PRINT \" *** Uncle TechTip Simulator ***\"\r\n20 PRINT\r\n25 INPUT \"What is your question for Uncle TechTip\";a$\r\n30 PRINT\r\n35 PRINT \"Uncle TechTip's Answer: \"\r\n40 PRINT\r\n45 PRINT \"Hmm, I don't know anything about\"\r\n50 PRINT \" \";a$;\" ...\"\r\n55 PRINT \"Maybe a reader can help?\"<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Around 1988\u00e2\u20ac\u201c1991 there was a weekly computer magazine in the UK called New Computer Express. This period coincided roughly with the time I was a freelance writer in the same field. For childish reasons now lost to time, a group of us freelancers had a major hate-on for\u00c2\u00a0 NCE&#8217;s advice columnist. Writing under the name [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,7],"tags":[2062,3147,3145,3146,217],"class_list":["post-15101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-choons","category-computers-suck","tag-basic","tag-crowdsource","tag-nce","tag-techtip","tag-uk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-3Vz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15103,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101\/revisions\/15103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}