Now we seem to be completely dependent on computers, but at the time, I'm sure they didn't rely on them as much. The people pretty much navigated themselves to the moon
Nowadays, we don't have price tags on anything anymore. Prices are fetched from a database using the UPC as a key, so if the computer's down, the buyer is out of luck. At a previous employer, we sold specialty goods to contractors, so we had strong relationships with our customers. I drafted a plan to print up pads of paper sale forms that looked more or less like our (80x24 greenscreen) order screens, so if we lost connection to the mainframe, we could still move product from the warehouse to the customers; we'd just give them the product and bill 'em later. It was a risky move, but not really any riskier than sending our customers across the street to our competitors. To my knowledge, they've never had to use the manual system, thankfully.
We may not be "completely dependent on computers" just yet, but we seem to be getting there.
Also, isn't it a little risky letting someone copy your credit card like that? Even if you trust the cashier not to steal the number, how do you know whether they're destroying the information after they're done with it?
(Disclaimer: I'm 29, so don't really remember a time when those things were commonly used.)
It's funny--29 doesn't sound particularly young, but I'm really suppressing the urge to call you a whippersnapper.
[1] http://img.ehowcdn.com/article-new/ehow/images/a04/b9/g6/cre...
For example on a $6.95 order hand over $12 and watch first for the bewilderment while keying in the amount and then the amazement when they give back the non-dollar bill change.
pedantic? yes. but as a fellow member of the "give-em-too-much-to-get-fewer-back" tribe, I feel that you might appreciate this particular bit of pedantry.
I remember talking to someone who had clearly never worked in retail, complaining about their god-given right as a consumer to have change made for them trumping an open-air market vendor's right to have change for the rest of their sales for the day.
Over time, one does develop a vague sense of how much their purchases will be taxed, but I would definitely support a measure that required merchants to charge no more than what's on the tag.
1. A country side advertising campaign? 2. A state wide advertising campaign? 3. A local newspaper that serves the county?
As odd as it seems, that's the way it is here in the States (but I can sympathize, a friend from Sweden was horribly annoyed by the differences between sticker price and final price because of the tax rate).
The LEM software was supposed to be capable of a fully automatic landing, but none of the astronauts rode it all the way down.
David Mindell's book "Digital Apollo" goes into these systems, and their development, in much detail; the discussion of the LEM user interface is in chapter 8.