It looks like Henley's Formulas. I can't read the rest.
[ame]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Henleys-Formulas-Home-Workshop-Gardner/dp/0517293072/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387154438&sr=1-1&keywords=henley%27s+formulas[/ame]
~Carole~
There is no more new frontier - we have got to make it here
so I did a little research.
it appears that Don is holding the 1979 edition of Henley's Formulas, but interestingly, this book was first published in 1907!
and the first edition is going for surprisingly cheap on ebay at the moment:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HENLEYS-BOOK...-/321175604252
the 1979 edition is also listed at a low starting price: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HENLEYS-FORM...item3f2da03f86
Have yourself a Nerdy little Christmas!
If I can't have it all, just a taste will do...
the next question is..what is that thing in front of him?
If I can't have it all, just a taste will do...
Lol. Watch the "Johnny Can't Read" video and you'll see a couple dozen of those ancient computer monitors on old-fashioned school desks (although that looks like a prop version rather than the real thing - I don't see a screen). No hard drives were in sight but you weren't supposed to look too closely, I guess. Plus, I bet a lot of people in 1982 were ignorant of what a hard drive even looked like because so few had computers (am I right, folks who know firsthand?). I knew what one looked like in 1984 only because we had one in the school, and I was selected to be one of six people in the whole elementary school who got to use it as part of an experiment as to its educational value. I was so thrilled! Gosh, that was a long time ago. Anyway, the closest you get is Johnny putting what looks like a VHS tape in a slot underneath his monitor (only VCRs didn't look like that back then so that's pretty bizarre - did the director think that was what a floppy disk looked like?). Johnny also manages to get some text written without a keyboard, lol. I wonder if that photo was shot on the set and / or designed to promote the single?
ETA: Question partially answered, my friends. Here's a photo of the single. However, he's wearing a Space Invaders T-shirt in that one. I'm old enough to remember that game, and Atari. Speaking of Atari, some students in the video are playing PacMac without a joystick. I mean come freaking on! Ataris didn't look like that either, and kids of high school age surely knew that, even in 1982. Obviously the people making that video were too old to be interested in PacMan! When my family got one in 1984, my sisters and I were frenzied with excitement.
Maybe they made Don do a few takes wearing a Christmas sweater for the holidays, or for the sake of people who didn't know what Space Invaders was, lol.
When my family got our first computer in the late 80s, the monitor didn't look much different! Thank goodness for the evolution of technology and flat screens.
oh my god I can't believe I've never seen that video before! haha
what a trip
I've also never seen computers on school desks that looked like that before.
thanks for all of that trivia, Nancy!
and I love that old family photo!!
If I can't have it all, just a taste will do...
In 1982, a lot of people didn't even really know what a computer was, let alone looked like. Pictures you'd see in movies or on the news were the huge mainframes that took up entire rooms.
In 1980, Tandy (Radio Shack) had a computer that 'normal' people could use. We had one at our technical school and I wasn't impressed. A lot of work for very little gain. It had a small monitor like the one above.
In 1982 I worked for IBM, we all had workstations hooked up to mainframes, but a large group of us used IBM's personal computer for some things, and there was no hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives. One had the OS and program on it, the other was what you saved your work to. Those monitors didn't look like the one pictured above, it was bigger and clunkier.
VK
You can't change the world but you can change yourself.
...I could have done so many things, baby
if I could only stop my mind...
Some guys are born to Rimbaud
some guys breathe Baudelaire
some guys just got to go and put their rockets everywhere.