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by whartung 701 days ago
And then, there was an anecdote!

I bought my friends daughter a watch for her birthday. She was, like, 12 or something. I got it at Target.

And it had a moon phase dial! How about that?!

So I was determined to set it accurately for her.

To wit I started dredging through the internet. And to be completely honest, I'm not quite sure how I was doing that, having nothing but a Netcom.com shell account available to me. Perhaps I was using Lynx, or using some mail gateway, or who knows what. It wasn't no 10 seconds on Google, I'll tell you that.

In the end, I stumbled upon some code for my HP-48. Aha! This should do nicely!

Somehow, I got the code into the calculator. Did I type it in? Did I download it over Kermit? Who knows. Times were moving fast back then. Somehow, someway, however, I got that code in and calculated away.

Finally! ACCURATE results. Done with precision and math and engineering. Done Right!

To wit, I then proceeded to get the watch set properly.

And...it was a fashion watch for a 12 year old girl from Target. This may come as a shock to some, I was obviously taken aback by it, however -- the moon phase did not work. It was just a moon on a dial that moved, though some undetermined mechanism. It could not be set independently.

Oh.