A place to discuss the weekly Wall Street Journal Crossword Puzzle Contest, starting every Thursday around 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Please do not post any answers or hints before the contest deadline which is midnight Sunday Eastern time.
steveb wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:15 am
You guys are so young! In 1977, I started working for a company that sold branch-management systems to banks, including electronic terminals for tellers (probably the first they had seen). The maximum memory capacity of the computer, which would run the entire branch, was 64K. That's right, K. But memory was so expensive then, many branches opted for 48K instead. That computer's long-term storage medium was 8-inch floppies.
Bring back punch cards!!!
TOPLFUP (arranging the cards with the corner top left face up)
And pain is if you ever drop the deck
In 1977 I had about a year left in high school, where I was "learning computers" in a club. Our computer was a converted teletype terminal in a very small closet which dialed in to a nearby college's mainframe. It created 1" wide punch tapes. The biggest "program" was someone's 100+ beer can collection.
College brought on punch cards and WAT4 & WAT5. The most valuable lesson learned was when to submit our meager 15 to 200 card programs to avoid the IT students with their +/-18" long boxes & boxes of cards, Their programs had priority over ours. We could submit & wait hours for ours to run, but the slightest mistake - as Bob notes - required resubmitting correctly & before the assignment deadline. That could be tough to acheive. One sympathizes with Bob & his 80 engineers sharing a PC.
FrankH wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:54 am
I don't believe Aston is named after a founder of the company or any person in the company, so that's one inconsistency.
I had the same issue. All the corporations contain the founders of the companies, except Aston Martin, founded by Bamford and Martin. Joseph Cyril Bamford (different person, same last name) was the founder of JCB (thank you Google), so I pondered a while trying to justify JCB by using a slightly different use of the meta (two Bamfords), but in the end decided GS was closer.
Funny, but the early days computing talk spurred by the Commodore 64 reference, was coincident to another puzzle thought about Fairchild Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley legend and progenitor of VC funded tech. I’m sure my fellow card punchers saw that, too.
steveb wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:15 am
You guys are so young! In 1977, I started working for a company that sold branch-management systems to banks, including electronic terminals for tellers (probably the first they had seen). The maximum memory capacity of the computer, which would run the entire branch, was 64K. That's right, K. But memory was so expensive then, many branches opted for 48K instead. That computer's long-term storage medium was 8-inch floppies.
Bring back punch cards!!!
TOPLFUP (arranging the cards with the corner top left face up)
And pain is if you ever drop the deck
In 1977 I had about a year left in high school, where I was "learning computers" in a club. Our computer was a converted teletype terminal in a very small closet which dialed in to a nearby college's mainframe. It created 1" wide punch tapes. The biggest "program" was someone's 100+ beer can collection.
College brought on punch cards and WAT4 & WAT5. The most valuable lesson learned was when to submit our meager 15 to 200 card programs to avoid the IT students with their +/-18" long boxes & boxes of cards, Their programs had priority over ours. We could submit & wait hours for ours to run, but the slightest mistake - as Bob notes - required resubmitting correctly & before the assignment deadline. That could be tough to acheive. One sympathizes with Bob & his 80 engineers sharing a PC.
Our original computer at home was a TRS-80 with 8K of RAM and used a cassette tape player for permanent memory storage. Our daughter was 6 at the time so she started writing her school papers with the word processor and printed them on the dot matrix printer. Since she had no spelling errors, it frustrated her second grade teachers.
I had contests with my son about who could write the best program to shuffle a deck of cards. He won with a novel approach that I did not think would work but all the tests I ran on it showed that it worked as well as any other program.
Jacksull wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:52 am
Did anyone else spend too much time looking for Goldman somewhere in the grid or the clues? I had SACHS early, and assumed the answer was Goldman Sachs. Then I spent the weekend waiting for Goldman to show up. He didn’t, so I submitted my answer an hour before the deadline. (I did learn that Morgan Fairchild anagrams to Rich Fair Goldman.)
In my original comment, I cited the song "Is that all there is?" I knew what the answer had to be, but I expected a second step .
Commodore wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 8:24 am
Funny, but the early days computing talk spurred by the Commodore 64 reference, was coincident to another puzzle thought about Fairchild Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley legend and progenitor of VC funded tech. I’m sure my fellow card punchers saw that, too.
Ahhh.... memories! Schlumberger acquired Fairchild Semiconductor in an interesting diversification era. Fairchild’s Automatic Test Equipment division merged with that of Schlumberger and I spent an amazing 11 years in high-tech sales, product marketing and business development all over the world. Back then, we had to go to the Print Room to collect reams of email printouts!
Going from top to bottom, once I got WILLIAMS and MARTIN, I suspected what was going on...the second name would be half the name of a company. I didn't recognize SCHMIDT, but kept going and saw that PACKARD would be Hewlett-Packard. FAIRCHILD didn't ring any bells either, but then went back to SCHMIDT and started googling. If you put "SCHMIDT PAPER COMPANY" into Google, you will get several hits for the Schmidt Ault Paper Company of York, PA. This held me up for a while since I didn't have any luck with investment companies named FAIRCHILD-anything. Eventually, I noticed that Morgan was a much better name for an investment company, and then backsolved to SACHS, realizing that Kimberly Clark was something I had heard of.
Also agree with FrankH that it's a slight ding that Aston of Aston-Martin is not a person, but a place.
steveb wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:15 am
You guys are so young! In 1977, I started working for a company that sold branch-management systems to banks, including electronic terminals for tellers (probably the first they had seen). The maximum memory capacity of the computer, which would run the entire branch, was 64K. That's right, K. But memory was so expensive then, many branches opted for 48K instead. That computer's long-term storage medium was 8-inch floppies.
Bring back punch cards!!!
TOPLFUP (arranging the cards with the corner top left face up)
And pain is if you ever drop the deck
In 1977 I had about a year left in high school, where I was "learning computers" in a club. Our computer was a converted teletype terminal in a very small closet which dialed in to a nearby college's mainframe. It created 1" wide punch tapes. The biggest "program" was someone's 100+ beer can collection.
College brought on punch cards and WAT4 & WAT5. The most valuable lesson learned was when to submit our meager 15 to 200 card programs to avoid the IT students with their +/-18" long boxes & boxes of cards, Their programs had priority over ours. We could submit & wait hours for ours to run, but the slightest mistake - as Bob notes - required resubmitting correctly & before the assignment deadline. That could be tough to acheive. One sympathizes with Bob & his 80 engineers sharing a PC.
Sometime in that time period I took a course on LISP (read: had to) - to this day I have flashbacks when I see more than four parentheses in a paragraph. I think by then we were on terminals, but my first programming course used cards,
FrankH wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:54 am
I don't believe Aston is named after a founder of the company or any person in the company, so that's one inconsistency.
That does seem like a glaring inconsistency, especially since the solution today justifies the meta answer with "...like the theme entries, a company named for its founders." Hmm. Seems like that should've been easy enough to fact-check. (According to Wikipedia, Martin is a founder but Aston comes from Aston Hill, where Martin used to race. He did have a partner in founding the company though, named Robert Bamford. Bamford Martin doesn't have quite the same ring to it...) Still, it doesn't make it unsolvable, and to me the theme is just as legitimate it you think of it as two-named companies, regardless of where the names came from.
FrankH wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:54 am
I don't believe Aston is named after a founder of the company or any person in the company, so that's one inconsistency.
That does seem like a glaring inconsistency, especially since the solution today justifies the meta answer with "...like the theme entries, a company named for its founders." Hmm. Seems like that should've been easy enough to fact-check. (According to Wikipedia, Martin is a founder but Aston comes from Aston Hill, where Martin used to race. He did have a partner in founding the company though, named Robert Bamford. Bamford Martin doesn't have quite the same ring to it...) Still, it doesn't make it unsolvable, and to me the theme is just as legitimate it you think of it as two-named companies, regardless of where the names came from.
The error in the WSJ explanation must be theirs; it could not have been provided by Matt Gaffney. The answers to the relevant clues only give you half of the corporation name; it follows that the path to the solution from those clues (SACHS) would only be a half name as well. That's consistent in my head.
My initial 60% was also SA_H_, and I knew at that point the answer was Goldman Sachs, which I submitted early on. I was stuck on it being the last name of each answer being the company name. When I reprinted a blank copy of the puzzle Friday evening to show some friends and ask for help figuring out what I was missing, I noticed two things:
1) The clue gave a hint to the company business. A fact that sort of went over my head on the first pass. At that point I saw Morgan Stanley and Kimberly-Clark
2) The two clues where the first name was used in the answer are the first part of the company names.
All loose ends tied up neatly.
If I'm around, I am willing to join the Muggle Zoom room at other times to lend a hand to those in need.
matthewmoravec wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:20 am
Late to mention it, but ashore as well. Only thing I'm missing is how EPOS are vaunted verses--any help?
From The Free Dictionary:
epos (ˈɛpɒs)
n
1. (Poetry) a body of poetry in which the tradition of a people is conveyed, esp a group of poems concerned with a common epic theme
2. (Poetry) another word for epic1
[C19: via Latin from Greek: speech, word, epic poem, song; related to Latin vōx voice]
Thank you! Based on the clue I googled what I presumed was the singular EPO and came up with nothing.
MarkL wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 6:21 am
Back in the day, a certain three-lettered company was stacking 16K DRAMs to make 'high density' mainframe memory. I won't even get into using punch cards in college before that!!
Then I shouldn't get into using punch cards at work.
After going 43/52 last year, I decided to aim for the lofty goal of perfection for this year. That lasted all of 7 weeks, but then I missed PRIME and YMA SUMAC in consecutive puzzles. So I reset to a more modest goal of scoring a perfect calendar quarter. I haven't accomplished that yet either, but this was my fourth 12/13 quarter since starting these in 2016 (dagnabbit, H. G. WELLS!). I'm 32/39 so far this year, and looking forward to Q4.
Sadly, I didn't get SACHS because I had Keegan instead of Stanley. That left me with SACHK which anagrams to SHACK so at the last minute I submitted RADIO SHACK knowing that it was wrong. But since in the past I did not submit an answer that I had no confidence in, but proved to be correct; I took the chance. Better luck this week.
Submitted the correct answer yesterday afternoon. I had it on Friday, but like a lot of us, thought there might be an extra step. I sort of looked for Goldman and came up empty-handed. Said, "just send it in already!"
I'll be checking my mailbox..(crossed fingers). Good luck to you all too!
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