archaeology

Packing: you think you've thrown out everything that needs to go to reduce the amount needed to be packed.

Unpacking: you discover you weren't nearly ruthless enough and you've been hoarding all kinds of random old stuff.

For example: exhibit 'A': a fan fold print out of a citation search I carried out at the start of my Ph.D. The interesting part is the ancient technology still in use in the mid-90s: a non-internet enabled system for searching journals, a convoluted hop to get the results to a machine that could actually print out (tpd%landlord.ph.ed.ac.uk@away.bib.ac.uk - eh?) and then the printout itself: a banner page complete with my username in ASCII at the top and rendered physical by none other than LPCPLAB as job 8373.

LP == line printer, CPLAB == computational physics lab, a small room populated by Apollo workstations running a broken version of HP-UX with horrible keyboards.

The old line printers were great - for text but incredibly noisy and prone to occasionally catching fire (if not cleaned out) which leads to one of my two favourite error codes: LP0 on fire.

The other is HTTP status code 418.