Before this gets recycled, I thought Iād scan it as a memento: a 1986 printout off our Riteman dot matrix printer (which I still have, with spare cartridges), hooked up to a Commodore 64. I forget the printer interface. The image isnāt mine: I only imagine that 14-year-old me was claiming copyright over the layout and text. To me this was all amazing. Dad bought a box of the line-flow paper from the computer store, I believe, a place called Einstein, run by a really nice guy called Raju Badiani (who also sold the computer system). Anything seemed possible, and by the summer of 1986ā7 I was hacking the bits and bytes and creating my own bitmap fonts on the 64, trying to make it all look like Eurostile. Nothing as sophisticated as Emigre. The 5Ā¼-inch floppies are still around somewhere!
Click here for all months (or hit ‘Gallery’ at the top of the screen, if you’re on the desktop), here for December, and here for November. This post explains why I wound up doing the gallery here.
I append to this entry through the month.
How interesting to find a photocopy of a letter my Dad wrote to the Department of Social Welfare in 1986, to apply for National Superannuation on behalf of his parents.
We had been here less than a decade, but, frankly, Dadās correspondence was always like this. The whole idea of immigrants coming to Aotearoa with limited English always smacked of racism and intolerance to me, and this letter illustrates that it might actually be our linguistic superiority in mastering another tongue that has racists and xenophobes worried.
There are some minor errors here, and he could have used a few commas instead of full stops, but itās on a par with period correspondence from native Anglophones.
I still have this Underwood typewriter.
While chatting about the movie Shaker Run with one of our Lucireteam (who was not born when the film was made), I noticed that the intersection at Courtenay PlaceāTaranaki StreetāDixon Street was rather treacherous in 1980sā fiction (start at 1’56”):
When I still had a blog on Vox, I noted that the car chase in this film played extreme liberties with New Zealand geography: you turn from the Auckland Harbour Bridge on to Willis Street, Wellington; and fly in a Holden Torana from a Viaduct rooftop, leaving the Lombard car park in Wellington, and landing in a Ford Cortina on a soundstage in Hong Kong.
