Word: ma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same womb. Jean is frumpy, asocial, infertile and separated from her husband. Rita is chic, impregnable as a rabbit, and antiseptically fastidious, except when it comes to stealing another woman's husband. Jean has tended the senile, incontinent mother for desolatingly lonely months; Rita has used the Ma Bell commercial method of reaching and touching by phone. Waves of passion rise between the two sisters like water spuming against a coastal reef, then subside in daughterly grief before the great silence: death. Suzanne Bertish's Jean is subcutaneously sensitive, and we feel the sand beneath her skin...
Ever see one of these before, mister? Yes, you. I'm talking to you, ma'am. Ever work one of these Commodores or Timex Sinclairs or Osborne Is or TRS-80 IIIs? How do you like them Apples? Just a joke, son. Good, clean fun. But you look so skeptical, like you're from Missouri, and I want to sell you one of these beauties, 'cause you need it and 'cause you want it, no matter what you say. Deep in your all-American heart (you are American, aren't you, pal?), you crave this little honey, which will count...
Within a few years, the wizards at Bell Labs built the first fully transistorized (or solid-state) computer, a machine called Leprechaun. But by then Ma Bell, eager to avoid the wrath of the Justice Department's trustbusters, had sold licenses for only $25,000 to anyone who wanted to make transistors, and the scramble was on to profit from them. William Shockley, one of the transistor's three inventors, returned to his California home town, Palo Alto, to form his own company in the heart of what would become known as Silicon Valley. In Dallas, a young...
...place in those hundreds of lines, chances are the program will not work properly. These software "bugs," as programming mishaps are called, can take weeks to find. One bug in an AT&T program knocked out all long-distance telephone service to Greece in 1979. It was months before Ma Bell's programmers pinned down the problem...
DIED. Jack Webb, 62, actor and alter ego of steely, deadpan Sergeant Joe Friday ("Just the facts, ma'am") on Dragnet; of heart disease; in West Hollywood, Calif. A self-styled "demon at work" who directed and produced most of the episodes both on radio (1949-56) and during two TV runs (1951-59, 1967-70), Webb continued to produce movies (The D.I.) and TV series (Adam-12, Emergency...