The K-Mart where I worked in 1983-1988 had a cafe, called 'The Grill'. Ours had booths, with smooth curved plastic (unpadded) benches. The ones along the edges were typical booths but there was also a row down the center of the same thing without side walls. Orange seats and brown tabletops, I believe. A quick look at the google'd images from above doesn't show anything that looked quite like what my store had.
I announced Blue Light Specials from time to time myself. There were a bunch of rotary-dial phones throughout the store, and if you dialed a certain number (I forget what it was) you could talk on the PA system. It's surprising it wasn't abused.
Brings back a lot of memories. I worked at K-Mart when I was in high school. I recall in 1983 when the TI-99/4A was discontinued, and the Sunday morning when we were selling them for (I think) $50 with a $100 mail-in rebate. When the doors opened people sprinted down the midway aisle to the TV/electronics department at the rear of the store where the computers were. I was an Atari snob at the time and had no interest in one for myself. I think we had less than a dozen in stock.
Interesting. I used to buy Zoom modems in the 80s-90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Telephonics), but apparently they have nothing to do with either of the other two Zoom companies mentioned here. I had occasionally wondered but never looked into it until now.
In 1988 when I got a job working in MSDOS, WordStar was in use by the programmers to edit source code. Though one guy used QuickEdit, and I used MicroEmacs. We all standardized on Brief a couple of years later.
My Grandfather had Alzheimer's. He didn't recognize anyone, but if you put a harmonica in his hands he could still play the polkas he learned when he was young. I can't say whether it had any other effects, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
There is some capacity in the primitive brain that allows some birds to mimic what amounts to a simplified audio file, storing and replaying it like data without any real understanding of the data or how they do it.
Others seem to genetically have a song of the species whether or not they learn from the birds of a feather.
It can remain in storage for who knows how long, it's in their brain cells of some kind, and memory is what they do.
Some of them sing pretty good and as nature intended can be heard from quite far away. So the other ones can recognize them by their song starting in the most prehistoric of times. Familiarity acts like it's built-in from the get-go too. How long have living things been recognizing each other by their song?
Like a digital file, it's the same data regardless of the playback tempo.
What other kind of place would you want a time-series abstract data file to be stored in higher life forms? It would be good to have a part of the brain inherently prepared for flawless memorization since before anybody could possibly figure it out.
Plus there may be other parts of the advanced brain that are bigger and more capable if suitably engaged, even if not comparable in terms of effortless, flawless memorization and recognition of things as abstract as frequencies, timbres, and their patterns across time.
Put it all together and that could be a virtuoso or something.
One of my late partner's grandmothers ended up with Alzheimer's and when it progressed to a point, it became difficult to communicate because there was so much hesitation and loss for words. She had been born a Louisiana Cajun and graduated from the first school in her town in the early 20th century. Same textbooks, radio programs, TV shows (when they came along), as any other grandmother from that generation in other states, so she was a regular native US English speaker and nobody ever thought she had a real Cajun accent at all. Nothing like her parents or grandparents but she was born into it and still was exclusively spoken locally for her early years.
Well she left the backwoods behind when she married a Texan and moved there, and hardly ever spoke French again. Sounded like she was from Texas when she had all her faculties, that's like 60 years later. Then years after that there was serious decline but you could play her a Cajun song and she could sing or speak perfect French and tell you what it was like getting ready to go to a high school dance back on the bayou. In detail.
