> “He could read them while driving and fold them back up while driving.”
For maps from the 80's or older, that's actually a feat.
Most recent maps fold up in an accordion-like or zig zag pattern. But not older maps! The folding patterns were inscrutable. You made a horrible mess unless you remembered the exact steps with which you unfolded it.
Given the diversity of people on Hacker News, I'm hoping there's a printing press operator who can explain why paper folding machines of the olden days didn't use a logical folding pattern.
I wonder if the machines back then were just as capable of using an accordion pattern, but mapmakers and printers thought there were advantages to the patterns they used, either practical or aesthetic?
When I was a kid, family and friends marveled at my uncanny ability to fold up a map perfectly. The secret was simple: I let the map fold itself.
I'd find the one fold that went the same direction all the way across the page, and start there. Then the one fold that went in one direction across the folded map, and fold it next. And so on.
As long as no one had mis-folded the map before, it seemed pretty easy. But I'd see everyone else ignoring what the map was telling them, just going at it arbitrarily and making a mess.
Later I got into ham radio and applied the same principle to my wiring, especially when I wound my own transformers. Instead of pulling and twisting the wire every which way, I'd let the wire show me where it wanted to go. And instead of holding the transformer core still and forcing the wire around it, I would rotate the core like a spool to take up the wire.
This principle still serves me today, as I seem to be one of the rare people who never has any trouble with MacBook Pro power supply cords!
I cringed when I watched a colleague wind up the cord for a brand new MBPR. He opened the ears on the charger, grabbed the cord and pulled it hard around them all the way. So he was not only stressing the wire from the extra force, he was putting a twist into it through its whole length.
Instead, I wind it the way I used to wind transformers: I let the wire dangle loosely, and then I rotate the power block like a spool with one hand, gently guiding the wire with the other so it wraps loosely and without any longitudinal twist.
I winced at your description of your colleague - and am reading this on a phone with an attached power cable that is frayed, taped up and then re-frayed with exposed wires. I still maintain that strain reducers would help.
I'm pretty sure it was always an accordion, but you had to fold it in half first (or quarters, depending on size of map) before folding according style. And I believe many folks didn't realize this or forgot this step.
I've seen that version (fold in half, then accordion style), but I assure you that most highway or city maps from the '60s and '70s had folding patterns that made absolutely no sense. Go and find one from an elderly relative's attic and you'll believe me.
In my experience, people found the area they were interested in, and made a fold around it, so that the map was easier to handle. Much like the newspaper folds that bisect the paper vertically or laterally into fourths.
The kind of thing a lot of people around him while living likely dismissed as "having too much time on his hands". (I'm not saying that, but it often frustrates me when I hear that)
My thought for people who say that is "Sad that you either don't have any or are unable to pursue your passion(s) and instead waste your time, on what? Being productive?"
For maps from the 80's or older, that's actually a feat.
Most recent maps fold up in an accordion-like or zig zag pattern. But not older maps! The folding patterns were inscrutable. You made a horrible mess unless you remembered the exact steps with which you unfolded it.
Given the diversity of people on Hacker News, I'm hoping there's a printing press operator who can explain why paper folding machines of the olden days didn't use a logical folding pattern.