Sunday, July 17, 2011

Back in my day ...

I took a little trip down memory lane today when Manisha posted a photo on Facebook of a Commodore Pet she encountered. The Super Pet was the first computer I learned how to use regularly. A college boyfriend introduced me to the engineering school's computer lab and showed me how to use a word processor. What? I don't have to retype papers to revise them? Awesome!

That was a very brief period in which you could wave an 8-inch floppy at an English professor and say, "My paper's on here but the printer's broken," and he would be impressed.

I also learned to play Adventure on the DEC-10 mainframe, and took part in the development of one of the very first social networks ... as a socialite, not a programmer.

Yeah, my geek roots go way back.

3 comments:

  1. Love this! My hubby and I often laugh as we reminisce about the first hard drive we'd ever seen. It had an unthinkably huge 5 megabytes' worth of storage and was almost as big as a cardboard file storage box!

    I used to have to routinely replace 8" floppy drives in old Altos computers back in my computer repair days. I needed a luggage cart to carry the drives into office buildings. :)

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  2. Old school! A college dorm-mate had a "portable" computer, so called because it had a case with a handle. But thing weighed a ton and was the size of an ottoman.

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  3. "Portable computer!" LOL Hubby had brought home an old Eagle portable computer one day. Unfortunately, that day our house was broken into and a few things were stolen. The thief(ves) walked right past that buttoned up Eagle, thinking it was a sewing machine! Back then, the thing was worth thousands!

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