Yesterday I worked on upgrading my computer with more memory and added a video card that had two monitor outputs and a TV tuner. I got used to using two monitors at work which gives you a lot of screen space to use and it has the added advantage of looking really geeky. As a kid was influenced by the Dr. Suess movie “The 5000 fingers of Dr. T“, it had keyboards everywhere. So I have worked to be surrounded by keyboards, monitors and other peripherals to match that theme.
Originally in High School before the advent of the personal computer I learned BASIC but only had the school mainframe to work with via teletype. A little later I worked with the first PC the ALTAIR 8080 that inputed information via octal switches on the front. Over time I went through a couple Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Amiga 500 (a great computer), IBM XT, 286, 286, 486. and many flavors of the Pentium. What this all leads to is an “old timers” attitude in relation to technology.
If I buy memory I think “I remember only using 36k” or buying 1 Meg at $100. When I get a hardrive I remember using tape drives, and then floppies, and then a whopping 10 Meg hardrive. Each purchase brings a “remember when.” So far these thoughts have been mainly internal and I have resisted telling my kids things like “When I was young I didn’t have a calculator, but a slide rule and I knew how to use it” or “I remember file sharing was borrowing a record and copying it to cassette.”
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Our first home computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 color computer. My brother in law worked at a store and this had been returned so we were able to buy it for $35 in 1980. We then hooked it up to an old Sony trinitron for the monitor, and used a Sony portable cassette player for a tape drive. Getting fancy for us was when we invested in a double floppy drive (one for the program, one to save stuff on). We bought a dot-matrix printer at a swap meet. I remember how impressed a job recruiter was in 1985 when I brought in my computer developed resume with 3 different type faces. Now, maybe computer mavens were doing that then, but this was for a job as a floor nurse (RN).
Of course, I am married to an engineer. And my mom worked in computers (main-frame) starting in the mid-1960s – so I guess that makes my kids 3rd generation geeks – no? I remember mom bringing home IBM punch cards when I was in High School and how she went ballistic if anyone messed with her programs.
Our first computer was a TI-99/4A. My parents never got us kids an Atari; we just jumped straight to home computer. My brother and sister were naturals at it; me, I’ve struggled to turn the thing on sometimes.