I know exactly how you feel Mike. I entered this world back in the day when we had to use a huge teletype terminal to dial into U of L's computer on a time-sharing basis.
It was even more amazing to sit and write 2-300 lines of BASIC to try to get this fabulous machine to convert Farenheit to centigrade. (My 24 year old nephew was amazed at my collection of paper tape programs that did less that a $2 calculator.) I skipped a few generations of computers during my early college years (after all, who would need computer skills, anyway) and missed the whole punch card stage. But when I went back to U of L I moved into the Apple ][ for one of my classes and still have some interesting work on a 5 1/4 inch floppy (a true floppy!) And of course I owned a C64 like just about everyone else. I put my BASIC skills to good use at one point, though. We had a TRS-80 (Wow! Remember those?) at the radio station and used it to type messages on the TV screen in the talk show studio. One Sunday morning during the religion shows I wrote the programming to turn it into a pretty nice teleprompter. It would list the callers on hold, and which line they were on. It would also remind the host when to do the weather and had a nice input prompt for the current temp. I touched my first Mac in 1987 and got my first one, an SE in 1989. I still remember how frightened I was when I installed 4 megs of RAM myself and how thrilled I was to get my first extended keyboard. And when I got my first modem and signed onto Prodigy, wwooowwww.... That was a Saturday morning I'll never forget. Those were also the days when there were a bunch of places around town that sold Macs. I bought my Mac from Graham Computer Center in Bluegrass Park. The modem came from a computer store in Gardiner Lane Shopping Center, but I can't remember the name. I also remember ordering from the MacConnection catalog with guaranteed overnight shipping for only $3. (Yes, three bucks!) But even with almost 30 year of experience in computers, it still amazes me how someone could imagine, design and then create a piece of equipment that will do all this stuff. BTW, last week I actually used a 1.2 meg diskette to move a file from one machine to another. Oops, gotta hobble to the porch and shake my fist at some young whipper-snappers playing on my lawn... rob Mike Watkins wrote: > Hen, > > Back when you long-time users were reading all these things for the > first time, I didn't own a computer. I bought my first (and present) > one in the spring of 2001. So I'm somewhat like the proverbial goose > who wakes up every day in a whole new world. By now, just a little of > that world looks familiar, however... I have this group to thank for > most of that. > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
