I thought today I would share what I think about when I hear people complaining about the speed of their Internet connection and computers, and the lack of memory on their various devices (and, yes, I have been known to be one of those people).
Does anyone remember this?
The Commodore PET
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France license. Attribution: Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr
THIS was the first computer I ever used. I was in grade 11, and our high school had just started its first Computer Science (I think that’s what it was called) class. And we used PET computers. What a disappointment – I was expecting Star Trek, and I got a teeny tiny monitor (the Commodore site – http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-products/commodore-pet-the-worlds-first-personal-computer/ – says it was 9 inches), and a “practical storage device”, in reality a cassette tape drive (yes – cassette tape!), which took FOREVER to save the simplest code onto. I don’t remember much about what we coded into the PETs, but I do remember having to spend hours and hours flowcharting everything first, and then hours and hours entering code praying it would work, then hours and hours saving the code onto the practical storage device to hand in.
I didn’t touch a computer again for several years. I was in university, and it was my brother’s Apple IIE– or was it an Apple IIc, no definitely a IIe… Anyway, it had no hard drive, but at least saved everything onto a floppy disc instead of a cassette tape – a 5 ÂĽ inch disc, mind you. But that’s a story for another day.
The Apple IIe
We didn’t have the exact same computers – but we had some bee-yooties ! How clearly I remember when Stringer and I moved up to one that had a separate hard drive – with something like 50 bytes of memory ! Or was it 5 …?
Probably 5 🙂 I remember the first time I used a mouse – it was on a MAC in 1990/1991, and then the next year I went to work somewhere with only PCs – they didn’t have mouses for PCs back then. What a step backwards!
It’s become very confused in my mind, sll that early computers stuff. I can remember clearly only explaining to someone how you shouldn’t keep all your files in the root directory of Windows 3.1 … 🙂
You should never keep all your files in the root directory of ANYTHING!! 🙂
I bow to great wisdom.