The muse is running a bit late today. I spent the morning travelling down memory lane going through about 120 floppy discs. I experienced a series of emotions opening up some pictures I hadn't seen in many years. For the most part it was fun but it was also an exercise in frustration because whatever format some of these cheap floppies were, they loaded very slowly or not at all. Or just froze up the screen completely, which is danger on my current outdated setup.
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Pretty much everything I have learned about computers since 1982 has been through trial and error. My first year of college turned me off to computers almost entirely because, never having touched a computer before, I started with DOS...and wrote these horrible little programs with IF/THEN statements. Needless to say I did not sign up for Fortran or Cobalt or whatever it was called. It was boring and tedious, and to make matters worse my instructor wanted me to do Calculus homework with it, and I pretty much gave up. I wandered into the radio station instead and fell in love. And that was that.
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Long about 1991 my father bought a computer... a 386 Packard Bell. It was thousands of dollars.
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He did boring stuff like settle his checking account and keep track of the family budget. I convinced him that there was more to life than numbers, and we signed up for Prodigy, back when there were probably less than 100 "web" sites in the whole world. I amused myself making friends at online bulletin boards, and playing basic online games. The modems were so slow back then, my dad soon lost patience waiting for each page to load, and started playing the card games again.
He did boring stuff like settle his checking account and keep track of the family budget. I convinced him that there was more to life than numbers, and we signed up for Prodigy, back when there were probably less than 100 "web" sites in the whole world. I amused myself making friends at online bulletin boards, and playing basic online games. The modems were so slow back then, my dad soon lost patience waiting for each page to load, and started playing the card games again.
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I wish dad could see what I do now. He died in 1998, so he only saw the "infant" stages of the internet. I know he kicked himself for not buying Microsoft stock early on, as he had friends who did, and saw their wealth grow. Of course that was before the big Dot-com bust.
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Well back to work. 63 more floppies to go through. Better get started. The new computer doesn't have a floppy drive. I really need to move on. If I find any really cool pix, I'll post them.
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