Good Morning Tri-State Email Newsletter
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
July. Seems like only yesterday I was trying to figure out how I was going to get to work in the snow when all I had was a scooter.
The other day I bought an external hard drive and it made me feel old. For a mere $100 I bought 1 terabyte of space. That's 1,048,576 megabytes. Compare that to the first computer my family bought in 1993, which had a hard drive that was 210 megabytes.
This may be incredibly dorky and it may be boring but here is a rundown of computers that I remember using.
-- Commodore 64: played games on it at my mom's friend's house. Big old floppy disc with the drive making all kinds of horrible noises.
-- Apple IIe: we had three of these in my second grade classroom. That was about 1987. There was some math & reading software on it. Only certain kids were allowed to use it. Here's the sad part. I was still using the Apple IIe at Napoleon High School to learn "programming" in 1995, even though the Apple IIe was discontinued in 1993.
Also, for some reason, the creators of the Apple IIe apparently believed it would need to endure a nuclear attack. Thus the need for a 40 pound case that was four inches thick.
-- Macintosh II: another friend of my parents had this one. This may have been 1989. I believe it was my first experience with a mouse. We would draw things in the paint program then print them out with the dot matrix printer screaming.
-- Packard Bell 486SX: This is the aforementioned 1993 family computer. This was my first experience with Windows. I believe it had Windows 3.0, but it ran on MS DOS. Even then, Microsoft stuff was overly complicated. I think this computer cost in the neighborhood of $1,200. The case displayed weird yellow splotches after about a year. Once it became outdated, we nicknamed it the Packard Smell.
There is still a long way to go in this list, but I'm running out of time. I'll continue it tomorrow. Lucky you.
My favorites from today's GMTS:
-- River Rescue --
I have never seen anything like this. In Des Moines, a boat capsized, and some nearby construction workers had a crane. So they dangled a guy on the end of the crane and he scooped up one of the people in the river. Weird. Good video.
-- Kid Steals Teacher's Car --
11 year old kid learns to drive from video games, then grabs his teacher's keys and off he goes. Teacher is in trouble.
Today's distracting link:
http://thereifixedit.com/THERE I FIXED IT
Really funny pictures of patch-up jobs.
