the computer age

[low_delta]

A friend was posting about her youth with computers. She was talking about Encarta and noisy modems. It sounds like the stone age, but was only the iron age. I learned about computers during the bronze age - when PC's existed. My high school had a Macintosh (before the term "Mac" was ever invented), but it was in the back room, where only the two computer geeks in the school were allowed to use it. It was impressive, because it had a color monitor. The rest of us used TRS-80's. I think we had twelve of them. Two had floppy disk drives, and the rest used cassette tape drives.

When I was a sophomore, I took a computer class. It wasn't about computer use, it was about programming. Straight logic. We wrote simple programs in BASIC. I enjoyed it. But none of us were going to be programmers, and if we were, we certainly weren't going to use BASIC. It did give us a chance to work with logic. And it suggested to me that I should learn how to type.

At the time, my friend's dad had an Apple IIc (IIe?). It was basically a word processor. It was cool because it had the amber screen, not the usual green.

Fifteen years later I had a used laptop (monochrome screen) and free Juno internet through a modem. I couldn't really do much more than e-mail. By late 1999 I had an HP with Windows ME and I was on the internet for real... still with free internet through a modem. It was a couple more years before I got cable.

Comments

[ravenfeather.livejournal.com]

I was in college before PC's were available for school use, and I too learned to program in basic, which I hated, it was like speaking to a baby IMO and in Cobal (you remember that Y2K language that was going to destroy the world?). I was already an established typer, so the keyboard was not an issue for me. I think there were four computers in the science building computer lab, but I honestly cannot remember if internet was involved. The only time I programed outside of that classroom situation was as part of a research project during one of my college breaks, and it was using cobal. I remember how impressed I was with the detail that could be achieved by stringing the simple symbols in the correct order. We programed a machine to analyze mouse enzymes from three different body organs and then print it out in an understandable mathematical format.

[low-delta.livejournal.com]

Actual programming languages were beyond me, but I never had any instruction in them.

[ravenfeather.livejournal.com]

There was no real language logic to them that I could find, but their own language that did not use language symbols (letters) so the "foreign language" of keyboard symbols and numbers had a heavy impact on me I think.

[rivendweller.livejournal.com]

I have a TRS-80 in storage. Maybe it is worth something, I don't know. Probably not. I was into computers early on because of my profession. I was recruited by a big accounting firm when I graduated from Cal Berkeley in 1984, and we used Compaqs in our field audits. We had to boot them with floppy drives. It was the stone age.

[low-delta.livejournal.com]

I see several of them for sale on Google, and they're around $200. No idea if they'll actually sell for that. One was listed at $7000.

I was considering the stone age to be before personal computers, but, yeah, I think you're probably right.