What is your earliest computer related memory?

Yes, but an interest that didn't interest you wouldn't be an interest.

Well, that is interesting point, but as a generation member born in a world of computers, I think we must just take for granted they've always been with us. Maybe people were like this when pin-hole cameras started. I just accept that Nikon and Olympus have always been around. Or music - Bose speakers and ipoddy stuff is a natural part of my world. Or what was teh world liek before Mozart or Beatles? It's just "there". Or blue jeans. It's neat to hear all the stuff people recall.

Your generation were prolly the first to log on. I guess the wonder will always stay with you. For me, its like getting on a bus.

Interesting.

Yes, that's the point I was making. You see a computer as just something that is "there" - maybe even as something that ought to be there. When I see a computer, it has attached to it a whole wealth of meaning. So in that sense, my inner world (where it pertains to computers) is richer than yours. Not "better" necessarily, but richer. Surely the more interest one can take in the world, the more resource one has should things get bad. If your personal world is stocked with things you merely take for granted and have little interest in, then your world seems impoverished to me.



You are making an assumption about my age based on my interests. I am also interested in discussing dinosaurs, ancient Greek and Roman poetry, and Laurel & Hardy films, but I wasn't around when any of those were

Or not

I've come late to this discussion, but as I am as old as methusalah (and certainly feel it) my frist computer memory is doing an introduction to computer course at school in about 1973, and punching cards which had to be taken to the local university to be run through their computer. I can't remember what I achieved with my stack of punch cards, and I certainly don't have any now.

My next contact was a friend with a ZX80, and then a ZX Spectrum, and a console. He explained how to program the computer and I learned a little, but we mostly ended up playing space invaders in huge teams.

Following this... I started work in a publications department which was moving from IBM golfball machinesfor typesetting to a computerised system. They brought in a Wang word processor, and all the secretaries (who had been on the training course) locked themselves in the loo and refused to come out. They were scared they'd break the machine if they put a finger wrong.

I loved the Wang, and was a grand master at Wang Adventure, which was a text-based game, bfore I realised that actually, it wouldn't handle the proportionally-spaced type which was a requirement for the system, and so that one went back and a Jacquard machine arrived.

The Jacquard machine was absolutely different from the Wang and used mark up language that came in very handy when I started a blog in 1998 and came across html, as it was more or less identical. I found I had a knack of picking up the way things work, and started a long career in writing idiot's guides to the computers and computer programs that were used in the office.

Personally, my first computer was an Amstrad512, bought so that I could write my novel and make my fortune, used instead to type up my poetry, to write articles and reports, ugly as hell. I watch episodes of "Drop the Dead Donkey", a comedy set in a tv office and tel my children "I had one of those!"

By then I was working at Lloyd's Register of Shipping in the City, and they had Europe's biggest mainframe computers, two of them, in the basement of their office at 71 Fenchurch Street. They were running in tandem, as they were used for the INMARSAT system. It was like being in a Bond movie going down there - special climates and dust-free atmospheres etc.

About 1986 they offered me email with the outports around the world and I couldn't see the point: if I had something urgent I would use the phone, and if I had something less urgent I woud send a memo, lol. Of course, NOW I can see what I was missing.

I had an Apple IIe with about 64k at work and then, a series of apples, and many years later, an Apple Power PC at home. It was then that I started my blog, in 1998.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Cali

When some folks use the phrase "Hoover twins" it probably means something other than washing machines.

I know, it's crazy....one of my LSL scripts has as much memory as my entire Apple II computer!

Ahhhh, thats the problem you yunginz!

You never really learn to appreciate what you have now if you don't remember what it was like before.

I wish my grandparents were still alive to see the stuff we have now. My grandfather thought the Atari 2600 was fun! I'd like to see what he thinks of modern consoles

And I suppose in another 20 years, my niece & nephew will be more technologically advanced than me. However, SL will still lag

"You are in a rough stone corridor. The exits are N,S,W. What do you do?"

Call a friend?

/me takes away Jig's computer for a year so she can discover something new when she gets it back. It doesn't matter how old you are when you get something new.

I see you are back on that oldie thing again. Too bad you can't put on the brakes because you will be there before you know it. Then the young ones will be making fun of you. Unless of course, their parents have taught them some manners. I just hope that you are still around to enjoy it because by then your attitude will have completely changed.

What do you get when you cross a rooster and a telephone pole?

When I was your age, we had to enter our data using a small magnet and a steady hand. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways. Whippersnappers these days with their keyboards and operating systems...grumble...grumble...

Oh bollocks. You following me around? Listen Kira, I'll prolly be dead long before my time since I stretched my cat's lives many times over. If young ones by then can find something to laugh about in my life, then I'll welcome it; I've had a good laugh at myself.

I know old age is not for the faint of heart but stop getting so rampant over the years passing.

Computer related memory...being told to put something on my 'desktop' and looking down at my desk's surface, wondering how I was going to move a computer file there.

Yes, Melita? And... ???

How rude - and then you have the affrontery to pretend offense when told so.

Each generation thinks the things 'in' when they are in their 20s or so will always be 'in.' Ipods will be hilarious to future generations too. You're not stupid; surely you know that.

I can't remember?

What's an iPod?

I not offended. Not sure if crossed hairs happening here or straw or something. Pretty sure its not "affrontery". Nope. Imagine my voice like a bit of a cross between London estuary and educated Sloan and you'll get my manner. Thames Valley Girl.

Its a bunch of whales decimated to just one.

Not surprised. (I've known a lot of Original Vals.) I don't confuse your parlance with intelligence (or lack of), though.

But what has that got to do with mocking people's age? (Or typos? Effrontery then.)

I think that was a typo...

I guess when the thread originator can't even stay on topic it's time to call it a day