10 Apr
1997
10 Apr
'97
11:08 p.m.
Is this a generational thing? My first computer
exposure what to a
mainframe in the late 70's, but my first computer was an 80's micro.
Are people in the 40+ age group more likely to have fond memories
of minis?
Of course. My own exposure was to micros in the 80s, so I begun by getting
machines I had worked with back then. I don't discriminate at all, though,
and would definitely love a PDP-8. But with storage space waning, seriously
collecting minis (I won't even dare to think about mainframes) is a bit of a
problem.
Ignoring the fact that I can't seem to find any, anyway. :-)
I may not be an "old fart", but seening
today's kids, sometimes I feel
like one. (Nintendo?, why in my day we had to type in our games on
membrane keyboards. It took hours to type them in. We stored programs
on cassette tape, and we liked it...)
"And you tell that to young people, AND THEY WON'T BELIEVE YOU!" :-)
Seriously now, I got my first (long expected) when I spent about an hour
showing a Spectrum to my current flatmate (aged 19 I think) and trying to
explain how you plug it into a TV set for display (instead of a monitor) and
a tape recorder for data storage (but where's the drive?). Once she realised
that the computer *was* the keyboard, a computer does *not* necessarily come
with a printer and, once you write data to the tape, you can actually *load
it back* again, everything was fine.
Until she asked if I could lend it to her to do her industrial design CAD
and Word work on.
I think the Speccy's insulted now. :-)
--------------------------- ,o88,o888o,,o888o. -------------------------------
Alexios Chouchoulas '88 ,88' ,88'
alexios(a)vennea.demon.co.uk
The Unpronouncable One ,o88oooo88ooooo88oo, axc(a)dcs.ed.ac.uk