I've been using computers for a very long time now - in fact I've actually been using a personal computer at home since a time when I had no idea how to use it at all! Hubby persuaded me that having a computer would be a great idea and so we spent a big chunk of my severance pay on something which was extremely whizz bang and up to the minute at the time. It really was something - it came with 3 disk drives - a 3.5, a 5.25 and a 20Mb hard drive - and yes, you read that right, it was 20 megabytes, not gigabytes *1. For the techies amongst you, the drive wasn't SATA, it wasn't even IDE, in fact, it was something called RLL which I think (since this was such an archaic device) probably stood for 'revolves lots and lots'. When we bought it, we also bought a copy of a new operating system called Windows, which we had seen demonstrated and a copy of Dos, which had to be installed before anything could be done at all. I famously rang hubby up in work (yes, there were phones at that time) and asked how I could get the Dos OS onto the computer, because it came with no instructions at all. Anyway, hubby said "put the disk in the drive and then type 'copy a twinkle dot twinkle c twinkle dot twinkle" - which just meant nothing at all to me! Anyway, after a bit of explaining, I managed it and after these first small steps things progressed pretty rapidly. They had to really, because the damn thing didn't work (twinkle or no twinkle) and I ended up on the phone to help desk - before I knew it I was thrust into the bowels of Edlin and on a really steep learning curve. Eventually, with our new copy of DR-Dos (not MS-Dos!) working, I installed Windows only to find that it was Windows 2 - not 3 (which was what had been demonstrated) and it mostly wasn't even in colour and so ensued another long story...
All of this is rather a long way from where I started with this entry, but you know me, never known to ramble ;-)
Its strange really, the way that your mind bunny hops from one thing to another, because all these memories came flooding back because of the new iPad. I know, I know, there's hardly any link at all between the iPad and our first PC apart from the fact that they are both a kind of computer but there you go - you are about to find out why my mind did the hopping:
I read a review recently on the iPad and about how robust it is with it's aluminium back and scratch resistant screen - heck, it even said you could spread it with jam and it would still work! Well, that reminded me of when they first started producing CDs (which was not that long before the time that we had that first PC) and I heard an interview on the news on Radio1 which was saying how amazing these new fangled shiny music discs were. It was said they were so amazing that you could even spread them with jam and they would still play. I mean, what it is with jam? Is there a special department in every new technology company where they test new things out with foodstuffs? Does some little guy with a clipboard and a white coat (with a row of pens in his top pocket of course) approach the boss and go "Mr Jobs, it's OK, you can release this one, it's withstood mashed potato and apple crumble - as soon as it's passed the jam test we're good to go!"
If you happen to work for a new technology company, please let me know why you don't use marmalade? Is it, as I suspect, that the coefficient of stickiness to lumps of peel doesn't produce precisely calculable results - or is it just that Stephen Fry only puts strawberry jam on his toast?
*1 Huge, when most were only 10Mb!
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