Speaking of elevators:
I was in a Niagara Falls hotel in 2004, and there was a middle-aged guy who didn’t know how to use the elevator. He kept hitting the button for the floor he was on, rather than the floor he wanted to go to. So the doors just kept opening and closing. An Amish couple had to show him what to do.
I ride the train every year (well, not this year) for a couple thousand miles each way. There are always Amish people on the trip. Seems odd, I cannot remember seeing Bombardier Coaches in the bible.
However, I do remember riding the train as a young’un, quite often, though on a much shorter run. Those old cars, when you flushed the toilet, you could see the ties going by. “Do not flush the toilet while the train is standing in the station” the sign said.
the rule used to be that they could use modern travel vehicles but couldn’t own them…
There’s Amish and there’s Amish. There are lots of them in S. Indiana, and you see them buying stuff at Walmart all the time. And no, they aren’t Mennonites-- you see them too, and you can tell them because they have prints on their clothes, and zippers and buttons) while the Amish use only dark, solid colors, and safety pins on their clothes.
Also, the Amish come to Walmart in horse buggies, no lie. They park them off at the edge of the parking lot, and come at low-traffic times, so no one parks near them.
But the Amish but sneakers-- you see women and children wearing them all the time, but not the men, for some reason. I think they buy tights, too. Not sure, but the ones they wear sure don’t look homemade. And disposable diapers. Maybe they buy the disposables only for trips, but they seem to buy a lot of them. You see them buying fresh produce in the winter sometimes, too, and they buy baking goods sometimes. I guess they mostly get stuff like that (flour and yeast) in bulk, but sometimes you run low right before a delivery, or need something special-- they have bakeries where they take orders from non-Amish for made-to-spec products.
Sometimes you see them buy the odd thing you wouldn’t think the Amish would get, but I suppose any port in a storm.
Once when I stopped for gas, there was a really large buggy outside the attached convenience store, and the family was inside buying snacks-- individual bags of chips, and Cheez-its, and bottles of juice. I guess there are all sorts of scenarios, from “someone stole the food they packed fro their trip,” to “They had a broken wheel, had to change it, and the trip took longer than they anticipated,” but these definitely weren’t Mennonites.
Anyway, I have had some conversations with Amish from time to time-- the purpose of eschewing modernism isn’t because there’s anything wrong or bad about it per se-- it’s just that too much of it gives you free time, and free time leads to temptation. The idea behind the lack of modernism is that everything takes so long to do, you have no time or energy left to do anything sinful.
So basically, you do what you have to. They can have AM radios for things like weather reports, so they can protect crops. They can have all manner of modern equipment when it’s a medical necessity. And when they go out in the world, they don’t have to walk up 20 flights when there’s an elevator. 20 flights is more to ask of someone that what is “natural,” or necessary. I can’t come up with quite the right word there-- but no one is going to sin due to the time saved not walking up 20 flights on a one-time outing to the city building for some kind of permit.
My first computer was a KayPro CPM machine. Two 5 1/4" floppy drives and a 7" display built in. Oh, and a 1200 baud MODEM as well. All the CPM machines ran the same OS, but the floppy drives were not compatible. Friend had an Osborne and DBase. I wanted DBase and we transferred the program via MODEM. Took several hours of listening to beeps and boops as I recall.
My first portable computer was an Osborne. Damn that thing was heavy and bulky but it did the trick. Been upgrading ever since.
My first computer science class was that year. We used WATFIV, a slightly more student-friendly version of FORTRAN 4. Used punch cards all through college.
When I was at Purdue, you had to sign up to use the keypunch machines, usually in the middle of the night. I think I was in the beginning of my senior year when we finally had access to terminals. And the one big project that we needed them for (the only electrical engineering class I had to take) was a group project, so my more computer-savvy partner did the input and I wrote up the final report.
And now my daughter is teaching middle schoolers who all have their own laptops. Meanwhile, I still have my slide rule from my first semester in engineering!
Fortran IV on a TRS-80 model 3! Two diskette drives and plenty of waiting.
This was back in 83 for me, BTW. We were learning it as more of a training exercise in programming concepts, not so much as something we would use in the wild.
For me, I got a TI99/4A and taught myself basic on it. This was a 16k ram Texas Instrument computer and cartridge system. Nice little machine for the time.
Did anyone else have a Timex Sinclair 1000 computer in the early 80s? It had a whopping 2K of RAM, and my 12" B/W TV was its monitor (no sound). It sold for $99.95.
I have a Wang Archiver floating around the barn somewhere =)
Back in 1977 or 78 NY state change the exam rules from no slide rules to no electronic calculators. To be a pain, I had my chem/physics prof teach me how to use a slide rule =) Next year, the ruling was no slide rules or electronic calculators
Yes.
Pretty worthless little device.
My father-in-law who was a commodities broker got a hand held Radio Shack computer around then. I taught him how to program it in BASIC. He was over 65 at the time. He picked it up very quickly.
The coolest thing I got for my Macintosh was HyperCard. That program was an awesomely powerful tool that Apple never should have murdered.
My first calculator, sometime in the '70s, had LEDs, could only do basic arithmetic, and had to be plugged in.
this was the first home pc i ever had … ever play blasto or hunt the wumpus? those were the only 2 non educational games we had …
wow i seen a couple of those at a swap meet 2 decades ago …the guy who was selling them was trying to give me a snowjob… i knew what they were …
My first work computer had a big old heat generating CRT with a metal mesh glued to the glass so you could use you light pen to pick commands and draw. And a single 10MB floppy drive that you had to physically swap with other floppies at the end of the day in order to save your work . And we liked it!
And our dads would beat us to death everyday and dance around are graves singing Hallelujah. And we liked it!