You’re welcome!
– but I’ve never understood the enthusiasm for eating things that have been charred black, even if just around the edges. That just tastes to me like burned food.
I know a lot of other people like their food partly burned, though; whether it’s veggies or meats. Tastes vary! – which is good.
I was in sixth grade in the years 1966=67. Thirty five years later I went to the retirement party of my teacher in that class. My class had been his very first, and I took our class photo with me. A young girl who was in sixth grade and she looked at my picture with interest. She noted in surprise “you’re all wearing dresses!” meaning the girls of course. I told her that we only got to wear pants once a week, on gym day. She replied “Oh, I’d just die!”, to which I said “No, you wouldn’t”
We’re on our tenth president since I was born.
Girls wearing pants to school? Never! Not only that, but their skirts had to touch the floor when they knelt. And no patent leather shoes. And you had gym only once a week?
14th for me.
Marbles. Clamp on roller-skates for your shoes. Gas station road maps. Ordering pulp paperbacks at school every month (they were about 10 cents each). Riding on the running boards of cars. Hopping freight trains.
And keys.
3 for a quarter, one for a dime. What the jukebox cost to play songs - records.
5 cent pinball machines with no flippers. You had to nudge it, but not tilt it, to get the ball n in a scoring hole.
14 presidents for me too.
This is before our time even, but the title sequence for To Kill a Mockingbird illustrates that.
In my day, it was two games for a quarter, five balls per game.
Then it became three balls per game.
Then it became, a quarter for one game of three balls each, but two quarters for three games of three balls each.
And now, from anybody under 60, it’s “What’s pinball?”
My Mom passed last December. She was born in late 1920, in the waning days of the Woodrow Wilson administration. Joe Biden was her 19th president.
Biden is just the 13th for me.
My first computer (circa 1982) had two 256K 5.25-inch floppy drives and no hard disk. You put the disk for the program you wanted to run in the top drive (A:), and wrote your data to the bottom one (B:).
The next one we got had a 10 MB hard drive. We thought, “Ten megabytes? That’s like infinity!”
Years later, in the early 1990s, I worked in the IT department of a major museum, and we bought 1MB (not GB) of RAM for a PC for $1,000!
My maternal grandmother was born in December and died in late November of 2012. She voted in a presidentail election in 1928, and when she passed she’d already voted for 2012. To be able to match that now a person would have to live to 102.
Yeah, we all like different things. I love charred broccoli, too!
Touch the floor? No, an inch of fabric on the floor.
And it didn’t occur to anybody, teachers or students, that the teachers might not have the right to demand that we kneel to prove it.
A quarter ran the washing machine at a laundromat.
Computers took up a whole room, somewhere. Not anywhere I was remotely likely to be.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. As the name suggests, it came with 64 KB of RAM. Guess how much RAM the Commodore VIC-20 had?
For budget-minded storage, I started with a Datasette, which wrote data to audio tape cassettes:
You could store 100 KB of data on one side of a 60-minute tape, but it would take 30 minutes to load.
Later on I upgraded to the 1541 disk drive:
Not only was it faster, but you could put 170 KB on a 5-1/4" disk. If you cut a notch in the disk’s plastic outer shell, you could flip the disk over and put another 170 KB on side B.
There are still some computers that take up a whole room, but they do far more than they used to:
So did the Kaypro II. Here are its specs:
| Released: | 1982 |
|---|---|
| Price: | US $1595. |
| Weight: | 26 lbs |
| CPU: | Zilog Z80, 2.5 MHz |
| RAM: | 64K |
| Display: | 9" green phosphor screen. |
| 24 X 80 text only | |
| Ports: | Serial port |
| Parallel port | |
| Storage: | Two internal 5-1/4" |
| SS-DD 195K drives | |
| OS: | CP/M, SBASIC |
I’ve seen those, never had the ‘opportunity’ to work with one. My previous job back in ~ 1988 we had a room with the elevated floor for cooling the beast/s. It was a DEC if I recall. Tape drives. Was a cold job to switch out the backup tapes. This was al UNIX stuff.
Live TV shows for kids.
Dirty Dragon was a favorite of mine.
the thing was a lot of the time they were wrong or nothing but ads …
Our iga closed in '89
Here’s my contribution… A busy signal …I have had kids and teens look amazed when they encountered one … Heck I remember when mom paid for call waiting and missed important call because I didn’t know what the weird beeping on the phone was …