Sunday, May 1, 2022

Here's another Home Computer Blast from the Past!

 


Ah, the good old days- when you could sell a computer by showing a kid pretending (badly) to type on a "professional keyboard" (when nobody had a computer at home, and very few people used one at work, what did this mean?  Whatever we want it to mean, of course!) and you could convince probably more than a few people that the system you were selling responded to voice commands (the kid says "ADAM, move that paragraph" while using the keyboard to move it- I bet we were supposed to think that the computer "obeyed" him.)

And that a project "you'll never finish by morning" will get done in approximately 15 seconds because you've got a word processor program which is doing absolutely nothing that can't be done with the electronic typewriter I relied on my freshman year of college- I'm not going to tell you what year that was, but the anniversary is coming up this month and the first number in the Announcement/Request for Donations is "4."  Ugh.

And that a computer which did not have internet access because that wasn't a thing yet but can be used to create a "launch sequence."  Who does this kid think he is, David Lightman?  Gonna play Thermonuclear War next?

At least back then, Lori Laughton was worried about what was legal....

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