FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for November 12, 2016

oh, those sure were the days

“Welcome… to… the world… wide… w…e…b…” (from a ’90’s Foxtrot strip)

Jason wants to be sure he can restore the hard drive after his father messes it up.

The first computers I worked with didn’t have hard drives. We had to back up our work on floppy discs. Real big floppy discs.

Original IBM PC only had floppy drive(s). If you sprang for a hard drive it was the XT. The drive was 10 meg and went for about $500. And no one thought you’d ever be able to fill the drive!

Back in HS in the late 70’s, my school’s computer was so primitive that if you turned off the lights in the room, the computer crashed.

Reading all these comments makes me very happy that I didn’t get my first computer until about 1999 (an eMachine desktop, IIRC) and missed all the “fun” of the earlier models.

What computer are they using anyway? Oh yeah… an “iFruit.”

I’m so old my first cell phone had a rotary dial.

I still have some 8" floppy discs. I’m a hoarder!

Dad is a positive destroyer of computers.

Anyone watching “Halt and Catch Fire” on AMC? It’s a drama set in the 80s about early computer geeks. Third season now; great show!

Long before computers, I worked in an office on Capitol Hill where they used IBM Selectric typewriters that were hooked up to another IBM device that cut holes in a long strip of paper as they typed a letter. They would then load that strip into another Selectric and it would auto-type letters by the hundreds. You just inserted a clean sheet of paper, typed the name and address and pressed a button and the letter would type itself. Very high-tech for 1967

I started out with pencil and paper. Still use it, sometimes.