Daddy's Home by Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein for February 09, 2025

    .. after walking ten miles in the snow, barefoot, to sign up to AOL

When I was a kid, a computer would fill a room, and only large science labs had them.

How old is your current computer?

Ten years – the refurbished one I was mentioning a couple of days ago. Still a hell of a machine!

I had one of them and can not for the life of me understand how that happened or how I waited forever for landline download! And now it’s a click here and there and here we are!! Very little wait time and if I don’t get there right now…I go crazy…lol!

You had to use 6 floppies to load or save an image.

And the modem sang songs….sort of.

I remember seeing computers filling a room. I remember my first work computer, it ran on 8.5" floppies. The company controller decided to play with it one weekend and erased the entire billing system and six months’ worth of input.

When I was a kid we used abaci, slide rules, typewriters & Red Ryder BB guns

And we weren’t ashamed to admit we had floppy disks!

and ten minutes later, we could finally use it!

This were the days back then……

And we had to make sure nobody was on the phone because we had something called dial-up & it used your telephone line to “call” what was called the world wide web. It made a godawful noise as it was connecting.

We had to grease up the abacus occasionally to keep it from stickin’.

And they were noisy, too.

Ah yeah. And my first Kaypro clone used both 5.25 floppy disks and a cassette tape to load programs. Our HS computer (dumb terminal) used punch cards and punch tape. Lots of confetti to toss at school games.

The ol’ “When I was your age…” — updated! O<[|;o)

DIP switches, give me back my DIP switches!