Your Computer & You
They say that your choice of machines reveals a lot about you. Cynics normally deride my chosen life support system as expensive and exclusive. But it isn't so, as fellow users will testify - and even non-users. In general, the sort of person who would use this machine is creative, intelligent and sophisticated. I haven't got one. Sigh.
Nemo, a 15" cinema screen notebook with 768 Mb of memory, is the latest machine in a long line of those who have handled my peculiar computing needs. It's a long lineage. Still occupying my desktop and handling strategic planning is Judith, a swivelling flatscreen desktop with great speakers and a 17" cinema screen. Out on the 'public' desk is Cami, a compact purple machine which handles the cable hub. Mothballed for now is Gentry, the last machine I have with a SCSI port anywhere. Before him, there were four others, all made by the same company, in an unbroken line stretching back from Perseus to Calvin (my first full-colour machine) to Adam to Ancient Eric, who had 128K of RAM and was a great hero of the Computing Revolution. Eight machines, all from the same company, well-known for innovation. I've seen all of it.
People who don't know me tend to think I've no other computing experience. I guess you can break computing experience down into hardware, software and programming (and no, I won't turn this into a games column as well).
Hardware: I started with little wire-it-yourself-and-program-it-by-changing-the-connections devices, making my own little gates from transistors. My first computer with a monitor still had its organs displayed in a jury-rigged wooden case. There was a VIC-20, an Acorn Atom, a Sinclair ZX80. I have handled Prime, Honeywell and IBM mainframes; I've operated Silicon Graphics workstations. And of course, in school, I have some won-the-cheapest-tender WinXP machine.
Software: Hmmm. I remember using WordStar and VisiCalc, the premier word-processing and spreadsheet software of their day. I remember that software was pirated in vast quantities because people couldn't imagine why it cost so much. I first used MS Word on Adam, a small monochrome grey machine which was probably the first computer of its age to not have a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. I used ClarisWorks for a very long time, with Paint, Draw and other stuff. In those days, we often made our own software.
Programming: I guess I could sort of call myself multilingual here. Machine language was an improvement over binary, and Assembly was better. BASIC, LOGO, COBOL and PASCAL followed, in that order. Then LISP. I can read C++ and stuff like that, because of PASCAL and LISP. I think when software started becoming big and complex and you needed a lot of memory not to compile code but just to display it. that's when I stopped bothering with programming. Easier to buy the stuff or pay a programmer.
And that's all about computers and me.
Nemo, a 15" cinema screen notebook with 768 Mb of memory, is the latest machine in a long line of those who have handled my peculiar computing needs. It's a long lineage. Still occupying my desktop and handling strategic planning is Judith, a swivelling flatscreen desktop with great speakers and a 17" cinema screen. Out on the 'public' desk is Cami, a compact purple machine which handles the cable hub. Mothballed for now is Gentry, the last machine I have with a SCSI port anywhere. Before him, there were four others, all made by the same company, in an unbroken line stretching back from Perseus to Calvin (my first full-colour machine) to Adam to Ancient Eric, who had 128K of RAM and was a great hero of the Computing Revolution. Eight machines, all from the same company, well-known for innovation. I've seen all of it.
People who don't know me tend to think I've no other computing experience. I guess you can break computing experience down into hardware, software and programming (and no, I won't turn this into a games column as well).
Hardware: I started with little wire-it-yourself-and-program-it-by-changing-the-connections devices, making my own little gates from transistors. My first computer with a monitor still had its organs displayed in a jury-rigged wooden case. There was a VIC-20, an Acorn Atom, a Sinclair ZX80. I have handled Prime, Honeywell and IBM mainframes; I've operated Silicon Graphics workstations. And of course, in school, I have some won-the-cheapest-tender WinXP machine.
Software: Hmmm. I remember using WordStar and VisiCalc, the premier word-processing and spreadsheet software of their day. I remember that software was pirated in vast quantities because people couldn't imagine why it cost so much. I first used MS Word on Adam, a small monochrome grey machine which was probably the first computer of its age to not have a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. I used ClarisWorks for a very long time, with Paint, Draw and other stuff. In those days, we often made our own software.
Programming: I guess I could sort of call myself multilingual here. Machine language was an improvement over binary, and Assembly was better. BASIC, LOGO, COBOL and PASCAL followed, in that order. Then LISP. I can read C++ and stuff like that, because of PASCAL and LISP. I think when software started becoming big and complex and you needed a lot of memory not to compile code but just to display it. that's when I stopped bothering with programming. Easier to buy the stuff or pay a programmer.
And that's all about computers and me.
etched with acid at 2:02:00 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home