Techie Toys Part One

I must admit it ... I love technology toys. Computers have always fascinated me even though I have not always been successful with them. My very first program code back in the dark ages was written in Cobol on IBM punch cards and resulted in 800 pages of error messages. As 800 pages was the maximum all the nerdy TAs had a good laugh at my expense. A couple of years later, at a summer job, the company decided that it would switch from punch cards to direct input to their mainframe. I was one of the testers and managed to kill all of the data entered since the project began one afternoon while trying to do an end run around an error code. As I said, I love this stuff but I can be the kiss of death when it comes to hands on work.

The first PC that I had at work had two drives for floppy disks - A and B. I don't think anyone but dinosaurs like me remember why you had a B drive. (It was for data while A was for programs)
My boss hated the fact that I spent most of my day on a shared PC down the hall from my office so I became the first person in our finance department to have one on her desk. On the home front my husband at the time was also fascinated by the emergence of the personal computer. We actually bought and built a Timex Sinclair and I taught some bats to fly and a turtle to crawl around the page. Anyone else remember the Turtle to teach children how to program???

The next big leap was moving from floppy drives to a hard drive. WOWSER BATMAN - It couldn't store any data but it could store programs. I think its total capacity was about 10MEG... about 1/100th of what I have on my little laptop today. The first portables we had were Compaq Portables that we all called luggable because they weighed about 50 pounds. On the home front we bought an IBM with a keyboard that you had to push a button to use the key pad. I remember using it one evening to do some data entry for a bunch of spread sheets and my husband sitting there mesmerized as I ponded away with both hands ... one to type in the numbers and hit enter, the other to activate and deactivate the key pad.

It was at about this time in the early 90's that my reputation as the kiss of death for any operating system came out of the closet. I had the computer techs running around like mad trying to unfreeze my system on a daily basis. At one point I even had my own tape backup system that I ran every day before leaving so that we could always recover the previous day's work if I accidently hit the 'format all' keys in Excel. This was also when I got a new system every couple of years. I would take the old one home, bring back the one I had and use the new one in the office. Laptops, wireless networks, high definition graphics, e-mail, instant messaging and gigantic storage devices have all made our lives so much more interesting.

I really can't mess up this laptop as I can always recover to an earlier configuration almost automatically. I used to load all my own software and do all my own configuration. Now I have no idea what's on this thing. This is a tablet PC and I can draw pictures and hand write text if I so desire ... unfortunately I don't desire to do that as often as I thought I would so this feature remains abandoned and unused most of the time. Although it is less than two years old is too underpowered for Vista, which may not be a bad thing considering all the bad press Vista has been getting.

Where am I going with all this? This is a preamble to a post, maybe several, that I am going to do on some of the techie toys I have acquired in the past year or so. I hope this has given you a flavor of how much I love this stuff.

If you would like to check out some of the early pieces of technoloy I have used, see this site. To see my current laptop check out Gateway for their newest version.