I arrived home today to this:
I guess it would help if I opened a window or two.
A change of heart
A couple of hours ago, I might have said, “Bibble!”
Now?
Now I say, “Wibble.” But not without a certain sense of irony, of course.
That is all.
64K memory lane
Nerds become nostalgic about their first computer in the same way that car buffs get all misty-eyed about their first wheels (and the car attached to them). Oldcomputers.net is a museum of the original home and personal computers.
I first got my hands on a computer when I was too young to really know what it was. Back in the seventies (maybe ’76 or ’77), my dad introduced me and my brothers to the DEC PDP-11 at the university. It was a row of red-and-black refrigerator-sized boxes with all the buttons, switches, and spinning things you could ever want. I remember playing Space Wars and Lunar Lander… badly. My Lunar Lander games would last about five seconds before I crashed in a little explosion of lines and dots. All those poor Tron guys… they met an untimely death at my hands.
Anyway, the first home computer I got my hands on was an Apple IIc at a local school. I still didn’t “get it”, but I could at least use LOGO Turtle Graphics to make some cool line drawings.
And then… ooooh…. portability. Or at least an early-eighties attempt at a portable computer. The Hyperion was an 8088-based IBM clone that weighed a ton. I wrote a lot of fun adventure games on that thing.
I think I started down memory lane today because I have a Dell PIII with Windows Me. It BSDs regularly, of course. It makes me yearn for a reliable old 8088 and a copy of WordPerfect for DOS.
What was your first computer and what did you do with it?
As an aside, the Blogger spell-checker suggested that I replace the word “nerds” in the first sentence with “Nordic”. When will Blogger replace that useless spell-checker??
Exploring the mysteries of the universe
If you let a bowl of ice cream melt, is it still ice cream?
Hmm.
Next step in blogger wares
In my meanderings through the blogosphere, I have noticed that a certain number of bloggers offer Cafe Press products: hats, mugs, t-shirts, frisbees, clocks, and many other white objects with logos on them. But these are all pretty ordinary products. I mean, most people already have too many souvenir t-shirts. And who really needs yet another mouse pad?
That’s why I plan to offer Cubey-branded pets. Visitors will be able to order their very own Campbell’s dwarf hamster with my domain name tattooed on its back. Kittens will have the logo shaved into their fur. And if you buy the Goldfish Special, you get fourteen goldfish: each one carries a different letter in waterproof ink to spell out “CUBICLE DWELLER”.
Maybe I’ll have to rethink that last one. They would probably swim in the wrong order and spell unfortunate things.
