Three days later I have finally finished rebuilding my father's whole network. Maybe now he will let me out of the house and feed me.
This makes me feel old, but I remember watching my father program his office computer, using PUNCH CARDS!
"Dad, what's that?", I said, staring intently at the large metal cabinets lining the room adjacent to his office.
"That, my son, is a computer ... the wave of the future", he replied.
"What does it do?", I asked inquisitively while watching the large wheels of magnetic tape spin.
"It calculates things for me", he responded as he pulled a small box out of his briefcase.
"I program it" he said, "by punching small holes in these cards and feeding them into that slot".
I stood transfixed as my mind raced. What great things might such a machine be capable of doing in the future I wondered.
So, we grew up as this technology advanced, shrank, and became affordable to the citizenry. Our first home PC was an 8086 ... with a math co-processor! We splurged a year later and bought a 3.5" floppy drive. It cost us over $300 : O By the time I was in my teens, bits and pieces of PCs littered the floor in our basement. My brother built our first "soundcard" from a design he saw in Radio Electronics. By the '90s, we each had multiple PCs running at home and at school. We were, and still are, a family of geeks ... maybe nerds ... except our sister ; P
But, this week that all ended, for our father has purchased a Mac! It came on the heels of our annual family reunion, where my brothers and I debated the merits of PCs vs. Macs. The battle raged for three days, required much food, and even more alcohol, but in the end, Apple and I were victorious. Clearly my arguments were superior, my counterpoints insightful, and my defenses indefatigable.
- Macs are sexy.
- Macs simply work.
- All the Cool people, such as iJustine and Spricket24, use Macs.
And so a shiny, new, sexy, cool Mac has joined our family of geeks.
Maybe now we can all be a shade less geeky ...
QG
