Back when I was in college, I had to take a course called 'Computer Science.' It consisted of learning FORTRAN, a computer language that at that time, was already a dead language. You had to type lines and lines of data on punch cards. A machine punched holes in the cards and that would be what the computer read. The cards had to be loaded into a reader that entered the data into the computer. The computer filled a large room that had to be kept at a cool temperature and had less memory than a modern day jump drive that's smaller than a stick of gum. Actually, I think some current day car keys have more memory. There was no audio or video, just a huge printout on paper that had a line of holes on either side and folded like an accordion into large stacks, depending on the size of your program. If you got one little period out of place, or one letter, your program would not work and you had to print out your program and look it over, bit by bit and see what you did wrong. This could be very monotonous and time consuming. It was a waste of time for me although later in life, it was somewhat helpful when learning a little html. I hated it and thought that I would never be any good at computers. Times changed very quickly.
Then, after I got married and moved to Fort Worth, I got a job at Tandy Technical Publications, across the way from Radio Shack Advertising where my husband worked. I would illustrate instruction books for games on Tandy computers. The operating system was called TRSDOS which stands for Tandy Radio Shack Disk Operating System. After the computer was started up, in the middle of a black screen, in plain white letters, it would say TRSDOS Ready. That meant your computer was ready for software. There were a number of programs available for their computers including a few simple games.In order to draw various points in the game, I'd have to load the game and play it to the point that they wanted illustrated. The games came on an audio cassette and had to be loaded into the computer. They were very simple games which had a few black and white pixels. There were the Model 2 and the Model 3 computers and there was a computer that consisted of a keyboard that would be hooked up to a television. There was a word processing program called "SCRIPSIT" that was very basic stuff with green type on a black background. You would print out your stuff on a daisy wheel printer that made quite a racket when it printed out what you wrote. I'm sure our downstairs neighbors were not real thrilled when we printed something out on our daisy wheel printer, it sounded like an old airplane taxiing down the runway, preparing for take-off.
My husband was then doing copy writing on a Model 12 which took 8 1/2 inch floppy discs. I remember when the Model 1000 was going to come out, in my department at work, they'd roll the demo model around on a little cart, covered in a black cloth. I think nowadays, some remote controls have more memory. When the advertising department got new computers, we got to buy the Model 12 for a real cheap price and also bought a daisy wheel printer. We had our first computer. I remember my husband helping a friend of his load a book up to a satellite, then down to another computer. The internet was in it's infancy. I remember my husband getting on something called 'Crysalis.' The name was in multi-color type.
Then, when I was working for JCPenney Catalog as what was called a "keyline artist," I was told my job was ending because they were going to put everything on computer and they didn't need keyline artists any more. I was lucky enough to get a job in the marketing retail area of JCPenney, which was like a whole other company, doing layouts for Sunday newspaper ads. I had to learn the computers. The computers were basic old macs. I wasn't sure how I'd do, but once I started training, it was easy and a lot of fun. I loved doing stuff on the computers. I learned Quark Xpress and Photoshop. I picked it up quickly and ended up helping my managers with their computer stuff. The only thing was the mac computers crashed a lot and I had to remember to save my work often or I would lose a lot of work due to a sudden crash. A cartoon bomb in a little white box would show up on the screen. It would be very frustrating, especially with large complex ads for kitchen appliances that had a double page spread with a lot of items. I loved Quark X-press, it was so easy to correct the occasional typo. White-out was a thing of the past.
Jump forward a few years and we found out Jeffrey, our son, has dyslexia. The lady who diagnosed it recommended that we get a computer. Steve got our old Model 12 out of the garage and set it up. The fist thing we noticed was that there was no mouse. We ended up getting an Acer at Comp USA. I was used to working on a mac and found the Windows operating system to be a little more difficult. Then, in 1995, Windows 95 came out and that made working on a PC (Personal Computer) much easier. The internet was developing and we were sending out e-mails and were on mailing lists. Our printer was an ink jet printer, and was much more quiet than that old daisy wheel printer.
Video games were also progressing. We had let Jeffrey use our old Atari and Intellivision on a little black and white TV in his room when he was real little. There was a parachute game he loved, when the parachute guy jumped out of the plane, you would guide him to a safe landing. Jeff liked to watch the guy jump out of the plane and splat on to the ground. Then he would roar with laughter. A few years later, Steve got him his first Nintendo game system, an inexpensive used system, and Jeff started playing games like Donkey Kong. Now, he plays intricate, detailed games such as 'Red Dead Redemption.'
At work, we got new macs, something called a "Quadra" or something like that. It was supposed to be the new mac state-of-the art technology. It was faster and didn't crash as much and was a lot of fun. You could record your own sounds on there and then use them as alert sounds like when the computer didn't like what you were doing. This came in handy because for some reason, a person in my group liked to work on my computer when I was at lunch, I guess he liked the way I had it set-up, or it was just convenient, it was annoying. I did not like him doing this, he would mess with my settings. So I would record a real long sound and set it up so that the computer would make that sound when he made a mistake and he would have to wait for the computer to finish making that sound before he continued. I would find that sound settings different when I came back from lunch.
One thing about macs is that I did not like their mice. They would stick and were often not very responsive. I got to use a wacom pad, which was a drawing pad you'd hook up to the computer and draw with a stylus. The only frustrating thing was that my bosses wanted us to do the layouts the old-fashioned way and to me, that was way too slow. I wanted to use the wacom pads and do all of the layouts using the computer. Eventually, they started doing it that way and these days, drawing the layouts by hand would be archaic. Also, photo shoots were done on film and I remember scanning pictures in for use on layouts. Now everything is done digitally.
Well, our Acer computer was a piece of crap. We took it to get fixed at Comp-USA and they wiped our hard drive clean and we had to start from scratch. Steve had backed-up a bunch of stuff and was able to get us back up and running. My husband was always good with computers and still is. He has saved us many times when we had serious computer problems like viruses or malware.
We got us a Toshiba computer and that was such a workhorse. It just worked, each and every time. It was a great computer and lasted for years. As technology progressed, we had to get a new computer.
We shopped around. We had looked at Gateway computers, but when we went to their store, they said they were out of motherboards, yet they continued putting ads in the paper, promoting their so-called fantastic computers while using cows as part of their logo and ad art. So one day, I took our ad from the Sunday paper and wrote a cartoon balloon over the cow saying, "We're out of motherboards." My husband thought it was real and got a good laugh out of it.
We ended up getting a Dell and it wasn't long before it went belly-up and we had to have someone out to replace the motherboard. To get to that point was a long labor of waiting on the phone for hours, talking to someone in India, getting taken to the next level, only to find out they couldn't help. It was a very frustrating experience. To actually get someone out to fix the computer was like going through labor, it was a hard and arduous journey.
In 2002, when I went to Columbus to see to my mother's affairs after she had gotten sick and passed-away, I was staying in her house. She had been against computers, wouldn't have anything to do with them and was perfectly happy with her electric typewriter. I had to type some stuff out and after having had become used to using Word for Windows, was to the point of screaming when using my mom's typewriter. I told my husband on the phone one day that I was ready to throw that stupid typewriter out the window. He suggested I go at get a laptop computer. After shopping around, I found a Toshiba at Circuit City that was just perfect. It had a pixel out in the middle of the screen and I had to exchange it, but the guys at Circuit City were very helpful in helping me get it exchanged. They were some of the nicest salesmen I had ever dealt with.
I was so happy with my new laptop. I could hook up to aol and instant message with my kids and husband, I could play CDs and movies on it and I could type documents in Word. My husband even sent me a CD of music that I like. It was heavy and not as portable as laptops are nowadays, but it still works. Steve had to replace the battery and the hard drive, but it still works, eleven years later. When I was in the market fort a newer laptop, we had thought about getting a Dell, but they kept delaying the order so we canceled and I went to Best Buy and got me a Toshiba, which I am using right now. I still like Toshiba computers.
Now, my daughter has an I-pad and both kids have laptops. They know a lot more stuff about computers than I do. Now, the TV, the DVR, the Blu-ray player and all of the computers and two game systems are hooked up to the internet. Everything seems to have a computer in it, even our washing machine. Software and technology is constantly changing and it is important to stay caught up. We have an account with Lynda.com so that I can catch-up with current software. A lot of my friends have smart phones and do computer stuff like the internet on their phones Smartphones are fragile and expensive, so I use a regular cell phone. If future generations ever read this, they will probably shake their heads at what they see as low level technology. It keeps changing and evolving like some sort of life form. I wonder what it will be like in another ten or twenty years.
