Friday, January 1, 2010

Remember those really big floppy disks?

Isn't it amazing how much time we all spend online nowadays? I don't know about you, but it seems like 2 hours of my day outside of work is spent online. I can say that I'm doing online banking and reading e-books, but who am I kidding? Most of that time is messing around on FB, this blog, e-mail, searching the web, and reading other people's blogs.

What did we do before this technology?

I was born in 1978, which coincides with being a young tot and having the first "computers" come on the market for home consumers. I say "computers" because my first "computer" was a TI-99. The TI-99 was really Texas Instrument's take on the Atari and Intellivision (now it sounds like a graphing calculator), but they called it a computer even though it was really a gaming system that you could program in BASIC. I was 5 years old, and I'm no genius child programmer, so I was using that thing for the games! Yeah, they were educational games mostly, but heck they were the most interesting things in the house so I replayed them. Eventually I got old enough that I got "fun" games - TI's version of Pac Man and Asteroids, which I played non-stop.

When I was about 9, I got my first real computer. By today's standards, it was a complete piece of crap. You had to boot the computer with the boot disk, which was a BIG floppy disk (5.25"). Just to boot it up took 5 minutes. Of course it was DOS-based, and you had to load any application with 1 or 2 of those huge floppies. It's not like those floppies held much data at all. I remember a standard pinball game - nothing fancy, orange on a black screen. That floppy was always accessed and churning as I racked up the pinball points. As a lover of game shows, I had all the game shows on big floppies: Wheel of Fortune, Classic Concentration, Family Feud. I think I need a multiple personality disorder evaluation because I'd always play multiple players and take turns being Joe Bob, Beth & Carly. Beth always won...hmmmm

Other than playing a ridiculous number of computer games (I stayed home all summer by myself all day...we're talking 20-30 hours of computer time a week), I would also write. I had some cheap-o word processing software that came with the computer on those huge floppies, and I would be 10 years old working on what I thought was the Great American Novel. The wonders of technology transferred my 5.25" blitherings onto the smaller, more recent floppies. But for the life of me I can't find a way to get the data off the small floppies because none of our computers have floppy drives anymore.

So I guess all this ramble is to say that computers have been a huge part of my life since I was very young, and me messing around on them far too much is not a new thing.

GEEK!

4 comments:

Mom_To_3_Silly_Bears said...

lol I so totally remember those disk while in school. all the games used to be on it. We still had one in high school that every one wanted to play Oregon Trail on haha.

Melissa said...

Oregon Trail and some game where you fired different artillery at other tanks on the other sides of hills and stuff were my favorites.
You can buy a floppy drive that plugs in to your USB if you really want to open them

B said...

Oregon Trail was "da bomb!"

Anonymous said...

Amazing as always