Sunday

Good Morning BlogWorld, Sunday, well that's a misnomer, it's raining, still!!! Not much to say this morning 'cept I'm feeling much better after a bout of whatever bug that has bit me. I'm off to install a second phone line for my daughter so she can get those teenagers off her computer and on their own. Seems that they think that what 's Mom's is their's too, she needs the computer for her work while they think it's their private play tool. Once I get the new line in I'll move their new MAC into position on the main floor where they can be in full scrutiny of everyone and we'll lock up her private office with her HP workstation. This should make it a lot more pleasant to work and to keep track of the sites they visit, besides it keeps me from having to constantly debug the PC that they hose up. The mutual rule from this point on is if the MAC gets messed up the teenagers pay for the fixing, I loath Apple products and refuse to work on them. I was a loyal Apple customer from their start, and after owning three of them from their first Apple 1 to their latest Apple IIGS , I discovered a different platform when they brought out the McIntosh and have never looked back, that was over 20 years ago. My interests in PC's have spanned the early 70's where I was introduced to mainframe computers with core memories, my longest nightmares were with Modcomp, (Modular Computer Systems, Inc) *Sigh*. Digital Equipment Corp, DEC, had some innovations and we advanced a bit, I/O devices were either a card or paper tape reader or like the DEC PDP-8, which had a series of toggle switches on the front where the One's and Zero's were entered by hand to 'Bootstrap' the machine before you could even enter the operating code. So you can see why I don't dwell too long on the good old days, Apple was part of that, their bootstrap was on a PROM chip, then you manually programmed the pig from the keyboard, you could then save the program to a cassette tape, wonderful!!! Then they came out with an external floppy disk drive, very expensive I might add, as were those first floppy disks. The problem was Apple never really supported their previous models and the add on's were overpriced since they were monopolized by Apple. Oh!!! Did I mention that the onboard memory was a whopping 64 Kb of RAM? That was better than the two Sinclair's I had prior to the Apple, I almost bought another pioneer, the Osborne , but was spared that fate, it was a fine CP/M machine that essentially killed itself with marketing problems. During all that time my profession went computerized to the extent that the last plant I worked at was totally computerized, where the control room was as sophisticated as any modern aircraft cockpit, it like those aircraft, had a glass cockpit, totally computerized and all 20,000 plus control loops on distributive controls. For me to keep up and running. Anyway, enough blather, I have some serious work and meal sponging to do and the day is wasting, I needn't worry about teenage help, it will be the usual, by the time I get there one should be on his way to Snoqualmie Pass to ski for the day and the other will be off to the skate board park for his day too. Life is simple after all. You all have a great day and if the old man upstairs is willing I might put some more trash up tonight. Meantime, Guy has some interesting observations from the back porch. While you're at it go check out Theodore's World for a great story about an old Devil Dog, and this latest atrocity by the religion of peace.