Had a fun Sunday lunch this past week…. We were sitting around the table woofing down some of Freddys corn fritters (recipe from my Mum (hard to believe that shes been gone 15 years next month)) chatting about I forget what when the topic turned to how my kids do not know a world with out the Internet.
This lead to me reminiscing (right there should be a tip that I am getting really old!) to what my teenage years were like, computer wise.
It came to me how we used to save our computer programs and so I explained it to the family… I think Terry just about wet his pants he was laughing that much that he was crying… All because I was running him through the process of saving your programs onto audio cassette via a standard cassette player.
I bought on more tears and laughter when I told them about how much I loved the Dick Smith System 80 computer because it had the tape deck built in.
He then totally lost control when I explained how you had to have a scrap piece of paper beside the computer that had the tape numbers on them and then the tape counters for each program. That way you could select the program you wanted from the tape, and then fast forward to the tape counter, type in ‘Load’ then press play on the deck. It was how we did it, there was no other way for guys like me at the time.
I also fondly remember the Microbee computer I had, and the Computer In A Book. I started out with a cassette deck and was pretty excited when we got a single sided 420kb floppy drive for it. I think our first printer was a huge band printer that I saved from the scrap heap somewhere.
About here is where we stopped, I think Terry would have exploded if we had kept going. We then tried to imagine him going back in time to show me his itouch when I was his age…. we then talked about how PDA’s were not even a thought then, and finding your music on anything other than cassette or LP would just not have been understood.
It was an interesting lunch to reflect back to when I was my sons age and talk the differences in life for the two of us.
Its sad in some ways that he does not know times like that, I am unsure that todays ipods are going to be remembered so warmly and affectionately, only time will tell, just like it did with me I guess.