When I was a kid, we had an old B&W TV forever. No cable. I do think we had rabbit ear antennas, though. We could pick up the three major US networks, plus the local PBS. My first impressions of TV was that everything was B&W. It was weird to see shows/ movies later and realize how much we'd been missing by not having color. We got our first color TV when I was in middle school, maybe 12 or 13, and only because the B&W had finally crapped out. My parents were the very definition of "cheap," and they both had experienced times of such bad poverty that they would use things until they literally fell apart.
By the time we got the color TV, their finances had improved to the point where they could also get cable. Back then, "cable" was basically a way to get better reception. Initially, it only added maybe one or two more channels. My brother discovered by twiddling some knobs that we could get pirated MTV. And I discovered, also by accident, that we could also receive MTV over the radio. Eventually the cable company caught onto this and scrambled the signal, but not until we'd had two or three years of free MTV. Good times. : )
My first typewriter was an old, 30s or 40s vintage model, maybe even older, that I think might've initially belonged to my father's father. It was in excellent condition, although it was lacking a couple of characters that would become standard on later typewriter models. That was the typewriter I used at home for my high school papers, which were all typed on that funky paper with the thin red margins. I remember also using paper you could erase mistakes with an ordinary pencil eraser; that was a huge improvement over white-out.
In high school, we used manual typewriters in our typing classes. They were much better/ faster than the antique I was using at home, and I remember feeling like I could just fly when I typed. Our first electric typewriter, a Smith-Corona that was purchased mostly for my sister (but that was later used by me, through my freshman year of college), felt like a rocket ship. Later, my dad got one that was even better than that. It even had two ribbons: one regular, and one for correcting. That also felt space-age. It did superscripting and subscripting as well, and because of this, I was able to con my parents into letting me take that typewriter to college starting sophomore year, because it made typing up science reports so much easier.
My first word processing experience was with XyWrite, which I learned as a junior in college. I can laugh now, but at the time, it was absolutely phenomenal, a revelation, to be able to just move a cursor around and insert things, to say nothing of being able to cut and paste whole blocks of text. My senior thesis was typed in XyWrite, and I did my graphs using a program called Sigma Plot, and the function that labeled the X and Y axes was slower than the second coming. God help you if you made an error or had to re-label a chart! Just backing up the cursor took half the day.
I'm old enough to remember VAX machines, which we used in college, mostly to run statistics programs.
For graduation in 1989, my parents bought me a Tandy PC from Radio Shack. Even after we'd moved on to better computers at work, I still used the Tandy at home: I could at least type in plain text and reformat the document at the office. In college, they had **just** introduced the 3" floppy disk, which felt VERY sci-fi to me, so I clung to the old 5" variety until I went to graduate school and was basically forced to switch to 3". I did toggle between the two for many years, until the 5" drives became obsolete, and I no longer had one at work. Now it's the 3" drives that are obsolete (I think you can buy them as an external drive, though, or at least you could until a few years ago).
I still recall giving a work study student a project to work on; the PC out at the students' work station was a cranky old thing that didn't like USB drives, so I put the file on a 3" floppy. Handed it to my student, who looked at me with an incredulous expression and said, "What's this?"
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branchandroot
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Date: Thursday, 26 March 2015 03:53 pm (UTC)When I was a kid, we had an old B&W TV forever. No cable. I do think we had rabbit ear antennas, though. We could pick up the three major US networks, plus the local PBS. My first impressions of TV was that everything was B&W. It was weird to see shows/ movies later and realize how much we'd been missing by not having color. We got our first color TV when I was in middle school, maybe 12 or 13, and only because the B&W had finally crapped out. My parents were the very definition of "cheap," and they both had experienced times of such bad poverty that they would use things until they literally fell apart.
By the time we got the color TV, their finances had improved to the point where they could also get cable. Back then, "cable" was basically a way to get better reception. Initially, it only added maybe one or two more channels. My brother discovered by twiddling some knobs that we could get pirated MTV. And I discovered, also by accident, that we could also receive MTV over the radio. Eventually the cable company caught onto this and scrambled the signal, but not until we'd had two or three years of free MTV. Good times. : )
My first typewriter was an old, 30s or 40s vintage model, maybe even older, that I think might've initially belonged to my father's father. It was in excellent condition, although it was lacking a couple of characters that would become standard on later typewriter models. That was the typewriter I used at home for my high school papers, which were all typed on that funky paper with the thin red margins. I remember also using paper you could erase mistakes with an ordinary pencil eraser; that was a huge improvement over white-out.
In high school, we used manual typewriters in our typing classes. They were much better/ faster than the antique I was using at home, and I remember feeling like I could just fly when I typed. Our first electric typewriter, a Smith-Corona that was purchased mostly for my sister (but that was later used by me, through my freshman year of college), felt like a rocket ship. Later, my dad got one that was even better than that. It even had two ribbons: one regular, and one for correcting. That also felt space-age. It did superscripting and subscripting as well, and because of this, I was able to con my parents into letting me take that typewriter to college starting sophomore year, because it made typing up science reports so much easier.
My first word processing experience was with XyWrite, which I learned as a junior in college. I can laugh now, but at the time, it was absolutely phenomenal, a revelation, to be able to just move a cursor around and insert things, to say nothing of being able to cut and paste whole blocks of text. My senior thesis was typed in XyWrite, and I did my graphs using a program called Sigma Plot, and the function that labeled the X and Y axes was slower than the second coming. God help you if you made an error or had to re-label a chart! Just backing up the cursor took half the day.
I'm old enough to remember VAX machines, which we used in college, mostly to run statistics programs.
For graduation in 1989, my parents bought me a Tandy PC from Radio Shack. Even after we'd moved on to better computers at work, I still used the Tandy at home: I could at least type in plain text and reformat the document at the office. In college, they had **just** introduced the 3" floppy disk, which felt VERY sci-fi to me, so I clung to the old 5" variety until I went to graduate school and was basically forced to switch to 3". I did toggle between the two for many years, until the 5" drives became obsolete, and I no longer had one at work. Now it's the 3" drives that are obsolete (I think you can buy them as an external drive, though, or at least you could until a few years ago).
I still recall giving a work study student a project to work on; the PC out at the students' work station was a cranky old thing that didn't like USB drives, so I put the file on a 3" floppy. Handed it to my student, who looked at me with an incredulous expression and said, "What's this?"