LOL, I'm glad you enjoyed. About 10 years ago, a friend of mine and I went to an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. Afterwards, we checked out the main exhibits, including the one on technology. We were both semi-horrified to see IBM PCs in the exhibit, the ones that had dual 5" floppy drives. We'd both used those. When you grew up using manual typewriters, a PC with 5" floppy drives felt like flying to the moon. My first experiences, you actually had a system disk that you used to boot up the software, then you took that disk out and inserted your own floppy to save your work. It was something of a revelation when the college got computers with hard drives, the software already loaded in, and you didn't have to boot it up via floppy disk.
I remember being excited by how much stuff you could store on a 3" floppy as compared to a 5", and then again how much more you could save on a flash drive. Now they have flash drives that can save insane amounts of stuff.
When I used Word Perfect my first year-ish on the job here, I hated it, because I'd been using Word for a couple of years in grad school, and it felt like dinosaur software. I picked it up pretty quickly, but it was a vast relief when we switched over to Microsoft Office in... I think it was the summer of 1994. For a while, I would do things in Word Perfect, then convert the documents into Word files, so I could print them with a better typeface. Finally, I was able to give up Word Perfect altogether.
I really loved XyWrite, though. It was based on a set of two-letter commands that were pretty easy to remember. I think part of the reason I opted for a Tandy as my graduation present was that it was so similar to the PCs in the college computer lab. Of course, it became outdated almost as soon as I got it home, but it saw me through grad school and my first few years on the job. It went into storage when I had to move to Cow Country in 2001, and then I junked it when I moved into my own place. I wasn't sorry to see it go, not even for nostalgic reasons.
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branchandroot
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Date: Monday, 30 March 2015 06:13 pm (UTC)I remember being excited by how much stuff you could store on a 3" floppy as compared to a 5", and then again how much more you could save on a flash drive. Now they have flash drives that can save insane amounts of stuff.
When I used Word Perfect my first year-ish on the job here, I hated it, because I'd been using Word for a couple of years in grad school, and it felt like dinosaur software. I picked it up pretty quickly, but it was a vast relief when we switched over to Microsoft Office in... I think it was the summer of 1994. For a while, I would do things in Word Perfect, then convert the documents into Word files, so I could print them with a better typeface. Finally, I was able to give up Word Perfect altogether.
I really loved XyWrite, though. It was based on a set of two-letter commands that were pretty easy to remember. I think part of the reason I opted for a Tandy as my graduation present was that it was so similar to the PCs in the college computer lab. Of course, it became outdated almost as soon as I got it home, but it saw me through grad school and my first few years on the job. It went into storage when I had to move to Cow Country in 2001, and then I junked it when I moved into my own place. I wasn't sorry to see it go, not even for nostalgic reasons.