Computer illiterate

[Dotard]

Way back in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1 I considered myself quite computer literate.

In these days of duel cores and Windows Vista, virtualization yadda yadda I find myself quite illiterate.

Honestly, I'm intimidated to do anything more than email, log onto these boards or make my internet spaceship go "pew..pew..pew.." and blow up other peoples internet spaceships.

Anyone else?

[Kyuuketsuki]

Way back in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1 I considered myself quite computer literate. In these days of duel cores and Windows Vista, virtualization yadda yadda I find myself quite illiterate. Honestly, I'm intimidated to do anything more than email, log onto these boards or make my internet spaceship go "pew..pew..pew.." and blow up other peoples internet spaceships. Anyone else?

Well yes and no ... my "expertise" derives from way back when and by "way back when" I'm, talking about pedal-powered! I kid you not ... my first computer was a terminal with no screen, just paper tape and a teletype. It wasn't mine obviously but it caught my imagination because of the Lunar Lander program and I even love the more modern incarnations of that program now. Later, during my degree I encountered the Horizon Northstar CPM system and my first real application, Wordstar 1.0 ... I used that 2 years later to write up my chicken poisoning dissertation and (much to the disgust of my classmates who paid the then princely sum of £1.50 per page to get theirs typed up) mine was far and away the best looking with it's clear, clean no mistakes and white-out typing and nicely bound presentation.

Leaving Thames Poly (back in the days when most universities weren't jumped up polytechnics and colleges) I went out to work and shortly after buying my now wife of 25 years an engagement ring I bought myself my first home computer, a Commodore VIC 20 with a 6502 CPU and a whopping 8K of ram (and if you think the Windows, Apple, Linux wars of today are something you should have seen the vitriol in those days of 6502 vs Z80) whilst a friend of mine built himself a Sinclair ZX80 (might have been an 81) which was claimed to be able to run a power station! Anyway I stayed with that fine, fine machine for quite a while and was only persuaded away from it by a donated Apple IIe which I hated and sold for £500 to buy my first PC, courtesy of Mr. Sugar, an Amstrad PC1512 with an 8088 CPU, 512MB, a 360K floppy, DOS 2.11 and Amiga GEM OS. Those were the days!

I worked in biology labs but, as luck would have it, a pharmaceuticals company (Wellcome Research) were looking for science graduates with IT skills so I shifted over to IT development working in APL, REXX, Fortran, Pascal, C, Basic, VB, Access & Foxpro to name a few. I tired of that as object orientation and visual IDE's became more common and switched over to support. And that is more or less where I stayed until 8 years ago when I became server oriented ... a backroom boy at last, no more direct customer contact, 'twas marvellous. Meanwhile I upgraded my home machine repeatedly switching this, improving that, tweaking the other which was great fun.

These days OS's, and hardware are not all that much fun; I'm constantly attracted by Linux but am never able to get it to do things that I want or as easily as I want but it still represents a kind of "real computing" that Windows somehow lost (although it's starting to gain aspects of it back particularly on the server OS's). XP, 2000, Vista and Windows 7 are all undoubtedly improvements on previous Windows OS's and have the advantage these days that they hardly ever crash, they just work as far as my family and I are concerned (although there remains a hard core of Windows f***ers out there who still do manage to do so, I've no idea how but I'm glad they exist because resurrecting such machines provides me with much need "PC pocket money" from time to time).

Nowadays I continue to upgrade, continue to pay with new OS's but the fun lies in virtualisation for me, it's a truly wicked technology allowing me to play with my favourite OS's and muck about with others with "virtually" (get it? Virtually?) no possibility of adversely affecting others.

So yeah, I get that it can be intimidating at times but I just throw myself into it most of the time ... if I didn't I wouldn't be much good at what I do (IT) I suppose.

Kyu