Postby Technomancer » Wed Oct 15, 2003 7:48 am
Oooh..Bloom County/Outland, that's an old favourite.
First Computer (family)- TI 99/4A (we got it in 1981/1982), it had a cartridge slot and a cassette drive. This thing was awesome, and was lots of fun to program. We later got a disk drive for it, and eventually upgraded to a Myarc 9640 Geneve, which wasn't half as robust. We got a 256K RAM card for it, which was a little bit bigger than a hardcover novel.
386 33Mhz- We got this when I entered high school. (1991, I think). Wing Commander was the first game we put on it, and the hard rive was 120 MB
I bought my first computer for myself in Jan. 1996, which was a Pentium some-thing or other (I can't remember). It worked, by I really got burned on the deal; the company closed down and buggered off a week after the sale. The modem was garbage, and the motherboard was incompatible with Win95. Since then, I've slowly upgraded components, and replaced the case. My computer's sort of moved like an amoeba. I'm still using the original hard drive though. Right now I'm running a Pentium III 833 Mhz, 256 Mb of RAM. I'll probably upgrade the Motherboard soon though.
Of course, if I want to see really old computer stuff, I can just look through my Dad's old manuals. (He got his Elec. Eng. Master's in 1965). One of them uses an oscilloscope for a register output.
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a "subject"—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil Postman
(The End of Education)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
Isaac Aasimov