My office computer was acting up today. Several others were too. I wouldn�t be surprised if power fluctuations were the source of the problem. It surprised me how startled I was at the problem. There was a time when my office computer only worked if I spoke to it very, very nicely in between occasional whacks in just the right place to get the hard drive unstuck. Remembering the Technology of Careers Past makes me feel old.

When I first joined my office, the office was working with Mac pluses. We had those things until long after it became almost impossible to get parts for them. We cannibalized old ones once things got really bad. As far as we were concerned, all the Mac pluses had signed donor cards. I seemed to have a knack for running the Mac Emergency Room and thus was A Valuable Employee. I also was enough of a wheeler-dealer to know who just used their computers as expensive paperweights and therefore would not notice if parts of their machines were replaced with ones that looked just fine but did not run as well. (I can confess to this activity now. Enough time has passed.)

For that matter, my first home computer didn�t even have a hard drive. It had two floppy drives with those floppy disks that earned the moniker �floppy.� Those of you who are past junior high age (or is it high school age?) should know what I�m talking about. I�m talking about those big, thin, black things that, well, flopped around if you held them at one edge. I thought I was on the leading edge because my printer was a 24 pin print and the pages looked almost as though they had been typed. The print was only a little fuzzy on some edges. I also thought I was on the leading edge because I had learned to program in BASIC when I was in high school.

When I was in high school, calculators were the state of the art and expensive. We all used slide rules. I had a particularly fancy circular slide rule and one of my teachers was drooling over it. I doubt if most of us could remember how to work a slide rule if our lives depended on it.

But slide rules sure were cheaper than today�s school supplies. This fall I bought Kat the graphing calculator she�s going to need for her math class. The thing has 23K of RAM and can be hooked up to our computer so she can download special programs. It cost what those calculators that only added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, and did square roots cost when I was in high school. Of course, a hundred dollars seemed like a whole lot more money in those days.

We�ve come a long way. Hooray!

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