Re: [cobalt-users] (OT) Posting to the list In General

["Carrie Bartkowiak" <ravencarrie@xxxxxxxx>]

When I was in college in 1988 I had an 8088 that was the workhorse for
the entire floor, because it was faster than the library's computers
(now if that ain't sad) with its little 9-pin printer. Everything was
in DOS and I even had WordPerfect on there - LOVED that program back
then. It had a 200MB hdd that I had compressed 400MB of data onto and
it still ran like a charm.

I still remember seeing a 3.5" disk for the first time and thinking it
was so small, hard, and UGLY - and the guy who had them (in
multicolors, no less) kept calling them "hard disks" and I kept
arguing "No, the 'hard disk' is what's in your computer, not your
pocket!"
When he switched to calling them "floppies" I got even more flustered
and said "A 5.25 is a floppy! How can you call that thing a floppy??
It doesn't bend!"
Even more frustrating was the fact that you couldn't record data on
both sides - what a waste! If it could hold 1.4 MB, then using both
sides it could hold nearly 3! So why didn't it do that?!?  *grin*

Fast forward to December of '96, when I saw an autoresponder at work
for the first time and thought it was the coolest thing since sliced
bread - I was at the Wizards of the Coast website, looking for updated
tourney rules for Magic the Gathering - got them all by autoresponder
and was so fascinated with it that I spent the next hour sending
emails to every autoresponder WotC had set up just to see what I'd get
back! Pretty sad.

Walking through the computer shows comparing prices on 72-pin SIMMS
and thinking they were SO expensive; the thought of a 2gig hard drive
made me drool... 2gigs!! Wow - I'd *never* fill that up!! LOL

My MIL talks of how she used to feed the punch-cards to the computers
where she worked, huge things that took up the entire room. I thought
that was pretty ancient, until I mentioned in chat one day how my 8088
still worked great and a 22-yr old friend from Canada was astounded -
they had pictures of those in his high-school textbooks(!!) and he
thought *that* was a dinosaur.

CarrieB