By Staff
I heard a piece on A Prairie Home Companion this weekend which sparked some memories of my past purchases.
The skit was an older woman going into the store to purchase a home computer. When the 16-year-old salesman waits on her, it is as if they are speaking two different languages.
He was going on about megahertz and she wanted to know what color the computers came in.
Computers have evolved so much just in my lifetime. They have gone down in price and in size.
Our family's first computer was also supposed to be be used for business and it cost as much as a car and required taking out a loan to buy it.
Its name was Lisa, made by Apple, and it had lots of bells and whistles and probably some software which still hasn't made its way to the newest ones on the line. It was state-of-the-art.
That computer was sitting sad and lonely on the floor of the garage when we divided up the household goods 20 years later, neither my ex or myself really wanting to deal with it or throw it away.
The printer didn't work, parts were no longer available and there was no longer support for that model from the company.
Another Macintosh, a LC for low cost, ended up with my daughter. It sits now at the bottom of a closet.
We now use Macs at the paper in the editorial department, but when I first started it was on a little box with a tiny screen, by today's standards, called a Kaypro.
The layouts we used to do by cut and paste now are done on a computer program and come out as completed pages. Thank goodness for the larger screens.
I bought an IMB type to hook up with my sewing machine to do embroidery designs. This takes floppy disks from the sewing companies with lots of beautiful designs of dogs, flowers and other things people like to put on shirts and hats.
I probably won't be able to update this machine, as the new ones don't even use floppys. I don't even know if I can legally transfer the designs to CDs.
On the NPR skit, the young salesman questioned. “What are floppys,” when the woman wanted a computer which used floppys.
The woman in the skit was finally rescued by an older salesman who realized she just wanted to know if she could receive e-mails and if the computer came in light blue.
It was funny, but true. Not all of us want all of the new technology.
I am happy that my cell phone rings. It is a basic model, the free one which came with the service provider contract.
I already have a camera I carry with me at all times. I sit at a computer for hours at a time, I don't need my phone to hook up to the Internet or take photos.
All my cell phone needs to do is receive and make calls. I don't even want caller ID, to send text messages, or receive voice mail. I have to deal with that already at my desk and at home.
I really dread that our cell phone records might reach the people who are spamming us with Viagra offers and porn we don't want to view.
Sometimes the advancements really take more time, such as the 200 spam e-mails I receive every Monday morning. What a waste of a weekend they spent spamming me. If everyone would quit buying this junk or asking about the offers, maybe it could fade into oblivion.
I just wish the cell phone would work more often in more places and not die in the middle of a sentence. It is extremely frustrating and I have tried more than one carrier.
Technology is great, but like the lady who wanted her computer to match her room, sometimes simple is better.