schoolhouse rock

I've started a sort of daily blathering on the main page of Inkspot, mostly publishing news. Jodi, Allison and I are going to a Schoolhouse Rock concert/musical at the Annex Theatre tonight...apparently a bunch of rock bands are performing songs from that fun series of educational cartoons. Should be fun!
I'm going to the cottage for five days starting tomorrow, and I'll be without a computer (oh the horror! the horror!), so expect no Blatherings during that time. It's sort of strange, comparing the state of technology now to back when computers were a rare and precious thing, and we had to line up in high school to use a single battered-looking keypunch in computer science class (now this really dates me, doesn't it?), clutching our sweaty pile of cards and praying that the ol' Wang would hold out at least until we got our assignment finished. What was everyone's first home computer? Mine was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, sneeringly nicknamed the Trash-80. I can't tell you how thrilled I was to see that first "READY>" prompt appear on the screen for the first time. Spent hours laboriously typing in BASIC programs (a single typo would prevent the program from working correctly, and my brother and I would spend even more hours reading the code aloud to each other while checking it against the screen to debug it), saved them on a regular cassette recorder connected to the computer. Now I get impatient if a webpage takes a few seconds too long to download. Once I got to university I bought a Mac (The First Mac, pre-Classic) and have been with Mac ever since (now have a Power Mac 7500/100). We're thinking of turning one of our old Macs into a fish tank. Site of the day: Britannica's Birthday Calendar (who was born on YOUR birthday?)

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