yes, it does mean something.
i`m taking it easy this morning, i should be getting bathing and getting dressed about now, but i`m still sitting around at home, not quite ready to go to work. i`m going, but not just yet.
i have a familiarity with machines that is frightening to a lot of people. i should define machines, electronics in general, computers specifically. they hold no fear for me. clocks do not blink 12:00 on my watch, no pun intended.
if pressed i will read the manual, but generally i can just work it out. i`ve been around computers for damn near a third of my life. the first computer i ever used was a commodore 64. way back then with monochrome screens and data stored on tape, with games that had more in common with choose your own adventure books than the carefully rendered stuff that is so common today.
i graduated from there to apple IIes and programming in basic, cobol and fortran. the advantage to attending one of the most prestigious high schools in the country is that you`re on the bleeding edge of technology, we had a computer science programme before term became common knowledge in the rest of the country and had the resources to back it. and little ego maniacs like myself doing the classes.
in the one move that i will always regret i dropped the class, because and i quote “they can`t teach me anything i don`t already know”. the thing about going to that school is the over inflated sense of self worth you`re imbued with from the very first meeting.
“you are best and the brightest in the country, blah, blah, blah” this is not something you say to 200 boys just entering puberty.
i digress.
me of the superego dropped the class but i still hung around the computer room and help with examination projects until i discovered the joys of womanhood and got up to all sorts of mischief that young men are supposed to at that age.
i wasn`t away for long, i left school, permanently eventually and sought out jobs. i had a fairly long, even at that point experience with computers and technology and because my mother`s insistence that i find something to do while waiting in the office for her, the ability to type.
got a job as a data entry clerk and then discovered the mac, and got another job as a type setter. stop me if you`ve heard this before or you can skip it if you so desire.
in the good old days, not everyone could afford a laser printer, so you would set your type in one of the thirteen faces available, put it on a diskette and send it off to a service bureau. aaah the heady days. i found my niche. i learned about design on the job, i took the manuals home, i learned about print and how it works and i carved my name in a new field.
i grew along with an industry. people started coming to me for advice about machines, i read. i read everything i could put my hands on, this was my field and i was determined to be the best i could. it wasn`t about the news technology, it was about getting what you had to work for you.
actually it was about the newest technology that you`d lust after and hope you could convince your bosses to buy. and if they did, hope it was super-ceded by something newer and shiner in six months.
less than 10 years ago, i convinced my then employers that we need more hard disk space and that we should by a 540Mb drive for storage. keep that figure in mind, we have flash media with almost that capacity, your average cd, holds more information than that.
they paid close to US$1000. and that wasn`t excessive in those days, how far we`ve come. i`ve see the first cd burners, that would only burn the media of the manufacturer, we`ve come full circle with the new generation of DVD burners. for $1000 you can get close to, what, a tetrabyte of storage now?
technology is obsolete almost the minute it comes out the door. but i try to keep up, i used to be mr. beta, the minute it came out it was installed on running on my machine. i tried the public beta of os x, hated it, but the final product came out, i was there running it, longing for the day when i could give up the classic mac os.
i could wax rhapsodic about the mac os from system six to the present and the last truly good version of windows was 95 but i wont.
i`ve seen them come and go and i`m comfortable with them all, new technology will continue to emerge and hopefully i can continue to stay somewhere close to the edge of it all
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typesetting, binary, computers
