Fred's Ramblings

Many of you know that I am always in front of a computer and have been that way for the last 35 odd years. And that is in fact the truth especially now that I am retired. It wasn’t anything that I thought I would be doing, but things have a way of turning out.

My kids were in elementary school when the personal computer came into the household and my late wife, a teacher, felt the kids needed to be able to “keep up” if they were going to be competitive. I didn’t necessarily agree with it because in my mind, computers could have been a passing fad. Computers weren’t cheap in those days, but I soon realized they were here to stay, and so we went out and bought an Apple IIc computer, printer and software because Apple is what was being used in the school they were attending. That first purchase cost $1800 in 1984.

Suffice it to say that I was the one that jumped in with both feet and started to see the benefits of the personal computer. Keep in mind that the system we bought did not have a hard drive…in fact it used “floppy disks” that had to be switched out of the disk drive depending on their use. The program itself was on one disk and the data was on another disk. I was ecstatic when we were able to afford an external disk drive which meant I didn’t have to switch disks.

From there I would copy different applications from the Nibble magazine and would be proud of myself when I got it typed in right and the program would actually run the way it was supposed to. Suffice it to say that I was hooked. Enough so that the kids had to fight to get to use it…at least my son anyway. Both my late wife and my daughter weren’t that much into it. So, I moved from an Apple product to an IBM (in those days) because IBM is what was being used at my work. And the rest as they say, is history.

When the internet came into being, that was a whole other program. Imagine being able to get online and seeing webpages from all over the world, emailing people everywhere and being able to “search” for whatever you wanted to see. Back then, the internet was free…not so much today. I can still remember going from a 14.4 baud modem to a 28.8 baud modem and I thought it couldn’t get any faster when I was able to connect with a 56.6 baud modem. Now we become impatient if a site does not load instantaneously.

Today I develop and manage different websites and am involved with different computer languages…HTML, PHP, CSS and I like to cobble together open source scripts to make them look and act the way I want them to. That is not to say that I consider myself a coder, but I enjoy those times when I can get something to work the way I want. From an Apple IIc to today’s laptops that have considerably more processing power. Don’t you just love computers?