I am 72 years old and I
have seen the most amazing technical advances during my lifetime. I
can recall the first VCRs introduced..the Betacord we bought at a
staff discount, cost over $800.00. in real dollars back then. I
still have a Beta machine in a back room.
I was around when the
personal computer came out. I recall us buying a Radio Shack
computer with 2K of memory. It came with a program booklet and we
typed in the hundreds of lines of program to set up a security
program. As it attempted to run it told us of errors on line 235 etc
and we went back and corrected the typos. It eventually ran and on
the screen the questions asked..'Are the doors locked?' to which the
user had to select Y/N. A few more questions which elicited a Y
answer and the computer told us that the house was secure.
Computers have come a long way since then.
I am a mechanical sort of
bloke. I have been into engines and mechanical gadgets since I was
about 14. Computers these days have very few mechanical bits in
them. Fans, the hard drive and the on off switch are a few of the
mechanical hangovers from my era. Even hard drives these days can be
solid state without any moving bits. I am preparing a few very nice
G5 Macs for distribution and one of them has been a bit silly by
starting up by itself. I belong to a Mac users' group and I posted
the problem to the list and received some very high tech answers from
folks a lot smarter than me.
I tried a few of their
suggestions before I figured that there is a problem with the start
button. Sure enough, when I inspected another machine the button had
a different feel to it and felt like it needed a bit of
WD40.....Voila, problem solved! Mechanics 1, techos 0. WD40 has an
interesting pedigree....Google WD40.
These computers were
industrial strength and major printers and newspaper houses used
them. They came out mid 2000 and in many cases have been replaced by
the Mac Mini which fits into a person's hands. I like this continual
upgrade trend manufacturers have because it gives me older machines
to distribute to needy folks.
The G5 tower, start panel and the Mac mini.
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