BootsnAll Travel Community

A Poem for Computer Users over 30

A computer was something on TV
From a science fiction show of note
A window was something you hated to clean
And ram was the cousin of a goat.
Meg was the name of my girlfriend
And gig was a job for the nights
Now they all mean different things
And that really mega bytes.

An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano.

Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3-inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did to the garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for a while.

Log on was adding wood to the fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode.

Cut you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu.

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead.

What about Ctrl Alt Del ??

Very true, but times change, I love being able to email friends and family ~ no more unposted half written letters.

That's funny.

I remember Wordpefect as a blue screen and Microsoft without one.

My first web browser was QMosaic. All text, no pictures.

.gif's were all around.

*sigh*...the good, old days!

I remember learning about computers involved a big stack of cards that had to be punched & then run. And you couldn't run the cards yourself.....you had to hand them over to a computer geek and then they would hand you back your stack and a green bar report.

so if your hard drive crashes is it a floppy one...

I remember the first video game. It was called Pong, and my family was the first on the block to have it.

So no doubt without computers, we would not know of Dusty's poetic prowness, nor the inex card systems or punch card operators Scubamama.
Then the smart arse accountants decided you could use them for cost control amidst great joy of going thru reams and reams of printout to find people would have made incorrect entries - such fun!
I bought a Commodore64 plugging into to tele about the time when GMH Oz were getting their Commodore models in full swing.
Still have the 64er complete with external tape memory and an unused printer somewhere hopefully that probably can go to a Museum one day.
We would play with the kids, a word game called of all things hangman - you had to start guessing letters and you had about six or eight chances until wrong entries had a gantry and stickfella swinging.

Yup, that was definitely my era. Punch cards, Pong, Commodore 64 etc. Then in the late 80's/early 90's there was that application called RBase. A command based program for logical thinkers and computer geeks. Sure had fun with that one, NOT.

I picked up a Mac 11 ci in 1990 for the simplicity of a Windows based platform that until this past spring didn't give me so much as a hiccup in performance. None of the problems common to the "Other" platform. Then it just clicked one day when I tried to boot-up and hasn't come back on since, not that I've spent any time or money on fixing it. When I see the memory cards for digicams exceeding 4 gigabytes I remember my Mac with it's upgraded 80 mb hard drive and 25 mhz processor. Those were the days!

You had computers?

We only had rocks.

Zeros and ones were either you had a rock or you didn't.

Oooh, gonorth, I did not pen this poem. It is doing the rounds - you guessed it, via email!