Obsolete again
saying, “One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency.” OK, a program called CHKDSK does that checking, and it often corrects problems which are discovered in the various tracks and sectors of the disk, and fixes problems in the way the files are recorded on the disk’s magnetic surfaces. That process seemed to make everything fine and dandy, for a time. Then, some months later, that little “inconsistency” message came on again, and CHKDSK again went through a lengthy series of checks and “corrections.” However, this time, evidently because of internal malfunctioning of the little arms which move the reading/writing heads over the spinning surfaces of the disk, CHKDSK’s “corrections” were messing things up in places rather than fixing them. So I lost some data files that will have to be re-entered. That’s work I hate to have to do all over again.
Anyway, I have now given up on my old trusty Windows XP computer, and I have a new one to get used to. I have just about lost count of the times that I have become obsolete so far as the computers are concerned. I started out with my first computer in 1984. At that time the idea of a personal computer was still young. IBM’s little Personal Computer had been in production for a few years, Apple was still making the Apple 2e, but they had just come up with the Lisa and the Macintosh models with a new-fangled Graphical User Interface. That would lead Bill Gates and Microsoft to invent Windows as their version of the graphical user interface. Before those developments, we didn’t have “mouses” with our computers, and we never thought about needing one. But “mouses” would become hugely important as instruments for working a computer, and so far I don’t know that the makers have ever found anything better than a mouse. Before that, mouses were mostly detested little creatures who were supposed to stay out of your house, and human beings had invented all kinds of traps and poisons to get rid of them.
When I first began my venture as a computer user back in 1984, I took a computer course at the high school in Searcy, Ark. Back then, a basic computer course was usually focused on the BASIC Computer Programming Language. The computers in the school lab there were all Radio Shack Computers running what was called the TRS-80 operating system. Back then, all the various makers had their own operating systems. Today we seem to be settled down to having mainly Microsoft Windows and the Apple OSs, with just a showing of Linux and a few others. After taking the BASIC course, and discovering that I liked programming, I bought my first computer from Montgomery Ward (the old mail-order catalog company which competed mainly with Sears Roebuck).
My new machine was a Commodore 64, which was Commodore’s latest super improvement over their previous little VIC20 home computer. The VIC-20 had caught on with many users, and the new 64 would attract thousands. Many high school computer departments were going to the Commodore 64 because of its economical price and its considerable capabilities. It could do not only word processing and spreadsheets and database records, but it could produce sound, it could do graphics and color, and it could even do electronic mail, which was a very new thing at the time. The microprocessor operated at 1 Mhz. Today’s computers run about 2,000 times that fast; but, the Commodore didn’t seem slow to me at the time. I paid about $1,000 dollars for the computer, a little black and white monitor, a tape drive, a modem, a dot-matrix printer, and a new-fangled thing called a 5 1/4-inch floppy drive. Each floppy disk had a 160 kilobyte capacity. Today that would be considered miniscule capacity, not enough to even be useful. But it was pretty useful back then. To be continued.
••• Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols may be contacted by email at joe369@centurytel. net or by phone at 479-6211621.