Nina's Blog - Thursday 2nd January 2025

Thursday 2nd January 2025

Elliptical trainer: 16 minutes, 4.2 virtual kilometres, 15.8 kph, 2 000 steps according my mobile.

No new snow since yesterday but it's -7 C so it's not melting.

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22Michelle · 70-79, T

@ninalanyon It still amazes me the impact of computerisation. I well remember the first time I got a desktop computer at work. And then within a few years I had a laptop and docking station and was dialling in to the office. It was very slow at first, but soon I was complaining if it too more than a few seconds to connect up.
And the impact on the office. I remember when the company I worked for in the 1970's had a typing pool. I dictated letters back then. There's also the technology that at the time seemed amazing. Telex, Golfball typewriters. Fax, email, Walkman, Cassettes, Videos, CD's. The changes that have come and gone in our lifetime, and are ongoing. I'm typing this on my mobile phone rather than use my

22Michelle · 70-79, T

@22Michelle ...rather than use my laptop or tab! Not sure how this last part didn’t post with the rest.

ninalanyon · 61-69, T

@22Michelle Working for Philips in the late '70s I wrote all my documentation longhand with instructions to leave space for diagrams and pictures. The the department manager's secretary would type it and I would paste in the diagrams. By the early '80s I was typing everything in Wordstar on an Apple ][ with an add-on processor and floppy disks. By then I was combining software and hardware development. The backup routine was the manager's secretary reminding us on Friday morning that we must copy our working floppies and coming back after lunch to collect them and put them in the safe, no network or hard disks.

It's not only technology that changes. In the early seventies, before the Walkman, I had a Philips portable cassette recorder and a pair of headphones that I used to wear when I went out for a walk. Many people found this very amusing. Now it's perfectly normal.

22Michelle · 70-79, T

@ninalanyon Floppy disks! I remember them. In the 1980's the oil company I worked for it was all mainframe computing. One entire wing was dedicated to the actual computer and it had cooling air conditioning, etc. I used to run a monthly report on vessel usage and to prevent the system being overloaded I had to go in early, 6am, to get the report run and printed before others came in at 0830 and needed to use the system. Now I could probably run that report on my phone, from home, at any time, in under a minute. The changes in the past 40-50 years have been so huge, so fast it is amazing to look back and remember how we did things back then.