I wanted to say that when I was in high school, I was happy to get a new slide rule. But Noooooooooooooooooooooo. Ex has to top that.

Well, he is older than dirtme.

Clarke (it may have been a different author, but Clarke sticks in my mind) wrote a short story about an exploratory space mission in which the computer went down. The crew fashioned an abacus out of spare parts and were able to calculate burn times and orbits. Don’t remember the name of it and I don’t think its in my library.

My first computer was a C64, and I even used it to go “online”. Back before the intertubes, where people would host their own “site”, a BBS or bulletin board, I’d chat with people and trade stuff (games mostly). Very primitive back then. The technological advances didn’t start to come until the porn industry saw potential in it all. The rest, as they say, is history.

We don’t have one, says I.

She says, the way the attic and basement are, how can you tell?

Well…maybe it’s with the hyrax alleged to be in the cellar.

Does anyone remember those things that you could get in about any supermarket check out line or five and dime? They had several sliding columns which enabled one to multiply, subtract, and add, either Pascal or DeCarte invented the thing. I still have one, and when I take it to civil air patrol meetings the kids are fascinated by it.

In 1964 an uncle who was an engineer at PENDOT(if that’s what they called it then, I lived in Virginia) came to visit and he had a really interesting thing, a pocket calculator. It subtracted, added, multiplied, and did guzintas. No memory, no other feature, had nixies and no LED or liquid crystal. He got it a year before they were available to the public, paid over $400 for it.

Can you even FIND any such a thing today?

I went to the 1964-65 New York world’s fair, saw the future and…it turned out not to have happened.

I’m certainly no expert on computers, but I noticed certain things through the years.

My father got commisioned in 1952, abd what with the UNIVAC and ENIAC things in the news, an “electronic brain” was very much on the public mind.
A gentleman came to our quarters shortly after my father put on his bars and was selling IBM stock. He touted the computers, said this was the future.
During WWII ,y father had been the master gunner in a 90mm gun battalion. It was his job to figure out the firing solutions for all the guns. Indirect fire in support, direct fire against German armor, and anti aircraft fire. He had to figure out fuze settings using the speed of approaching aircraft, their suspected altitude,even weather conditions. He did this using slide rules, math, set firing tables, and pencil and paper.
They got radar which helped, then they got “firing computers” which slaved the guns to the radar and would figure out the solution and fire the guns automatically. Well…sometimes…maybe…
These things were in four big (for the day) trailors, and they would for various reasons “go into a slew”, or as we say now, crash.
This meant that my father had to very quickly (and he usually had already started as a backup) manually figure out a firing solution in a very short time and hope the guns could be UN slaved (a somewhat lengthy process) and firing before it was too late.
With this experience rather fresh in his mind, he declined to buy the profferred IBM stock. He did, in fact, laugh about it later.

B 29s had a tracking computer as well so that if a gunner had a target in his sight an appropriate gun would track it and fire. These “crashed”, too, and a brother of my Japanese aunt actually shot down a B 29 because that happened.

In the 1970’s I worked in the army air traffic control school as an instructor and we had a radar simulator which used an NCR 5 computer, had this humungous equipment, and as the building fire marshal I had to take a special course on what to do, and more particularly what NOT to do in case of a fire.
I’m told the same job can be done better using something like I’m using now, at single digit percentages of the cost back then. If the thing went down, the clock started running at $250 an hour from the time the tech office picked up the phone to say, “we’re on our way”.

Are implants to use an internet next? Bio computers?