Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Mom's and Dad's PCs

Every time I swap or upgrade one of my computers, I give the swap-out to a family member.  My mom has been the recipient twice.  She currently has a Dell desktop that is more than powerful enough for her needs.  She likes to play Solitaire and the other games that came with the installation; she also listens to CDs and looks at photos on occasion.  The oddest and coolest thing is that she has no desire to use the Internet.  Mom is well-educated, well-read, and quite alert, so I know she is well aware of the internetworking juggernaut, and I bet that some of her friends use the 'Net regularly.  But Mom gets along quite nicely without it, thank you very much.

My dad (RIP) and I were the only two in the family who were really bitten by the PC bug.  When Dad passed in 1985, my brother Owen and I cleared his apartment of his belongings.  He had a Radio Shack TRS-80, one of the first computers made available to the mass market.  I was fascinated by it but couldn't figure out what to do with it.  I wrote a program that picked Lotto numbers at random and quickly lost interest.  I have no idea what I did with it; I probably moved away from it at some point.  It wouldn't command that much on the open market today, as these were quite popular -- but it would look really sweet hooked up to my Dell XPS410.

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