JMB- Luxury. We used to dream of loading the discs of the program one after another into the disc drive each time. We used cassette tapes.

Seriously though, my first “real” computer (after the Acorns and Sinclairs of the world) was an Apple II, which I expanded to fill all seven slots and it had four 5.25″ floppy drives on it. (You needed all four to run Pascal properly without ridiculous swapping about).

Whilst at work, I got my hands dirty with punch cards and paper tape. Our 300 baud modems were the size of a large briefcase and I even had a portable microfiche reader.

My first stint in a computer department we compiled programs on an IBM mainframe but had to do them as overnight batch jobs because the bean counters had baggsys on the system during the day.

For 20 years or more we have used an email address at the chemistry dept computer at UBC (there were no ISPs in those days and email was only at the universities, etc) surname@chem.ubc.ca Never changes, well the computer does, but not the name and the way we connect to it changed. First of all to do email from home, I wrote the email on our home computer in Wordstar and put it on a disc and the “old scientist” took it to work and sent it from his computer hardwired to the chemistry computer. This was 1985 when the first child went to graduate school in Toronto. Then we got dial-up and PC anywhere connecting to the work computer. Later on we could use dial-up to connect directly to the chem. computer, then hi speed finally. When we got hi speed cable internet some years ago I got my own email account. Hopefully this one will see me out but we still use the old email address too, well the OS uses it exclusively.

Now the home computers we have had are another story. The first one had no hard drive, you had to load the discs of the program one after another into the disc drive each time.

We’ve come a long way baby in a relatively short time.