The Mock Dock

Hey - do you guys remember the first school/home computers that came out forever ago?  Like the Apple IIe and its various predecessors?  I was just thinking this morning about how totally dependent I’ve become on technology to do most everything, and how different things used to be back in the day.  You know, in olden times.  The days of yore, if you will.

Like - I remember being in middle school and first taking an Introduction to Computing class on a big bulky computer that looked a lot like the one pictured.  And I remember thinking that the whole idea of computers at the point was completely retarded.  We were taught DOS commands, which were essentially strings of c’s and colons and backslashes and all sorts of other secret code symbols that took forever to type exactly right, and all we’d get out of it was like - a shape of a butterfly or something on the screen.  It just seemed to take an awful lot of work to do the tiniest thing.  I remember asking my teacher, “Why do we have to type all this gibberish?  Why can’t we just type ‘make a butterfly pattern’ if the computer is so smart?” I didn’t do well in Introduction to Computing.  

I STILL don’t really understand why programming languages have to be so hard.  I’m looking forward to the day when computing will be purely based on voice commands.  And instead of typing, I’ll just be laying in bed orally dictating my blog posts.  Or better yet, I’ll just THINK them really hard and they’ll magically appear on the screen.  That’s how lazy I am - I dream of a day where I can do everything horizontally.

You know what class I totally kicked ass in?  Highschool typing.  It was by far the most useful class in my entire school career.  And that includes college.  Nothing has helped me more, on a professional level, than learning to type.  Classes like calculus and statistics were, I believe, created for the sole purpose of tormenting drunk and/or hungover college students.  I had the WORST instructor ever for Calculus in college.  She was lanky and overweight all at the same time and she had blond hair that was simultaneously hideously greasy and also frizzed out and fluffy.  And the armpits of her clothes were all stained this disgusting yellowish color.  I don’t know what she ate, but whatever it was apparently caused her to sweat mustard.  My nickname for her, in fact,  was Greasefluff McMustardArms.  That nickname alone is basically all I remember from that entire semester’s worth of calculus.  Oh yeah - and there was something about the function of x.