Hoping that this doesn’t violate my own self-imposed rules about blahgging about one’s job, my work environment involves a mix of old and new technology. I am not directly involved in the old stuff. They have plenty of talented people handling that end of things and it’s not my job. But I can actually understand, to a point, what people are talking about. And it does bring back memories.

Like the big old Data 100 printer we had back where I started my illustrious (or not) computer career. I’m not very well versed in printer technology but this thing was about the size of a stove and there was a ribbon and a print-head (?) that actually printed characters onto the paper through the ribbon. It was noisy. If the door to the computer room was open, and it usually was the first few years I was there, you could tell by the sounds the printer was making exactly whose printout was printing. Various mainframes and a mini (the bane of my existence) and I have some crap from the innards of the mini above my fireplace now.

Much, much, MUCH later on, I had a desktop computer there that was what we used to call “IBM-compatible”. All that meant was that it wasn’t a Macintosh. We used DOS back in those days on our PCs. About six months before I left that career, we switched over to Windows. Danielle made the switch gracefully and made quilt-looking desktop backgrounds and the whole works. I was too busy to breathe and just made do with a blue (or whatever) desktop. I could blahg more about Danielle, one of the few people I have ever been able to actually DELEGATE WORK TO and KNOW THAT IT WOULD GET DONE! But I won’t. Wherever you are, Danielle, you go girl! I loved sharing a cube with Danielle.

Once I did actually delete the autoexec.bat file on my not-quite-Windows-yet machine. With some trepidation, I reported it to my boss. No, I was not afraid of my boss. We were friends and I won’t blahg about that relationship (don’t take that in the wrong direction) until one or the other of us is dead. But I knew he would absolutely razz me up and down, sideways ’round when I told him I’d made a catastrophic mistake. “ALICE!!” he’d yell. No, that isn’t my name. It’s okay. Anyway, he just called our network friend (another Anne, a Chinese counterpart) and she got me back in there in short order and was nice and friendly about it too.

I didn’t think I missed those days but sometimes I do. But onward!

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