I never thought I'd see the day I'd be blogging - but there you go!
Just the other day I was talking to (possibly) my youngest colleague about my earliest computer experiences. It was 1980 and I had just arrived in Sydney, and I was friends with a sound engineer who had worked with a Fairlight Computer - at that time not long designed by another Sydney sound engineer if I remember correctly (worth googling?), and my friend had some experience of/ liked mucking around with computers (what we'd call a geek today). I, on the other hand, was barely aware of them.
He described a word processor to me, how you could type onto it and what you had typed appeared on a screen, then you could amend/ edit your work, deleting and moving stuff around until you were happy with it and ready to print it out. I was blown away - sounded fantastic! Then when I was checking vacancies in the paper, I started to notice ads for word processors - wow - it really was happening - now!
Fast forward a couple of years when I was working at UNSW Library, and I found myself thrown in the deep end with the task of typing the minutes of a meeting - on a word processor. Next it was searching on ABN - but with lots of warnings about doing so very carefully - the cost you know, very expensive for each search, so you had to check your spelling etc.
And now here I am blogging. It's a long road from the first word processors to Web 2.0, n'est-ce pas?
2 comments:
Yes - such a lot of new 'stuff' in so few years. But after Learning 2.0 you'll be out there amongst it!
Enjoy!
Victoria
I'm so old I can remember being shown one of the first smaller computers at school in the UK and it had a tape-drive which you had to play to boot up the computer! A few years later I remember doing a Word Processing class and being amazed by it all. I remember when Fairlights came out as I was hugely into sythesizer music at the time and what a groundbreaking invention the Fairlight was! I nearly went for a job there just to be nearer to the technology (sounds ridiculous now!). Now I have learned XHTML and so many things. This Learning 2.0 training is great and covers a lot of the technology I was aware of but chose to ignore to some extent (RSS, wikis, etc) in favour of YouTube, itunes, etc. So far it's been great fun and there's more ahead I see!
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