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Way back in the 1980’s, I received a minor in computer science. Before anyone thinks this is anything special (and I pray, for the sake of the children, that nobody does), I need to stress two important things.
First, I took five years of French and all I can say is ‘Allez-vous a la biblioteque avec la grand chat du guerre.” In other words, I don’t retain a whole hell of a lot.
Second, every single thing I learned about computer programming is pretty much useless now.
For example, when I started learning programming in high school, I did it on cards. No, seriously, old style computer cards. I used to walk around the high school campus with all my books and a 30-pound box of fricken cards that contained all the different lines of my ELIZA program.
The art of filling out computer cards only prepared me for one thing: voting in Florida. And I don’t live in Florida.
Also, the first program I learned was BASIC. BASIC was an acronym for something, but it also pretty much described the language. Each line of BASIC began with a number. This meant that if you wanted to insert a line of “code” (we didn’t call it code) between two other lines, you had to give it a number between the other two numbers. This meant you usually gave each line of code a number like 10-20-30 so that you could insert 15 etc when you screwed up. If you really screwed up, you had to renumber the entire program, a process that could take hours. Especially if each number was on a fricken card.
Even the stuff I learned in college - stuff with hip-hop names like pushing and poping - is mostly useless in this world of JAVA and html. The real pisser is that these “languages” are infinitely easier to use and more useful than BASIC ever was.
This leads me to the point of this update. I found a floppy disc (which I can never use now since I don’t think the drive exists that can read it anymore) or 1980’s style lo-res porn. Stuff that was essentially crude line drawings that looked like they were thrusting into each other. Pretty hot stuff back in the day, though I don’t remember getting off to it since there were, in fact, issues of Playboy in the Michaels homestead. Thanks, dad, for sparing me the horror of wanking to 2d line cartoons.
Anyhow, I guess my point is, you kids, cruising for topless pictures and stuff, you don’t know how good you have it.
I am going to go do some pushing and poping now in honor of the wonders of the Interweb.
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