Monday, March 22, 2010

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

I seem to recall a saying that "everything old is new again." Don't know who said it first, but I sure hope it's true. Because if everything that is old becomes what is new, that's good news for Suzy and me. That will make our learning curve so much easier.

We both used to be pretty good at computers. In fact, we bought our first home computer back in 1976, or thereabouts. It was a Radio Shack Color Computer that used our TV as its monitor.. And everything was in color! Games were in color, graphics could be in color, if you could find graphics. And it would do things.

My brother Chuck bought a Commodore computer about the same time, but that's not part of our story, just a little side visit.

The Color Computer came with 16K memory; we upgraded to 64K and knew we were set for life! I learned to write programs in Basic, and used them for many things including calculating retirement plan benefits for the employees at our Safeway Division Office. What a thing that was, a real computer right in our home!

Pretty soon, though, the Color Computer was obsolete, and we bought a Tandy TRS-80. I think it had 128K, which of course we soon upgraded to 640K. Over the years we have owned, or been obsessed by, over a dozen computers, and we've gradually fallen behind in being able to use them fully.

Now we have so much "sharing" over the Internet that we just can't keep up. My mother always taught me about sharing, how good it was to share my toys, how it was good to share our good fortune by donating to worthy causes, how good it was to share our time and talent by volunteering to help others. But she never imagined that we'd be asked to share our total lives, including secret thoughts, through such things as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, constant texting, continually hanging on the cell phone.

Here's a screen from Facebook, if you haven't seen it before.
And this one is from Flickr.

We've learned to blog, of course, by stepping up from mass e-mails to MyTripJournal and now to Blogger. And we're pretty comfortable with that. We've avoided such things as Twitter and texting. But recently our family all joined Facebook and share photos that way, so we had to join Facebook if we wanted to see those pictures. Now they joined Flickr to share photos, and we've had to join that also. Haven't the slightest idea how to use either program ourselves, but it's a great way (I've been told) to share photos. I thought we were doing pretty well with Picasa WebAlbums from Google.

So now we will learn a little about Flickr and Facebook. Maybe when the family gathers here in August they'll give us lessons in those two programs plus whatever else new they find. That'll be good. Keep us new and young and growing!

In the meantime, here are some pix we pulled from those sites on the Internet. First is our grandson Sam, who is edging closer to 15 every minute.


Then we have the newest one, Darren, our 4-month old great grandson.

Darren with his parents Adam and our granddaughter Renee

Darren with his mother Renee.

And Darren with his "Great Auntie Deb."
"Everything old is new again." When do we go back to pasting snapshots on the black pages of bound photo albums? When, perish the thought, will we all go back to writing letters by hand on paper? Ah, progress happens, and it carries us along with it in ... Our Life on Wheels!

7 comments:

  1. First, let me congratulate you on fine looking grandsons. Grandchildren are such a joy in our lives.

    Second, I remember when I was the computer guru that everyone came to for about 20 years! About the time I took an early retirement things had progressed to the point where I fell behind the curve and couldn't keep up, nor did I want to. I am happy to go back to the stone age, in a way. I want my fast internet connection, but email me pictures as an attachment, or post them to your blog, but I tried Facebook and opted out. And I do occasionally write letters in long-hand. Shocks the hell out of the recipients, I'm sure!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, it's a rapidly changing techno landscape alright. Hard to keep up with everything. A lot of the stuff is educational & great. And some stuff seems to be just plain dumb.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Jerry & Suzy... What a beautiful family you have and Darren is just way to adorable. Great pictures!!! Have a super day and travel safe!
    (((HUGS)))
    Donna

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great pictures of your family, Jerry, you and Suzy must be very proud - and, rightly so. I remember well all of those old computers especially the old TRS-80(Trash 80)! They were pretty neat stuff at the time. I'm not a big Facebook user at all, I still prefer email myself.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The technological world just keeps on spinning!

    You picked some of my favorite pics of my family to post!

    Love you both!
    ~N~E~E~
    P.S. I'd be glad to show you a few tricks on Facebook. Flicker is one I haven't used much, but mom could help you there.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Good Job!!! Nice looking kids!!
    I know you are proud....

    ReplyDelete
  7. Great pictures....and that is something you would never be able to do if you still had a Trash-80 (TRS-80). The first computer I worked on was made by Italians for Better Macaroni...or something like that. They shortened it down to 3 letters. It had 4k of ferite core memory.

    I build and maintain my wife's and my computers and still love to get my fingers in there (WATCH THAT FAN...OUCH). But no one troubleshoots and repairs electronics to the component level anymore. Just replace the mother board, video card, USB cards, etc. I still remember what a resistor is.

    See you guys sometime.

    Ray

    ReplyDelete

Here's your chance to tell us what you think!