Something New

Two A/M. That's the same.  What is different now is that I am officially on Assisted Living at the old folks home. 

That means a fifty percent raise in my rent, for my board and care.  Fifty percent  Wow. It also means that when I am ready to go back to bed, I pull a cord and a caregiver comes to help me transfer from wheel chair to bed.

It is  tough, and expensive, to lose your independence, but it comes with the age: eighty two.  (Most of the people my age are dead. Now isn't that a cheery thought for Two A.M.?)

I don't remember my birth, few of us do, but I remember the moment of my rebirth. That took place at a Radio Shack Store in 1979

I was idling there, probably buying electronic parts for some project or other and I spotted a computer.  That was new.  It had a keyboard like an adding machine, so I punched in a problem, say, four plus eight.  Nothing happened.

"So what's with the calculator? Nothing happens when I add four and eight," I tell the clerk.

"It did the math.  You have to tell it to PRINT so you can see the answer," said the clerk.  I thought that's pretty dumb. The adding machine on my desk knows to print the answer when you put in a problem. 

"But look at this," said the clerk typing in a line, and presto change-o, the computer instantly prints the times tables from one times one to twenty-five times twenty-five.  WOW said I. 

Before long, and a few visits later I bought a TRS-80,  I took it home and set it up at four pm and didn't move for eight hours.  I was hooked.

Twenty six years ago my computer had four kilobytes of RAM.  It loaded programs, from a cassette tape recorder, at 128 BPS, That's bytes per second, not Kilobytes, not Mega bytes, just bytes.

You had to write your own programs.  Nevertheless, I was hooked and have been ever since. 

That was my rebirth.  Today was my entry into old age.  That;s my life in the old folks home

Three A.M. Time to pull a cord and get helped back to bed.