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This post is not about diabetes, and not at all about diet. This is about my old flames.
But what I have typed in here has definitely something to do with how we all participate in this diabetes-related e-forum. E-forum is the keyword, and the real key lies in the letter ‘e’. We are participating in the deliberations of this forum through the electronic or “e” medium of our computers. This post is about my love affair with the computer. And it came out of my fingers spontaneously and effortlessly when I saw pictures of my old flames as I was surfing the net. My old flames are there for you all to see in the attached picture.
The personal computer was not yet born when I was in the engineering school. There was only the big “mainframe”, somewhere far away from our campus. For us students, the mystique of the computer lay in its remoteness. We students had no opportunity to see, touch or feel it. We had to approach it through many intermediaries. During our brief course on computer programming, we wrote a few simple FORTRAN programs by hand, got them punched into holes in decks and decks of cards and forwarded those cards to the keepers of the computer. Days later, after our cards were “batch processed”, we would get our results in reams of difficult to read printouts.
Even when I began working, the situation was not very different. The only change was that I could see and if I really wanted, touch a “naked mini.” But the unapproachable mainframe was still my official mistress. On the rare occasions when I had to write a program, I still wrote it with pencil on paper, got decks of cards punched and got them all batch processed to get my results.
And then one day, a “desk top” arrived in my lab. It was the wonderful HP 9825, really a glorified calculator. It was meant for carrying out some complex, automated measurements. I instantly fell in love with it. It would finish its assigned work of making automated measurements in no time. The rest of its time was for me and me alone. I began talking with my playmate for hours together every day in the esoteric language called HPL, a language similar to, but more powerful than BASIC. I made my playmate do many wonderful things – even made it draw pictures with clumsy dot matrix printers and sing tunes with its beeper.
This happy liaison lasted less than two years. Then came a more charming playmate – the HP85. This had a real display. I made it do many tasks that otherwise I would do manually, taking a lot of time and making human errors in the process. But I also made it sing, dance and draw. Although no “one night stand”, this too was relatively a fleeting love affair. I “progressed” to more sophisticated “personal” computers. And now, three decades later as I recline on the couch typing in these words in my little “notebook” I wonder how things changed so much about the mystical computer. While my personal computer became more and more slim, smart and pretty, I changed from a strapping young man to a middle aged, greying man with mild “central obesity”.
Regards,
Rad
But what I have typed in here has definitely something to do with how we all participate in this diabetes-related e-forum. E-forum is the keyword, and the real key lies in the letter ‘e’. We are participating in the deliberations of this forum through the electronic or “e” medium of our computers. This post is about my love affair with the computer. And it came out of my fingers spontaneously and effortlessly when I saw pictures of my old flames as I was surfing the net. My old flames are there for you all to see in the attached picture.
The personal computer was not yet born when I was in the engineering school. There was only the big “mainframe”, somewhere far away from our campus. For us students, the mystique of the computer lay in its remoteness. We students had no opportunity to see, touch or feel it. We had to approach it through many intermediaries. During our brief course on computer programming, we wrote a few simple FORTRAN programs by hand, got them punched into holes in decks and decks of cards and forwarded those cards to the keepers of the computer. Days later, after our cards were “batch processed”, we would get our results in reams of difficult to read printouts.
Even when I began working, the situation was not very different. The only change was that I could see and if I really wanted, touch a “naked mini.” But the unapproachable mainframe was still my official mistress. On the rare occasions when I had to write a program, I still wrote it with pencil on paper, got decks of cards punched and got them all batch processed to get my results.
And then one day, a “desk top” arrived in my lab. It was the wonderful HP 9825, really a glorified calculator. It was meant for carrying out some complex, automated measurements. I instantly fell in love with it. It would finish its assigned work of making automated measurements in no time. The rest of its time was for me and me alone. I began talking with my playmate for hours together every day in the esoteric language called HPL, a language similar to, but more powerful than BASIC. I made my playmate do many wonderful things – even made it draw pictures with clumsy dot matrix printers and sing tunes with its beeper.
This happy liaison lasted less than two years. Then came a more charming playmate – the HP85. This had a real display. I made it do many tasks that otherwise I would do manually, taking a lot of time and making human errors in the process. But I also made it sing, dance and draw
. Although no “one night stand”, this too was relatively a fleeting love affair. I “progressed” to more sophisticated “personal” computers. And now, three decades later as I recline on the couch typing in these words in my little “notebook” I wonder how things changed so much about the mystical computer. While my personal computer became more and more slim, smart and pretty, I changed from a strapping young man to a middle aged, greying man with mild “central obesity”.Regards,
Rad
