I first got involved with computers while in college. I dated this guy (yes, a man) who was ‘into’ computers. I was doing work study as a tutor and he managed to get the workstudy moved to the computer lab. All the tutors did there was remind everyone where the on switch was (waaaay in the back of the CPU) and a few other things. I learned it all fairly quick and begun having fun. We had this mainframe that was HUGE, as in 5’X3’X7′ sized. It produced a lot of heat. All the computers in the lab were just terminals actually, hooked to the mainframe. I remember when the 3 1/4 disks first came out. This would have been ’85 or ’86. BASIC was the language of choice while the geeks were into UNIX. I wasn’t interested with writing programs, I was interested in manipulating the programs once they were written.
I continued my fascination with the machines after I finished school. At that point, the ‘net was Prodigy and other text only email. Everything came in ‘digest’ format, very hard to read. Access to websites grew, their number increased, email improved immensely.
Upgrading and modifying the computers became my fun activity. Put in a new drive, upgrade the BIOS and CMOS. Win3.x was all the rage. Wow, what you could do with that. *snort* In my Real Job I was the one they called over to fix whatever it was they just did to the software.
My point to all this is that I have spent almost all day arguing with my laptop. Mozilla is an excellent program, the problem is not with Mozilla. It is XP and how it handles files. I have finally decided to just start brand new. I can kinda sorta access all my old email, but for the most part, it’s a big pain to get to. But email became just one of the many problems with starting new. I had to load my bookmark file, find the password file and figure out how to transfer it, on and on. I had to do the password thing because while I usually write down the user/password things for all the sites I visit, I hadn’t for this blog. And, as weird as it sounds, it’s been fun! What an amazing thing the human brain is! And what a great thing it is to use!
Well, got more to do. Still doing the email thang. If I had your email address, you might want to send it to me again. paula ….. at….. holyroller.org