Return of Memoryfest - Day 13 & 14/31

[bironic]

Lost our internet connection last night and this morning. Always annoying, but at least this time I didn't have a critical project to upload for work. Two memories tonight to catch up.

13. Middle School

Comments

[thewlisian_afer]

13. I don't recall ever learning about the world wide web... We had a forty-minute computer class in school once or twice a week in elementary school, but there was no internet connection. We just learned word processing and played Oregon Trail and stuff like that.

I was in fourth grade when we got a computer at home. Daddy set up some parental controls and I was allowed to poke around as I pleased. It didn't take long for me to run into my first internet creep. Since I was only nine years old, when people asked me my age I would ask, "How old do you think I am?" My answer to whatever they said was always, "Nice guess." That way I wasn't lying outright but I wasn't actually answering their question either, they just thought I was. (People have always guessed that I'm 5-10 years older than my actual age and they still do.) So the person I was chatting with was under the impression that I was 14. We'd met in a teen chat room so I was under the impression that he was, you know, also a kid. After a while of chatting in which

[bironic]

13. Computers have always, always been a part of my life, which isn't so unusual for kids now but was a bit of an anomaly when I was young. We always had at least one at home. There are pictures of my sister and me when we were babies in my dad's lap while he sat at the computer. I learned my alphabet on the computer. Just about everything I've learned about and/or on computers was done at home rather than at school; we had those computer classes in elementary school too, with Oregon Trail and Print Shop card-maker and lessons about the "home keys," and then typing tests in middle school and Internet research lessons in high school, but with the exception of a class I took in BASIC in 10th grade, it was all old news

[thewlisian_afer]

Aw, now I miss my nephew. His name is Justin, and he's blond and a troublemaker. ♥

I'm not sure exactly when it changed, but I was pretty much first year Hermione Granger when I was very young. I was bossy and a know-it-all and painfully rule-oriented. Oh, how the times do change. XD If I hadn't been so damn nasty and hissed at the kid, I probably wouldn't have been caught. Murmuring is a lot harder to hear from across the room than hissing is.

[elynittria]

13. OK, I'm going to show my age a bit here... Computers were definitely not part of my childhood. When my dad purchased a handheld electronic calculator, it was a big deal (and expensive). We kids weren't allowed to play with it, although we sometimes were allowed to check calculations in our homework with it.

I got a kick out of the fact that it used what was termed "Polish reverse logic" for entering equations (instead of putting operators such as + or X between their operands, you had to put them after them, so "2 + 2" was entered as "2 2 +"), both because it was so odd and because our family heritage was Polish.

[daasgrrl]

OMG! Reverse Polish! A lot of people in our course used Hewlett-Packards like that, but I hated it and never did get the hang of it. Standard scientific calculator, thanks *g*

Yeah, I was going to say that computer experience really shows one's age. I still (vaguely) know how to use DOS commands...

[kabal42]

I had an HP like that in my teens. It was my dad's, but I borrowed it when maths became something calculators was needed for. And I also vaguely remember DOS commands. I should've stuck with learning them!

[kabal42]

Two back for you

[mer_duff]

13. My first exposure to computers was in Grade 7 - though only at a distance. In math, we wrote simple programmes that were taken to the local high school and input and run there. The next day we would find out if we'd done it correctly or have to figure out where we went wrong (I remember finishing the assignments and then spending the remaining days trying to write a programme that would identify prime numbers). I don't think I actually used a computer until I was 16, when I helped my father with the data entry for the school scheduling.

14. We used to have mini spelling bees when I was in Grade 4, which I was always desperate to win, because that was the year my mother taught me (and the year my parents separated, so I was seeking attention in the way I knew best). I remember that "mountain" was my nemesis. For some reason, I always spelled it "mountian" - or at least it seemed that way.

[synn]

Here you go:

http://synn.livejournal.com/202366.html

It's friends-locked for little reason and has nothing to do with either of your memories.