smacky and bucky

I was just thinking about "ASDF JKL;" and how it's one of the last carryovers from the days of the typewriter. In my freshman year of college, I had a new electric typewriter. It was fancy because it had an auto-erase function, eliminating the need for White Out. White Out is a correction fluid that was used to paint over typing errors. It was invented by the mother of Michael Nesmith, the singer/guitarist for the Monkees, the American version of the Beatles. Got that? The patent was sold for millions of dollars decades ago, making Michael Nesmith the richest former Monkee by millions of dollars. It also ensured that he didn't have to take part in any of the reunions they did in the '80s. Got that? I believe they still make White Out, but I can't imagine why.

My sophomore year of college I moved up to a Tandy computer. No internet connection (this was 1991) but it used floppy disks and a dot matrix printer. Today's coffee makers probably have a microchip with more memory than that computer.

In fact, I didn't have internet connection at all as an undergrad. I'm not sure when I first heard about it, but it wasn't something the college offered.

I suppose the irony of all this is that, as the youngest editor in my department, I'm perceived as the "go-to" guy for computer questions. I seem to know more than the others simply because I'm the closest to the epicenter of the birth of the computer age. And even I missed it by at least five years. My nephews were online at an age when I was playing with legos in the basement. It's a different time.