Pewters

When my daughter was little, she was overly intrigued with computers.  But since she spoke like a Russian Émigré from the ages of one through three, the word came out as, “pew-ter,” like she was visiting Paul Revere’s smithyworks from the Motherland for the first time and was in awe of all his artsy platters and such.

“Pewter.”

Clearly this girl knows a little sumthin’ sumthin’ ‘bout computers and that early fascination hasn’t gone away; She remains interested in technology – lately, the role of technology in my life when I was her age.  “What was YOUR technology class like when you were my age, Mom?”

Uhhh…my technology class was reading through the instruction book to figure out how to play tic-tac-toe on Merlin, the Electronic Wizard, when I was your age, Sweetie.

Technology, in the form of computers, didn’t come into my life on a regular basis until the late 80’s and I was at the tail end of my college career.

You know what’s funny about that?  I just received a mailing about my college reunion…and guess what was on the front of the mailing?  A picture of my college computer class circa 1989!  The students are all wearing their gigantor tortoise-shell glasses which take up the majority of their faces.  Not to be outdone in size, the computers are the approximate dimensions of a dog house and are perched on wooden planks laid over sawhorses.  Ha, ha, kidding about the sawhorse set-up, they’re on banquet tables clearly pulled from the student dining hall.

Anyway, what’s particularly enjoyable about the picture is that there are THREE students for every ONE computer, like computers were so precious you couldn’t have just ONE student per computer or anything.  And the computers themselves were those yellowing-from-the-heat-or-too-many-students-clustered-around-breathing-on-them DOS Prompt thingamajigs.  The whole thing was precious!

So I turned it over to ‘Pewter Princess for a look-see.  Her response?  “Yikes.”

Uh-huh.  Yikes indeed, My Dear.  Yikes, indeed.

P.S. I had a college roommate who was a Computer Science major.  Beep boop.  Every time I say “Computer Science” beep boop I have to say beep boop because the name alone makes me think of automatons and/or Joshua from War Games.  Would you like to play a game, Professor?   Anyway, for her work-release program, this roommate had to assist students in the Computer Science Lab beep boop which I recall being housed in the windowless basement of the Business Management building.  And?  It may have been work-study, not work-release.  And??  There may have been windows, they were just painted black and the students would scratch “send help” messages on the windows with their fingernails.  See?  It’s more fun to make it sound like Computer Science beep boop was the gritty underbelly of a liberal arts education in the late 80’s.  Anywho…at the end of summer break our Junior year, this Computer Science major beep boop returned to school telling us all about how these supercomputers beep boop were being connected across the United States which would allow people to “talk” to other people.  Through the computer!  Beep boop.  In fact, they were also being connected with other countries and she had even “met” a guy in Canada or parts-north that way.  Another friend and I, hearing this crazy talk, laughed ourselves silly.  Computers that are somehow connected?  And allow people to “talk” to eachother no matter where they are?!?  HAAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA!  What a stupid idea.  That will never catch on.

One thought on “Pewters

  1. Thank you for my morning laugh, New Stay at Home Mom!
    Sam was fascinated by computers when he was little too, but he called it the to-pita….that took awhile to figure out!!

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