(((Hugs Computer)))

I suppose those with wildly active and interesting social lives don't find the on-line connections as important to their daily life as I do and more power to them. But most of my adult life we have had unscheduled schedules making it really difficult to plan for dinner with friends, meeting at the beach, joining clubs and organizations... so when my first computer entered my life in 1996 an on-line social life was like a bomb going off in my heart. Yes I know real-time people may be more important but I don't know anyone that wants to play at 4 AM or go to lunch on the spur of the moment and those are the sort of times I'm free.

And suffice it to say that I've made some lasting friendships via long distance and have traveled across the country and ocean to meet some of them, and had some of them travel across the country and around the world to spend time with me. And I can say I've never met an internet friend I didn't like. Bless you all, you warm my heart and my days with your presence.

So while on the theme I thought you might like to see the precursor to our marvelous machines of today. In some circles, the clunky box shown here with two floppy disk drives and a 5-inch screen introduced in 1981 is considered the world's "first really popular portable computer," found today in the Computer History Museum. The Osborne 1 weighed 24.5 pounds, had a detachable keyboard that served as a lid, had a carrying handle and was small enough to fit under the passenger seat of an airplane. The machine also came with a bundle of software, including WordStar for word processing, SuperCalc spreadsheet, and the BASIC programming language. We've come a long way, baby.

I'm off to the farm for a few days, I'll miss you all.

Wednesday Thankies
Automatic Microsoft updates
McAfee
Snopes