About Our Neural Synapses

It was in 1979 I bought my first computer - an Osborne. Some of you chronologically qualified may remember this smallish, portable, DOS based machine. I ended up taking it to work, and writing and producing my own correspondence. I learned typing at the age of 13 and had spent much of my life since in front of a typewriter (a wonderful Olympia still here in the house), so I could print out my first draft, do the edit, print the final version and get the letter out the door.

Turned out this upset the higher ups in my work place...after all, I had a secretary. True enough, but she was wonderfully bright and capable, and I figured that I might lose a few minutes and give her more and more interesting things to do.

I then progressed to an Osborne 2...it's still in the basement and runs, the last time I checked. Don't know where I'd find those floppy disks, though.

In 1985 I acquired a Mac Classic, and it changed my life. With that 64k of RAM, why there was no world I could not conquer. Since then, I don't know how many Macs have run through my life - a bunch, that's for sure. Nowadays I have a computer at home, one in the office, an iPhone, and a first generation iPad.

I can run the office computer from any computer in the world, so I can be somewhat untethered when I travel, and I spend hours doing what I like to call "research," and what "she who would command" labels "playing around."

True enough. But play, in its highest form can be the most exhilarating kind of learning anywhere around.

Whether I'm spending time in The National Gallery in London via Google's Art Project, or reading the downmarket Daily Mail in London, some kind of learning is going on.

And then there are the problems, some of which I can solve myself. Last night I had to reformat an external hard drive for the Mac, and the instructions from the manufacturer were created by the writing team of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie (you have to be a certain age to understand that). I struggled for a bit, found some help elsewhere on the web), solved the problem and got the hard drive formatted and the computer's hard drive backed up.

So the neural synapses have gotten a bit of a work out - and that beats the hell out of an evening of solitaire or high school reminiscences....