Ya-ha!

It's my grandfather's birthday today. He should have been 88 today, and I think he would have probably enjoyed American Idol quite a bit.

I can tie my current week of IBM-compatible personal computer rants to my grandfather, even though they were in my life at the same time for only a month. I kept myself busy in those days learning the reasons why the operating system that came with my Kaypro didn't run a thing, then I used the computer to make get well banners, looked up medicines on Prodigy, and was playing Clue: Master Detective when the phone call came that Pa had died. I still seems like a rather odd thing for me to be doing at the time, but I was not in possession of a driver's license or a car, just an 8086 with no hard drive and a 3mHz processor, which would--from that day on--be my main billiards partner. I still have the save file from that Clue game. "Gumby," "Jessica," and "Lothar," never found out whodunit. Never really cared to find out, actually.

I think, actually, those days might have directly influenced my data hoarding habits. Write everything down, stick it on a disk, and no one ever dies. Jolly good work.

YouTube, of course, is possibly the greatest service ever invented. It wasn't around in 1990, and that's just as well because this would not have looked right in 16 colors.



1988 was fabulous, really.

Ya-ha!