Motel West, alive and kicking......

Ahhh, names like General Chaos, Midnight Cavalier (and getting to call him Midnight Chevette again) right here on my blog. Heard from (other than here) Sir Duke, White Lioness, Herb Doom, Frank Zelba and of course DB Rat. Names I haven't heard, let alone read on a computer screen, for years. Makes me wonder what Your Concience, Ed Broadbent, Dr. Faust, Michael Binkley, The Apex, Nosferatu !, Oliver Wendell Jones and the rest are up to.

I found an old IBM 386 laying around the school last winter and set it up in my classroom. Has Windows 3.1, but also had DOS Wordperfect 5.1 - which is the only way I can get the old dot matrix printer to work. I was teaching a computer tech class at the time, and part of the curriculum was a little bit of history. So, I get the computer printing up some papers for me and of course the kids ask "What is that noise?" Which lead straight into the workings of the old IBM with 256 KB memory, a 20 MB harddrive and Windoes 3.1. Most of them don't remember anything before Windows 98, and that's ancient. Almost died when I told them that I hadn't made a mistake and it was in fact 256 KB and 20 MB, not MB and Gigs. It put things into perspective when a student held up this thing that was the size of a really thin lighter and pointed out it had 100 times the memory of that hard drive. So I decided to really freak them out and describe the experience of downloading a message from the BBS with a 300 baud modem. Jaws hit the keyboards as I described watching the letters come through one by one, almost like someone was typing it right there in front of me. When one of them asked "how long did it take for a picture to come through?" I just laughed.