Welcome to the 21st Century!

I'm as giddy as a kid expecting Christmas to arrive soon! Within the next couple of months I will no longer have to rely upon this terribly slow dial-up internet connection - I will have broadband service ! Hooray, Yippee, Eureka!!

It's been horrible for many years having to surf the internet, access my favorites, and visit via e-mail with my friends utilizing my dial-up service! Not that I haven't been grateful to have internet access, mind you - because I have been and still am! But, dial-up service limits one so!

In one way or another, I've been involved with computers since the early 1980s. The very first computer with which I worked was a humongous Litton 3-tape drive monster, which had to be kept at a certain temperature all of the time. It filled the room in which I worked, leaving only enough space for me to scrunch into a chair to stare at a miniscule green screen! The printer, nearly as large as the computer, was in another room - wiring was a nightmare! Embarrassingly, I have to admit to crashing the accounting program innumerable times - thank goodness for backups and a very patient employer! When tax time rolled around, I had become an "old hand" at computing! Yeah, right!

Remember the "Tandy"? Oh my, I thought I'd really come up in the world when I opened my own office, with my own accounting program, and this wonderfully easy-to-use computer! Of course, there was no room on the so-called hard drive to save any data. The money I spent on 10" floppy disks would make a very nice nest egg for me now that I'm in my so-called "golden years!" Naturally, the screen was still that putrid green - made one's eyes feel as if they'd been pierced with thousands of pins and needles if one worked at it for more than an hour at a time! And, my dot-matrix printer NEVER gave me any trouble at all, you understand. Can't count the times I had to dig pager jams out of the middle of its jaws! Oh my, but those were the good old days! (sitting here chortling)

Then, I invested in a computer with (I think I remember this correctly) 100 meg of space on the hard drive and 64 meg of RAM. Still had to invest in floppy disks by the gazillion - 3" ones ! Windows 95 was so much more user friendly than that DOS system which had to have come from the mind of a completely insane computer geek who had nothing better to do with his time than make things difficult for the general computer-using public! But, I could now get on-line with something laughingly called a modem! My goodness, but in those days the internet was not only limited with available information, but difficult to connect to unless you were sure (completely sure) there was a site with an absolutely correct URL!

Since then, I believe I've had two other desk tops and two lap tops! I now have a Dell with a much larger hard drive than needed, an all in one printer that does everything but wipe my nose for me, and all kinds of gadgets and gizmos for perpherals. I'm beginning to catch up on some of the computer lingo, but much prefer English when chatting on line while I play in Pogo!

I've been told when I use my computer the first time after having broadband available to me, I will NEVER contemplate going back to dial-up again! Not that I plan on doing so anyway, you see! I've been hounding the powers that be in my area for nearly ten years to make this type of internet service available to those of us who live in rural areas - and it's finally coming true! Better late than never, is what I say!

Mickey Finn is counting the days until she can actually talk using VOIP!