I have to come out about something.
I’m not straight.
But I don’t know what to call myself. Maybe you can help me.
I don’t know the word for what I am, besides old.
I’m so old I don’t know what words mean anymore.
I’m so old I think a tranny is a part of car.
I’m so old I think three-way refers to an intersection.
I’m so old I think that LGBTQ could be a really fancy sandwich (maybe LettuceGoudaTomatoBaconQuiche. (why anyone would put quiche in a sandwich is beyond me, but these are modern times. Stranger foods have appeared on the Web. And in books))
I’m so old that I was surprised to find there were THREE genders of bathroom in Crown College at UC Santa Cruz (and Crown is the most practical of the UCSC colleges, supposed to produce engineers and scientists. Porter is the arts college, they may have more than three )
I’m so old that I don’t know if PC is short for Politically Correct (ideology), Personal Computer (as opposed to mainframe), or type of operating system (MAC vs PC)
In the last sense, the sense of operating system, I am definitely bi. I have an Apple laptop, and a PC desktop. I go both ways.
I HAVE to. It’s who I am.
Perhaps I was born this way.
When I started with computers, they were not separated by operating systems, just by brands, sizes and programming languages, and we learned to type, not to keyboard. There was carbon paper. There was corrasable paper, and White-Out was on every desk next to the stapler.
I was an early adopter, a mainframe gal. In junior high, I punched cards for the IBM 360. The card puncher had its own room, at the end of the hall, where it couldn’t hurt anybody. In high school, I could go to the Gandalf terminal in the guidance office, set the “dip switches” to the prescribed settings, and do what I needed to do on monochrome screens along with the guys from the AV squad. In college, I opened up my free student account at Columbia Computing Center and used EMACS to write programs whose output was printed out on paper that had green and white lines and holes on the sides. Out of college, I typed on IBM Selectrics with magnetic card systems. And I was using a Commodore 64 before it came out. I had an inside track–one of its developers was my boyfriend.
I edited a magazine called the Atari Explorer in 1984, and wrote half of the Spring 1985 issue. But my favorite writing in that magazine was just a title–it was an article on word processing programs for Personal Computers, and the title I wrote was ‘Throw Out the White-Out.’ Which I did, and never looked back.
Our house was the old kind of ‘PC’– IBM compatible– till 2002, when against my husband’s wishes, I bought my younger son an Apple Ibook when he was in 6th grade. All his friends had one, and I wanted him to be normal.
Imagine my surprise when I unwrapped the little white thing and discovered that it was solid and compact, and could probably survive being run over with a car.
It was well made. It was darling. It had smooth corners. I fell in love with it. Then I gave it to my younger son to take to school, and went back to working on the husband-approved computer – an HP desktop with an AMD processor . I don’t remember if we still called them clones then. But when we traveled in 2004, the ibook was the machine we took along to store our pictures.
In 2006 eldest son got a job at the Apple store and to support him, I bought a Macboook of my own. But just for something on the side. Then I got my eldest son’s old IPhone. Then I replaced my ibook with a MacBook Pro. And now I’m in really deep.
Onecakebaker 